Isak's Blog

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,

Happy Friday,

I haven’t gotten nearly enough sleep this week, but I have had really good coffee with my new-to-me drip machine and burr grinder.

Here are 10 things worth sharing this week:

1. Love these photos of Bob Dylan’s notebooks while writing 1975’s “Blood on the Tracks” (me and my dad’s favorite Dylan album). And it looks like a 1964 Royal Caravan typewriter? Maybe one to add to the collection.
2. Agree with all of Andrew’s reasons to use a paper dictionary instead of a search engine. You learn more and you remember better! It’s also more fun.
3. If you like words, you should check out a usage dictionary to understand what words to use when, too. I’m not a “keep books in the bathroom” guy, but David Foster Wallace said usage dictionaries make great bathroom books.
4. “When we read fast, we experience nothing. The book does not have a chance to burrow into our heart.” Gamifying reading might help you read more, but it also changes how you read. I tracked the number of books I read for a while, but it incentivized me to read shorter books instead of longer books I actually wanted to read. So I changed to tracking pages read a year, but I started listening to audiobooks at a fast speed while doing chores and hardly paying attention. This year I’m not tracking ANY reading, and while I’m still in a reading funk and haven’t finished a book, I’ve been reading snippets here and there in many books — something I haven’t done in years. “We are addicted to data and intent on improving ourselves over enjoying ourselves.”
5. There’s a huge, heavy, old CRT TV that I’ve been using to watch SNL, tv, and movies on through my computer using this HDMI-to-RCA converter, and there’s something really fun about watching Weekend Update or Heated Rivalry on a fuzzy 4:3 curved screen. Maybe I’ll get some retro shaders this summer and watch Unsolved Mysteries.
6. Speaking of dictionaries and reading, here’s a timely quote from Samuel Johnson, the English writer of the 1700s who worked on the first Oxford English Dictionary: “A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”
7. I appreciate that Tyler Cowen invited a Lit guy to talk Shakespeare on his podcast and not a dozen minutes in they were reading Shakespeare line by line. I’ve only read a few Shakespeare plays I was forced to read in high school and college. Maybe a good Big Summer Book this year would be a Riverside edition?
8. Sometimes when I think about how much of my life I’ve wasted on my phone, I daydream about typewriting or transcribing an entire book by hand. Bethany Collins is doing it with “Moby Dick,” and Van Neistat did it with “Breakfast of Champions.” I feel like I’d want to do it with a special book, but maybe it’d be a fun (long) exercise to pick a book off the shelf at random?
9. “I’m not saying my phone has caused the same problems I’d have with, say, heroin or alcohol. But maybe it’s worth asking: How much fun am I having? Or: How much fun am I missing out on when I’m on my phone?” I’ve followed Brendan since 2012 and totally agree with how weird it feels to not pull out your phone and instead just sit there doing nothing - especially in public.
10. To that end, you can pay $60 to brick your phone to keep you from using it. Or you can do what I did: download the Foqos app (totally free), set the unlock to an NFC tag (<$1 online), and use that instead. Not that I’ve been doing it lately, but it is nice when I want to buckle down on no-phone time.

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,

Note: After ten years of meaning to, every Friday I’m going to send out a list of things I found and interesting and worth sharing. These posts will share a mix of articles, books, music, art, and ideas that have inspired me. Welcome to the first.

Happy Friday,

It’s false spring in Minnesota, and only three hours of writing stands between me and a few pizzas and the Olympics this afternoon. Here are 10 things I found interesting this week: