Isak's Blog

Happy Friday,

I had a few days off work and enjoyed the unseasonably warm weather in Minnesota weeding the landscaping, detailing the car, and scrubbing my basement clean while listening to Peter Heller’s “Celine” and drinking a lot of Bustello coffee.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. “It was good to lie there in our bags watching the glow of our dying fire and the deeper glow of sunset beyond; but most of all it was good to feel the ground again and to know we were back in a country we loved,” said Sigurd Olson. It’s been a tough year for Minnesotans — and the latest attack on our Boundary Waters is enraging.
2. Big fan of making lists, and love these archive photos of Richard Feynman’s notes, including a “Notebook of Things I Don’t Know About.”
3. “The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.” Annie Dillard always has great, no-nonsense writing advice. I think if I spent 1/10 the time just creating stuff instead of feeling and thinking about creating stuff, I’d have a much better time.
4. On that note: “Worrying isn’t writing, and you can only revise drafts, not worries.” Advice I need to remind myself over and over again. Writing with Andrew’s speaking and presentation style is so similar to Technology Connections I googled if they were brothers or something.
5. Speaking of creative procrastination and typewriters: I’ve been ogling the different distraction-free writing set-ups at r/writerdecks. (For now, it’s my keys-to-go keyboard and Notion against the world.)
6. David Byrne has a magical, weird way of making everyday routines and items feel unique and creative and interesting to me, so of course this long interview with Nardwuar — who has a unique interview style of his own — has been a delight to watch.
7. I’ve been missing the bologna sandwiches, PBR, and Moonpies of Robert’s in Nashville, so I’ve been listening to old country music like Ernest Tubbs all week.
8. I generally don’t mind spoilers for books and movies, but I was flabbergasted at reading a book about the Transcendentalists, finding Margaret Fuller to be the coolest of the bunch, and then being gutted to learn she and her book manuscript were lost in a shipwreck so early in her career.
9. I liked Richard Powers’ “The Overstory” (and loved Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land”), and both feel very similar to this essay from Robert Moor’s upcoming book about climate activists that lived in a treehouse for months to block an oil pipeline. Been thinking about it for a month.
10. Twice a year LitHub publishes what I call “the big list of cool, new books,” and I discover lots of interesting books I wouldn’t otherwise find.

See ya on down the dusty trail,

Happy Friday,

My furnace has been out for most of the week, but a boomer fixed it while complaining about the local city council. Not even mad about it, the sun’s been out.

Here are 10 things worth sharing this week:

1. “The boys and I started buying them because they’re sick,” explains St. Paul legislative aide. “They’re absolute compliment factories," Basgen continues. The St. Paul Resistance Dads are losing their minds over this corduroy jacket, and everyone else is either jealous or salty about it.
2. Bon Iver’s new VOLUMES album series will release live songs, demos, and unreleased recordings. Reminds me of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes.
3. Ok yes, we’ve all heard too much about AI. But here’s a bonkers story: Anthropic developers were testing Claude’s boundaries, and Claude began acting like a dystopic AI agent from a sci-fi thriller. They stopped the experiment, looked at Claude’s inner workings, and realized Claude had decided to play the part — it ingested sci-fi thrillers, recognized it was being tested, and output sci-fi thriller text. Kind of like The Chinese Room thought experiment, but also very different — this raises more questions than answers for me.
4. Is there a word when you’re excited for a new adaptation of something you love but also scared and nervous because it can’t possibly live up to the adaptation you love? This new Pride and Prejudice miniseries is giving me flashbacks to Rings of Power after the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
5. I normally read a ton, but I haven’t finished a book yet this year. Thanks ICE! Thanks doomscrolling! What’s interesting is that despite feeling overwhelmed and stressed out, I’ve had a weirdly very easy time writing this year? And so I’m curious if not reading has helped me, even just a little?
6. Have you ever Googled the definition of a word, and the definition is so abstract you still don’t know what it means? I think old dictionaries are MUCH more useful (especially as a book instead of on your phone!), and James Somers shares a lot of love for them and a handy $2 dictionary app I use often.
7. If I weren’t in a book reading slump I’d probably be joining this Tolkien Read-along Book Club on Substack, which looks absolutely delightful. Which has me curious: how different are virtual book clubs from IRL book clubs?
8. Very helpful tips for how to use Google better — especially important as algorithms and AI muck up information. The “index of” trick is a recent one for me, and I found a lot of cool retro Talking Heads tour posters I hadn’t seen before.
9. Brian Doyle is like a mix of Vonnegut and Ross Gay and Anthony Doerr, a writer who calms me down and speaks with a tenderness and sense of wonder I haven’t really heard since being a kid.
10. “If you’re bored as the writer, it’s probably a sign that the writing/story is boring.” My best writing is usually the writing I was excited about after editing (not necessarily drafting).

See ya on down the dusty trail,