Isak's Blog

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. The orioles are around, a green heron flew through, and a baby skunk and myself scared each other while I was out for a run.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. Love these three roundups of interesting book dedications from Molly Young.
2. RIP John Basinger, who memorized the entirety of “Paradise Lost” (my copy is 512 pages) by bringing his copy to the gym and memorizing seven new lines on the exercise bike and reviewing the previous 14 lines while lifting weight.
3. It’s fun but quickly boring to notice the trendy Classics everyone is recommending online — last summer was “Lonesome Dove,” then it was “East of Eden,” and “Count of Monte Cristo” is still popular. So I really liked Tip #4 from Naomi Alderman’s list to google three books you love in quotation marks to find an article talking about those three specifically — which would likely recommend another book you’d like. (Mine? I switched to authors: Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, David Gessner. First result worked well!)
4. Which helped me find this decade-old article about Annie Dillard, one of my favorite writers, and her book “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” one of my favorite books of hers. “That’s what interests Dillard: ‘ultimate concerns’. To address them she relies on two things: her senses and everything she’s read.”
5. I like older interview-style shows that interview creatives — and I’d never heard of “Bookworm,” a public radio show hosted by Michael Silverblatt from 1989-2023 (!). Here’s a helpful link to the full archive. I’m listening to interviews from the 90s with Elmore Leonard and Tom McGuane.
6. I’m nearly finished with Stephen King’s “Bag of Bones” about a writer grieving the sudden death of his wife and the ensuing writer’s block. The main character never reaches the top of the best-selling book lists and has to schedule his publications around other, more successful writers — which was inspired by King competing in real life with Tom Clancy.
7. Really like this list of recommended reading for every summer mood. I’ve paired Stephen King with summer reading since late elementary school, so I’d recommend his for when you want the literary equivalent of walking out of the summer heat into the cool but eerie shade of a quiet forest.
8. Do today’s writers have regular columns? The media landscape has changed so much, I can’t keep up, but I wonder if a column like Kurt Vonnegut’s or Hunter S. Thompson’s would work today — even if they’re as true today as they were over 25 years ago. When in doubt, write about human ignorance and imperfection, eternal truths.
9. I feel like I never let myself be bored anymore. (Thanks phones and infinite scroll!) The closest I get is around 4 p.m. when my brain’s so full of information and exhausted from computer work that I do chores without even music or podcasts to fill my thoughts. Here are some things to do while waiting that I probably won’t do but will think about as I unlock my phone.
10. Finally: end your week with this poem from Mary Oliver.

See you 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,