Collected essays by Craig Mod

Essays

• February 2024

  Five Years of Memberships

  I've been running the SPECIAL PROJECTS membership program for five years; here's what I know.

• February 2023

  Running a Membership Program: Four Years In

  Everything I've learned in the first four years of running SPECIAL PROJECTS

• December 2022

  Drumming

  Returning to drumming after a fourteen-year break

• September 2022

  Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life

  Reflections on eighteen months of electric bike ownership

• January 2022

  Memberships Work

  What I learned during the third year of running my SPECIAL PROJECTS membership program

• August 2021

  Photos and Words and Teju Cole's Golden Apple of the Sun

  Containers matter; what makes Teju Cole's latest book so great

• July 2021

  Pop-Up Newsletters are the Greatest Newsletters

  Timeboxed, seasonal, pop-up — a newsletter with a limit is a fantastic tool for not losing your mind

• April 2021

  The Healing Power of Code

  For some of us—isolates, happy in the dark—code is therapy, an escape and a path to hope in a troubled world.

• March 2021

  Looking Closely is Everything

  How the pandemic taught me to look closely at the world, and how I hope to carry that forward out the other side

• January 2021

  Running a Successful Membership / Subscription Program

  What I learned from the second year of running my SPECIAL PROJECTS membership program

• October 2020

  Let's Walk Across Japan, Together

  Join me as I walk 500 km along the Tōkaidō in November, 2020

• June 2020

  Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump

  Our software feels less refined as our hardware achieves platonic ideals

• January 2020

  Running a Paid Membership Program

  What I learned from the first year of running my SPECIAL PROJECTS membership program

• January 2020

  On Being a Good Newsletterer

  Notes and tips on how not to be a newsletter ding dong

• November 2019

  Stab a Book, the Book Won't Die

  On the resilience of books in the face of apps, attention monsters, and an ad-driven online economy

• August 2019

  Referenced Works 2019: Walks, Books, Habits, Publishing Tools

  Referenced articles, books, art, locations and related reading for talks in 2019

• July 2019

  Fast Software, the Best Software

  On the benefits of speedy software, and how it affects user perception of engineering quality and overall usability

• April 2019

  SMS Publishing

  Minimum viable networked publishing

• February 2019

  Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters

  Email: The oldest networked publishing platform

• November 2018

  Referenced Works: Books, Meditation, and Mountain Paths

  Referenced articles, books, art, locations and related reading for recent talks

• November 2018

  Books, Walks, and the Edge of the World

  On Margins ep. 006: A walk in the woods

• November 2018

  Getting the iPad to Pro

  The new iPad Pro is a computer from the future, with software from yesterday

• April 2018

  If kottke.org were a book

  Jason Kottke has been distilling his brain into kottke.org for twenty years; what would that look like printed out?

• February 2018

  Offscreen Magazine Interview

  Notes on writing, publishing, startups, life, and disconnection

• February 2018

  Tools and Creative Permission

  On the feedback loops between our work and the objects around us

• October 2017

  Kevin Kelly and the Golden Age of World Travel

  On Margins ep. 003: "Asia Grace" — Photographing Asia in the 1970s

• September 2017

  Focus / Hida 2017 Fellowships

  Two fellowship openings for a fall 2017 retreat

• July 2017

  To Make a Book, Walk on a Book

  Designing Koya Bound and other books by placing them on the floor

• April 2017

  A Life in Cameras

  Seventeen years of light tight boxes

• January 2017

  How I Got My Attention Back

  Technology is commanding our attention in infinite, insurmountable loops. A country trip off-grid helped me escape.

• February 2016

  The Leica Q

  A six month field test — by Craig Mod

• January 2016

  Myanmar’s Farmers and their Smartphones

  A dispatch from an Internet revolution in progress

• November 2015

  Paju Book City

  A city of books on the border of North Korea

• September 2015

  As We May Read

  From print to digital and back to print

• July 2015

  Upon this Wrist

  A week with Apple Watch

• February 2015

  Notes on the Other

  Can you eat sushi? Can you use chopsticks?

• November 2014

  A Need to Walk

  How and why we walk and how to walk better

• September 2014

  Hello, Again

  Feet on the ground, satellites, and the indie web

• August 2014

  Let’s Talk About Margins

  We're making a book. The margins are important. Do you know how important?

• August 2014

  Iceberg Tweeting

  The ever growing world beneath the tweet

• July 2014

  On Permission

  Your phone is off, Dylan is on. Let's get to work.

• July 2014

  Let’s Fly

  How to survive air travel

• July 2014

  How Apps are Made

  Trench notes on app design

• June 2014

  Far Beyond Snowfall

  Op-Docs and video and the future of the Times

• June 2014

  Ebooks for All

  Building digital libraries in Ghana with Worldreader

• June 2014

  Coming Home: NYT Now

  Putting the news back on our home screens

• May 2014

  Brando’s Room

  Traveling space, if not time, to say hello to Capote and Brando

• April 2014

  Staring Down Colliders

  Visiting CERN and the LCHb proton collider

• January 2014

  The Future of Photography is Software

  Software ate the camera but freed photography — on the future of networked lenses.

• January 2014

  redirect to essays

• December 2013

  Cameras, Goodbye

  Photography in the age of the iPhone

• December 2013

  The First Façon

  Façon blend, cloth drip

• October 2013

  Pull Back

  Everything benefits from a little consideration

• April 2013

  Wind Up Kidd Chronicle

  To Murakami and Kidd and Ware

• March 2013

  Hitotoki: Narrative Mapping the World

  Notes on tiered publishing, writing from the hip, and real-time storytelling

• December 2012

  Subcompact round up and The Daily

  Circling back on the tiny Japanese car

• November 2012

  An Invitation — Roden Explorers

  Join me on an adventure in mailing listing

• November 2012

  Subcompact Publishing

  Defining simple tools and systems for digital publishing.

• November 2012

  「超小型」出版

  シンプルなツールとシステムを電子出版に

• November 2012

  Unbindings and Edges

  Consider the magazine

• October 2012

  How Magazine will be Changed Forever

  On the edges of print

• October 2012

  Walking and the quantified self

  How the quantified self affects our relationship with the world

• October 2012

  パリとデータマインド、ホログラム化するぼくら

  体力レヴェルから睡眠パターンにいたるまで、あらゆるものを記録するパーソナルトラッキングデヴァイスは、自分を知りたいという欲望を満たしてくれる。

• October 2012

  Paris and the Data Mind

  The quantified self reporting from Paris

• September 2012

  Publishing Startups and the Great Fuzziness

  Startups are strange little things

• September 2012

  Our New Shrines

  We have four million fans. We'd like to talk to you.

• August 2012

  Platforming Books

  Where and how contemporary digital books live

• May 2012

  Ahab!

  A feeble attempt to help those foolish enough to make a Kindle book by hand

• May 2012

  Hack the Cover

  Book covers in a digital world

• April 2012

  A pointable we [3/3]

  The power of URLs and publishing

• April 2012

  A pointable we [2/3]

  The power of URLs and publishing

• April 2012

  A pointable we [1/3]

  The power of URLs and publishing

• March 2012

  The Digital↔Physical: On building Flipboard for iPhone and Finding Edges for Our Digital Narratives

  Flip-flopping between atoms and bits

• August 2011

  The Culture of Technology

  Silicon Valley versus New York City

• June 2011

  Post-Artifact Books and Publishing

  Books after books, publishing after publishers.

• June 2011

  Twitter Archives and the Sendai Quake

  The value of simple systems in moments of crisis

• March 2011

  The Nourishing Wake

  Returning from Tokyo after the quake

• January 2011

  A Simpler Page

  Reading digitally more simply

• January 2011

  The Long Road Back to 2000

  On building a simpler page for A List Apart

• November 2010

  The Collaborative Book

  The effect of realtime and time on the writing process

• July 2010

  Kickstartup — Notes on successful Fundraising with Kickstarter and the (re)making of Art Space Tokyo

  Successful Fundraising with Kickstarter

• April 2010

  Embracing the Digital Book

• April 2010

  Books on the iPad

  Collected media quotes from April 2010

• March 2010

  Books in the Age of the iPad

  Thoughts on the future of books

• March 2010

  『"iPad時代の書籍"を考える』

  本の未来へ

• February 2010

  Annapurna Moonrise

  A night on Annapurna basecamp

• December 2009

  パナソニック Lumix GF1 フィールド・テスト — ヒマラヤで過ごした16日間

• December 2009

  GF1 Field Test — 16 Days in the Himalayas

  16 Days of testing the Panasonic GF1 in the mountains of Nepal

• July 2009

  @font-face: The Potential of Web Typography

  Methods for leveraging @font-face for beautiful web typography