Writing this from Keuka Lake, where I rolled in last Friday after about two and a half weeks of solo road tripping that took me from Napa to Florida to Keuka. The plan had been for Julie and me to make the trip together, but a week before departure she flew east to be with her father, Gerald "Jerry" Saxton who was in his final week. Jerry passed on April 29. The drive east turned solo and the whole rhythm of the trip changed with it. Two Wilco shows, golf in five states, and a four-round Streamsong trip with my brothers-in-law and Jacob that became Jerry's send-off.

1. Where I've Been Traveling

I took the southern route, working my way from Napa to the Mojave. Easy to find dispersed camping out west and I took advantage of some primo spots until arriving at a Harvest Host as I worked my way through Arizona and New Mexico.

Traveling from Texas to Louisiana I crossed Texas west to east without ever getting on an interstate. Felt no slower, much more enjoyable. And more bird sightings.

When I planned this drive months ago I noticed it lined up with Wilco's gulf coast tour. Without Julie this time (she became a Wilco superfan after the Tallahassee show last year), I still managed to see them twice. Rumor has it they are back in the studio this month.

I finished my drive east to see family in Melbourne FL and pick up Jacob in Orlando. We joined Dave and Mike for an amazing three days at Streamsong.

After a night back in Melbourne I dashed bak north in three days with stops at Lake Marion Golf Course (SC) and Patch Brewing (Gordonsville, VA) — both Harvest Hosts. I-95 was rough — bad storms, several major accidents, including a toppled car carrier with ten cars on it. Made it home safe.

2. What I've Been Reading

Articles

1. This week in "Putting AI to Work" — Andrew McAfee's weekly roundup. Predictions, best practices, a model of AI takeoff, and a plea to keep things weird.
2. The Folder Is the Agent — "I'm running 44 AI agents across multiple projects. Each one is just a model pointed at a folder." Captures something true about how the workflow actually feels right now. Not a fan of "I'm running xy agents" claims right now - this is like bragging about how many open browser tabs you have.
3. Dropping sprints: a year with Shape Up — A team's year of moving from Scrum to Shape Up, with honest reflections on what worked and what didn't.
4. Reckoning With Israel's "One-State Reality" — Ezra Klein interview with Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami. Honest about the political math.
5. Orban Was Bad, Even Though We Don't Have A Perfect Word For His Badness — Scott Alexander on the trouble of describing illiberal regimes that aren't quite authoritarian.
6. Fully explaining the Italian South-North divergence — A serious attempt to explain why the Italian south stays poor without falling into "it's the culture" hand-waving.
7. Reading War and Peace — Allen Martin's reflections on tackling the Briggs translation. 1356 pages, 360 chapters; a useful pre-read for anyone considering the same.
8. Ancient South Americans arrived in three waves — Genetic evidence of multiple founding populations and surprising diversity in the peopling of South America.
9. The Zen of Peter Frampton — NYT profile. Frampton living with inclusion body myositis and still recording. Touching.
10. Guitar Solo Ghosts: A 2020s Alt-Country Survey — Steven Hyden on the state of the form. Paywalled but consider subscribing. He talks about how the current crop of Americana guitar rock bands (see Brown Horse below) talk about Lucinda Williams, The Breeders, but "the younger turks often skip the ’90s alt-country link in the chain. Or they don’t cop to it publicly, anyway."
11. Discovering Prince, Ten Years Later and the original It's time to discover Prince — Anil Dash's pair of essays bracketing Prince's death anniversary. The 2017 piece holds up; the 2026 follow-up is honest about what we still haven't reckoned with.
12. Shall We Do Introductions? Meet Margaret, the Flight Attendant — A flight attendant since 2008 starts a new publication of stories from her career. This is a good friend from Portland and you'll love her writing.
13. Jon Caramanica is a bad cliché — Brad Mehldau on the NYT pop critic's follow-up defending the omission of Billy Joel from the "Greatest Songwriters" list. Mehldau being a serious musician taking a serious swing at a lazy critic is exactly the kind of writing I want more of. I wasn't going to share the ridiculous NYT list but I guess I am indirectly. There's so much I can get behind on the list: Holland brothers (and Dozier), Carole King, Dylan and Simon (of course). But some of these are way too young and their work too recent to pass the test and justify excluding Billy Joel (or even Jeff Tweedy).
14. Spain just became one of Europe's cheapest power markets. Here is how. — Jan Rosenow on how wind and solar quietly pushed gas off the margin and the wholesale price followed.

Books

1. Continued the John le Carré binge. Finished The Spy Who Came In From the Cold — finally — and it's everything everyone says. Followed it with The Looking Glass War and The Little Drummer Girl. Plan to keep going through the Karla trilogy next.
2. Kept moving through the Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobooks (great solo road trip company): The Eye of the Bedlam Bride (book 6) and This Inevitable Ruin (book 7) both finished. The series gets weirder and somehow keeps working. Listening to book 8 now.

3. What I've Been Watching

TV Shows

1. Finished a solo watch of Down Cemetery Road — Apple TV+ adaptation of the Mick Herron / Zoë Boehm novel. Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson are good but the show was only so-so.
2. Finished season 2 of The Pitt — awesome stuff.
3. Finished season 2 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. A different sort of viewing for Julie and me. We don't love it but it is fun staring at the monsters. And Kurt Russell.
4. Finished DTF St. Louis — Steve Conrad's HBO dark comedy, mentioned last month as just-started. Probably the best show Julie and I have watched in a few years. Has a Wes Anderson vibe to it re: dialog.
5. Finished Rooster — Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses' HBO comedy with an author and his college-aged daughter. Easy watch and fun.

Movies

1. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) — Richard Burton; watched the night I finished the book while in the Mojave. The book is better but the film holds up remarkably for a 60-year-old Cold War movie.
2. Marty Supreme (2025) — Josh Safdie's table tennis movie with Timothée Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow. We didn't love it.

4. What I've Been Listening To

Music

1. Two Wilco shows in two days, as covered above. Different setlists, both excellent.
2. Lots of Cat Stevens after my guitar lessons added Father and Son to my repertoire. The Song Exploder episode on the song is a great companion piece — Yusuf walks through writing it and then re-recording it 40+ years later.
3. Album Club: My Aim Is True — Elvis Costello, discussed with Jim on April 19 (he picked it; I forgot to pick my cut!). Then Album Club: Lust for Life — Iggy Pop on May 9 (my pick). The Bowie collaboration is so omnipresent the album almost plays as a Bowie record fronted by Iggy. The original "Tonight" is better than Bowie's 1984 version.
4. Two solid Switched On Pop episodes on artists I've underexplored: Why U Love 2 Listen 2 Prince (with Anil Dash) — pairs nicely with the Anil Dash essays above — and Learning to Love Train: "Drops of Jupiter" is back in the atmosphere, which is more interesting than the title suggests.
5. Total Dive by Brown Horse and swan by Fazed on a Pony — both in heavy rotation lately. Two big thumbs up for Total Dive.

YouTube

1. Ffunny Friends - Tweedy and Hayley — Jeff Tweedy and Hayley Williams (Paramore) covering Sparklehorse's "Sad and Beautiful World." Worth your three minutes.

5. What I've Been Playing

Golf

1. Streamsong, as covered above. Four rounds in three days at a major-tier resort with the people who matter to me. Sadly I'm not playing very well right now. Time for a drive to Erie.
2. Plus the en-route stops: Bakersfield practice, Hidden Cove (Holbrook AZ), Los Altos muni (Albuquerque), Crooked Creek (Electra TX), Crooked Hollow (Shreveport). Five states' worth of golf in two and a half weeks, almost all of it 9-hole pop-ins between drive segments — the kind of golf I find genuinely refreshing.
3. Listened to Chasing Scratch S9 E4 - "The Plan" on the drive home, where they bring on coach Josh Nichols to walk through Robert Karlsson's longstanding practice framework — block, random, performance — split across the four parts of the bag.

6. What I'm Attempting

1. Picking up harmonica. Specifically the Bob Dylan / Neil Young setup: diatonic harp in a neck rack while playing guitar. Special 20 in C just arrive and maybe a K&M 16415 rack on the way in the near future. Goal is folk fills, not blues virtuosity.
2. Father and Son on guitar. Added to my lessons rotation with Collin. The chord work is approachable; the challenge is the fingerpicking arrangement. The big challenge for me has been Harrison's "Something". It is coming along pretty well.
3. Extracting Seek history. Julie and I use the app Seek from iNaturalist to identify flora and fauna in the wild. Problem: you can't extract your history from the app. If you setup the app to sync out to iNaturalist then you likely have it there, but I've got five years of data I wanted to get out. I pulled a backup off my iPhone to my Mac, pointed Claude / Opus at the backup folder, and told it:

   This folder is a backup of my iPhone. I'm trying to find the application data for the "Seek" app - hopefully a SQLite DB that I can extract my sighting history. Go through this backup and see if you can find the data for this app. It is made by iNaturalist

   Turns out it is a Realm database, and it was able to extract my sightings plus all the photos. Now I should be able to turn around and import this to iNaturalist.

Back at the lake now. Loons and mergansers lingering in this late spring, grackles already nesting under the dock roof, lake water cold enough that I'm not jumping in until the air warms up this weekend. Glad to be home with Julie.

-Chris