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,

My creative antenna has been WAY more open than usual this week, and I’ve been riding it as long as it’ll push me, grateful each morning.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. I started my morning sitting in a chair, listening to the new Bon Iver live album, drinking a pot of coffee, and watching the sun melt the ice off the trees. Bliss. I love hearing artists rework their music to sound so different than the original studio version.
2. Summer is approaching, which means I need a Big Summer Book. There’s something great about unfolding a huge book in June knowing warm months and many chapters lie ahead of you! This list has helped me narrow down my top picks. Maybe it’s time to lug around a thick copy of “War and Peace” all summer like Ladybird Johnson? Or maybe a thick Stephen King book. (Maybe both?)
3. It’s spring migration for my fellow birders! This year I got a phone with a better zoom lens and I LOVE IT for photographing birds. I don’t want to spend $5k on a good photography rig, so having a phone that doesn’t take potato-quality bird pics is great for sharing with friends.
4. Is creating art about finding meaning for ourselves or sharing an experience with others? Lo-fi Cinema on the joy of creating for both self-discovery and connection with others.
5. I’m listening to “The Comfort Crisis” while walking outside or doing chores and love the idea of a Misogi: a hard task you undertake with roughly a 50/50 chance of success. The quirkier and more challenging the better, but do it for yourself, not social media. Reminds me many of Beau Miles’ adventures like when he commuted to work by kayaking 4 days from his home to his office. I’m a low-momentum homebody so this stuff fascinates me.
6. I was avoiding my important writing pieces this week by procrastinating on my phone or organizing my digital files. And while procrastinating, I noticed Casey Neistat posted a new video about how procrastination and busy work are a necessary, integral part of the creative process, and I’ve felt less guilty about it.
7. I didn’t expect to tear up while scrolling my TikTok feed, nor did I expect such a short video to shift my perspective on childhood and adulthood.
8. “You give a chunk of the precious few hours of your life to something, imagining a great moment someday when it will all come together, and then when it does, you turn around and realize how many other great moments made up what you thought was ‘the process.’” Brendan’s always been great at celebrating how the little moments in our day end up being the most important thing we have. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” says Annie Dillard.
9. I’ve been reading Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” before bed in that consciousness window where you’re not fully awake but not quite asleep either. I have a surface-level understanding of Jung’s shadow self (check #4 above!), but I think there’s more communication going on with your subconscious in that half-dream state.
10. I’ve been making my way through Dante’s “Inferno,” and watching lectures from Yale, Better Than Food, and Brian McEvoy has helped me better understand what I’m reading beyond “whoa, this is really graphic and messed up.” And don’t sleep on “keyword + lecture” videos with super-low views, those are sometimes the best ones.

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,