Oooohhh Summer, How Much Risk Is a Useful Amount of Risk? — Roden Newsletter Archive
Roden
Issue 116
August 4, 2026
Oooohhh Summer, How Much Risk Is a Useful Amount of Risk?
Thinking about how Tokyo and NYC continue to diverge
Roden Readers —
There is sweat and then there is s-w-e-a-t and the out-of-doorsness in Japan is presently a natural machine that produces nothing but sweat and sweat and sweat and swelter. Dryness has been eradicated. Fire is impossible to start. Blowtorch any single thing and it will laugh in your face. The implicit ubiquity of moistness inspired Japanese dictionary publishers to excise “dry.” A useless word. The only sane response is to find a cool cave at the top of a mountain and hibernate until November. (Or go to Victoria, Canada, which I did; more on that below.)
#TBOT, TGP, AGB
Acronym updates!
TBOT Fine Art second printing (1000 copies, signed; silver foil stamp + new afterword) will be going live soon. The first-to-know one-off signup list is here.
The Good Place (TGP), our SPECIAL PROJECTS members-only social network, is better than ever. I keep saying this, but I truly can’t believe how nice it is. (X / Threads / Bsky all feel … uniquely poisoned?) It’s basically the only place I post these days. Thanks to everyone who has popped in and shared cool projects / thoughts / ideas / queries for advice.
I continue to make A Good Book (AGB) — our SPECIAL PROJECTS’ Goodreads replacement — more gooder. Here’s how it now works:
The central premise is to share only books you love, so by dint of that, there’s no need for “ratings” — everything you add should be a five-star book
When you add it, you must write why you added it or it doesn’t become visible to the community until you do
Everyone has a shelf
You can add books from others’ shelves to your own; those also should only be five-star books for you (and you have to write why you’re adding it to your shelf!)
You can browse the shelves of other users
If someone has a shelf on AGB, it appears as a little linked icon next to their name on TGP. The shelf shows all the books and all the WHYS for the books. I know I’m biased in that I built this thing, but I love browsing and reading why others have added different books.
#Jet-Lagged Culture Shocks; How Much Risk Is a Useful Amount of Risk?<br>If you come to Tokyo expecting New York, you’ll be sorely disappointed in some ways (and utterly delighted in others). And if you go to New York with Tokyo expectations (or even “classic New York” expectations), you’ll probably have an aneurysm as you run screaming from the city. (Famously, a variant on this has been documented re Japanese visitors to Paris: Paris Syndrome.) I love both of these cities — New York and Tokyo — in their own idiosyncratic ways. But having just spent nine weeks in NY, I haven’t been able to stop pattern-matching — in particular around risk and “risk tolerance” between the two. It feels like they’re more divergent than ever. In fact, in my twenty-six years of popping back and forth, the cultural gaps have never felt quite as wide.
As my plane descended into JFK on my return flight from that strange Florida trip (as if a Florida trip could be anything but strange), it looked as if New York was at war with itself. It was nine p.m. on the Fourth of July and we were banking over Queens. I pressed my nose to the window. Across the boroughs, tiny explosions were popping off on every block; little bursts of light and sparkle. In the distance, towards the East River and beyond, gargantuan displays of fireworks — almost hallucinogenic in size, like an afghan knit from stars, draped from the heavens — covered large swaths of the sky and cast the skyline glass in wild colors of the coruscating variety.
A few days later I returned to Japan. I booked my ticket to coincide with Kamakura’s annual summer fireworks event. But: the “waves were a bit too high.” So said the loudspeaker announcements in robotic tones on the afternoon of the event. The show would go on but the forty-five-minute event would now be thirty minutes. No, fifteen minutes. No, ten minutes. Maybe. Maybe it would or wouldn’t happen, the announcements continued to announce. I could see the waves from my window; they were fine. Fine waves. Nothing to worry about. Obviously, Japan’s caution isn’t baseless; the country has a hard-earned memory of the power of the ocean. But these were not those waves. On the other side of the ocean, during that Fourth of July chaos spectacular, rockets were shot off from street corners and rooftops in Prospect Heights — likely hitting homes and cars — and, in fact, so many fireworks were ignited with such impunity that the Brooklyn Bridge itself caught on fire.
In the end, Kamakura city set off about twelve (12) fireworks in batches of four, separated by roughly five-minute...