Isak's Blog

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. One of my favorite camping spots in northern Minnesota had an AQI above 1,600 this week, and my mouth tastes smoky while I’m typing this many hours south of there.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. PurpleAir is my favorite way to track air quality and monitor the summer smoke situation, recommended by someone who’s dealt with more wildfires in Colorado.
2. “There is such a thing as righteous anger, because that is not about you and your personal ego; it really is the anger you’re feeling on the behalf of the vulnerable.” Anger can be a powerful, empowering, and positive force when facing systemic injustices like climate change. (It’s been my main climate emotion for 7 years and I recommend it.)
3. I’m also a fan of having a creative nemesis. (My former nemesis wrote climate disinformation in Minnesota.)
4. “’It’s much worse than we think, and sooner;’ [the child in my dream said] to whom I said ‘no duh child in my dreams, what do you think this singing and shuddering is, what this creaming and reaching and dancing and crying is, other than loving what every second goes away?” Ross Gay’s “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” is one of my favorite poems, and it’s great set to Bon Iver.
5. Adults are seven times likelier to be advocating/taking action against climate change if their primary emotion is anger rather than hope. For every two clicks a person moves on the anger scale, they move one click on the activism scale.
6. I’ve apparently replaced “Big Book Summer” with “Stephen King Summer” after finishing “The Body” now listening to “Duma Key” and reading “Fairy Tale.” Something about King’s characters, from 11-year-old boys to high school teenagers to adults, makes his stories interesting even when the plot lags or the endings are unfulfilling. I grew up in a small town, and there’s something genuine in his simple, rural characters.
7. “Humans are not as dysfunctional as we think, we can work together to produce something joyful.” David Byrne on why he replaced one drummer with six so they can move around on stage.
8. I’m fascinated by people who commit to a seemingly pointless and time-intensive project , like Van Neistat typewriting, cutting out, and arranging every word of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” or the local legend riding Valley Fair’s Excalibur Roller Coaster (my childhood favorite) over and over, day after day, in search of — something.
9. When I grew up, the internet was a place; specifically, a computer tower and monitor on a desk in a room in our house. Now it’s in my pocket (and seemingly in my hand without me noticing), so I like this idea of using a scrolly phone and a scrolly chair to make it place-based again.
10. Very excited that Adventure Journal, a quarterly print mag that’s my ride or die (been subscribing since Issue 18 and want to buy the first 17) has archived their entire catalog to subscribers.

See you on down the dusty smoky trail,

Happy Friday,

I turned 33 years old which means I am officially of age in Hobbit years; I celebrated by staying up until 4 a.m. after saunaing with my dad — which was apparently too much fun because I’m still behind on sleep.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. I have a few print magazine subscriptions: “Adventure Journal,” an outdoorsy quarterly I signed up for when I quit my job to freelance write to get major inspiration from. And “The New Yorker,” which I bought this year to spend less time reading the news on my phone. Analog is all the rage these days, but I my favorite part is receiving something nice in the mail instead of bills. Try it!
2. If you do subscribe, “The New Yorker” fully digitized its entire back catalog. I went back and read issues from the week I was born, then my dad, then my grandpa. The fun thing about history is how all this has always been going on.
3. I may or may not have watched this video about hobby tunneling and thought to myself: how hard could it really be to dig my own tunnel from my basement to my detached garage?
4. A new Bob Dylan book is came out in January about his later career, which might inspire me to get into more of it than just “Modern Times” and, yes, “Christmas in the Heart.”
5. The internet is better with RSS, and I missed the days of Google Reader so much I got a subscription to Feed.ly (like don’t love) a few months ago. It seems there’s a bit of a resurgence lately — Austin Kleon and Cory Doctorow both blogged recently about how much it improves your web browsing. I use it for work to track clean energy/climate news plus a bunch of writers and blogs I like.
6. I got my hands on the newest edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the first update in 20 years. Cloth binding, nice pages, a thumb index — I’m in love, and it looks great next to my thesaurus and usage dictionary.
7. I’m still in a book rut (this is a recurring theme apparently) and have been daydreaming reading Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” after loving Knaussgaard’s “My Struggle” series a while back. So while I haven’t cracked the first book yet, I did discover the Proust FM radio website that plays the entire series on a loop forever.
8. If you feel like there’s maybe not much to celebrate for the U.S.’s 250th anniversary this year, well, you’re not alone — it seems like that’s how people have felt for every major anniversary of the U.S. (And yes, I read this in print with a cup of coffee Tuesday morning instead of scrolling BlueSky.)
9. I’ve been poking around books instead of reading them all the way through this year. Last night I cracked open this beautiful edition of “The Silmarillion” and played Andy Serkis’ narration to read the Beren & Luthien chapter, and it was a WAY better night that scrolling Reddit, BlueSky, and Instagram.
10. I’ve been low-contact with podcasts since the pandemic because they just started to feel too noisy, but I might have to dive into the “Exploring the Lord of the Rings” podcast series with the Tolkien Professor based on this BlueSky thread about the Mines of Moria.

See you on down the dusty trail,