A panoramic mural from the House of Kong exhibition featuring a crowded scene set against a colorful South Asian architectural backdrop. Animated Gorillaz characters, including Noodle in the foreground, are surrounded by a diverse cast of illustrated and photorealistic figures, a black panther, an elephant, and stray dogs. The scene blends the real and the fictional in the visual style that has defined Gorillaz for nearly three decades.

March 8, 2026 / 0 Comments

The Tinkerer

Last weekend, I was roaming through a collection of warehouses and open spaces somewhere in Downtown Los Angeles. House of Kong is an immersive experience created by Gorillaz, the virtual alt-hip-hop group that grew from the minds of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett over the past 30 years. The exhibition is both a celebration of that history and, seemingly, the way they are rolling out the latest album from this band that doesn’t really exist. I was agog at how they constructed a maze of interconnected rooms that revealed both the band’s actual development in our world and the parallel universe where Murdoc, Russell, 2-D, and Noodle exist. A guided tour with each visitor provided headphones that delivered a synced audio experience, moving us from one room to the next. From the very beginning, we were active participants in the adventure, though we didn’t know that yet. Anna spent 45 seconds as a roadie for the band, getting a flight case to its appropriate location. Another member of our group was given a task that seemed normal and mundane but was actually critical to our experience.

My senses were turned all the way on for the entire afternoon. There were sights, sounds, and even smells that could only have been envisioned by a group of highly creative humans working and playing together. I was inspired by all of this but mostly by the idea of a musician and a comic book artist sitting in their flat, riffing off of each other, and with pen, paper, some musical instruments, some talented friends, and some luck they turned a ridiculous concept into a successful GRAMMY award-winning band that continues to be a thing nearly three decades later.

For the rest of the day, I romanticized this analog creation myth as a counterpoint to the AI slop encroaching upon seemingly everything right now.

And then the next morning, instead of happily or frustratingly toiling away at some hobby rooted in the physical world, I spent hours on my laptop screwing around with Claude.

Am I a hypocrite?

At work, lately, my 1:1s with a colleague have mostly been animated conversations about AI tools and experiments. Recently, the discussion centered around how he had spent his weekend playing around with AI coding agents, yet kept running up against token limits. It got to a point where he set an alarm so he could get up in the middle of the night when one of his cooldowns was scheduled to end during the wee hours.

He wasn’t doing this for work. He was utilizing the software in the service of one of his hobbies. He’d made iOS apps in the past, not to get rich but to solve a problem specific to him. With the current advancements in AI, he was now able to take those ideas even further and try new ones. His only customer? Himself.

I’m doing the same.

The first weekend of each month, I analyze my music listening from the previous month. I nerd out on this blog about it relatively regularly. It’s a tedious process. I spend several hours extracting, transforming, processing, and categorizing the data so that, in the end, I can tell myself the story of my music habits. I blog about it, but this is just for me. It’s a labor of love. Really, though, it’s mostly just labor. The part I most want to do, categorize music based on my taste and context, is maybe 25% of this effort. This weekend, though, I changed it up.

After three or four hours of doing my normal process, I opened up Claude and said,

“I want to automate the labor and leave the part I love to me. Here are the tools I use. Here’s my existing workflow. Suggest a plan.”

And it did. I reviewed it, made adjustments, and put it to work. Claude Cowork turned a tedious data analysis job I didn’t want to do (and likely would have done poorly) into something that will make my little music hobby project infinitely more enjoyable. Now I can spend those hours categorizing songs and artists if I want. Or doing something completely different. As I watched Claude manipulate my web browser and work in the terminal on my laptop to output what I requested, it felt like magic.

These little moments of magic powered by AI are becoming ever more frequent. There are work cases, sure, but that’s not what has got me excited. It’s about trying shit, learning new ways to do things, and surprising myself with the results. I’m not trying to use AI to come up with million-dollar ideas or 10x my work output or whatever else some self-appointed industry guru or tech CEO-cum-snake oil salesman is claiming that this technology can do.

I’m chasing the “wow, isn’t this fun” feeling. It’s a hobbyist’s enthusiasm rooted in figuring out how to do something that maybe only you will think is cool, but, damnit, that’s all that matters.

Cruftbox calls it tinkering. 40 or 50 years ago, we might have thought about it as homebrew computer culture. Before that, ham radio enthusiasts.

But is collaborating with my computer in any way close to what might be when humans come together to make things?

I find AI as a “creative partner” distasteful at best and gross, at worst. I don’t want to read things in “AI voice.” I don’t want to be assaulted with your AI-created images, videos, or audio. Especially if the output is for artistic pursuits. Whatever for your slide decks or infographics, but if you’re trying to make me feel something? Get that slop out of here. Prompting is not creating.

I’m not being holier than thou. I’ve tried it myself. There is writing I’ve done where I’ve used AI as a writing assistant, and I can clearly identify when I let the computer replace my words, style, and voice with its own flattened idea of what constitutes good writing. There are a couple of things I’ve published over the last year that are absolutely cringeworthy to read.

Over the last few weeks, though, I’ve been floored by the power of accessible agentic AI software. Charlie Warzel, in conversation with Anil Dash, said the “aha” part of this moment in AI’s development is that we’ve moved on a bit from trying to get AIs to mimic Human conversation and, instead, found real material benefit in talking “Computer” to AI so that it will then do computer things beyond our capabilities. That’s been the thing for me as well.

I’ve gone from being highly skeptical of the rise of AI to enthusiastically discussing what I’d like to try next.

Digital tinkering has a cold-start problem that is often very difficult for non-techies to overcome. You don’t know how to talk computer. Having a tool that can understand you, figure out the computer shit necessary to get it done, and actually execute on those things is incredible.

Still, I never want to see your fake video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt. Please, though, put the latest Gorillaz music video on repeat.

I’m not a hypocrite.

I don’t want art made by software cosplaying as a person. Damon Albarn hasn’t replaced Jamie Hewlett with a drawing program that can simulate his style. Hewlett isn’t asking an AI song maker to create soundalike hits from their discography. There’s no humanity in that. It would have no value. Artistically, they’ve only opened the aperture for more people to contribute to their creative spectacle.

And yet, I’m having fun playing in this digital sandbox with AI agents solving the silly little computer-centric problems that only matter to me.

How human.

A wide, sunlit Los Angeles scene with a tall palm tree on the left and a leafy tree on the right, framing a concrete wall tagged with large graffiti reading “DESTROY ICE”; dry grass and a low fence sit in the foreground beneath a clear blue sky.

January 16, 2026 / 0 Comments

Intentionally Offline

View on Threads

Ironically, my intention to spend more of my life away from screens crystallized around a social media post. I’ve known Zadi Diaz since the heyday of blogging, the rise of YouTube, and those few years when SXSWi cared more about the culture and creativity of the web than about monetizing enthusiasm at scale. She has always placed a grounded, human lens on our shared digital experience.

Throughout 2025, I’d already been noticing how much more joy I got from leaving the house than from scrolling. Friends. Family. Music. Sports. Art. The world. In the fall, I saw Little Simz live and had to check my growing inner middle-aged crank. I visited Memphis for the first time, wrapped another WNBA season courtside with the Sparks, and started trekking to SoFi Stadium for Chargers home games thanks to a friend’s largesse.

And yet, those excursions didn’t feel especially intentional. Too much of my time was still swallowed by doomscrolling or playing a dumb mobile game. Worse, when I was out, I often felt a pull back toward the screen. I’d sit in the car after arriving somewhere that wasn’t time-sensitive, staring at my phone instead of going about my day. I could easily convince myself to skip or cancel activities, return to a comfortable seat, and indulge in the dopamine rush of the algorithms.

The problem was that the high wasn’t even that satisfying. It hasn’t been for a long time.

I don’t know if we, as a culture, have reached a tipping point with algorithmically curated experiences and hyper-niche virtual connectivity. I do know that I have. When every app leaves you feeling vaguely worse, rarely shows you people you actually know, and demands more effort to determine whether something is real, manipulated, or AI-generated than to enjoy it, it’s time to step away.

I no longer want social media giving me simulated or secondhand experiences that I know are more entertaining, more fulfilling, and more trustworthy in person.

Over the holiday break, I was animatedly telling Tiffany about my intention to trade digital experiences for IRL ones whenever possible.

“Isn’t it funny,” she said, “that we make this resolution every year?”

She wasn’t wrong. Since 2021, I’ve resolved to get back outside each year.

Just a year ago, around this time, I saved another Threads post to my journal:

View on Threads

So what’s different this time? Will I retreat to the endless scroll after another round of declarations?

I don’t think so.

Jenna Wortham has described the current impulse as being “performatively offline.” I don’t take that as a pejorative, but it doesn’t quite fit for me. As Zadi put it, the algorithmic artificiality of our digital spaces is pushing many of us toward the natural world. When you spend too much time trying to determine what’s real, the simplest response is to stop looking at the deception and walk out your door.

The hellscape you see in your feeds may exist in your neighborhood. For some of us, it absolutely does. But more likely, what you’ll find instead are friendly neighbors, pets, babies, and communities in need of your presence and patronage.

Here in Los Angeles, that means embracing friction, inconvenience, and uncertainty. Of course, you sit in traffic. Of course, there are odd smells and curious characters on public transportation. But, in exchange, you get opera in the park, free art in galleries and bars, and protest graffiti on the streets. You eat ten-dollar street tacos instead of thirty-dollar ones delivered by DoorDash. You stumble into hidden treasures, make new friends, and deepen bonds with nearly lifelong ones.

In return for putting your phone down and looking up, you see the world—your world—for what it actually is. That clarity can inspire small acts of care. It can also make visible how wonder and injustice coexist, as they always have. That is both infuriating and comforting. That’s the human condition.

Living this way doesn’t feel performative to me. It feels like a recognition that no matter what tech billionaires try to sell us next, no matter how sophisticated the algorithms become, they still can’t beat the desert of the real.

It’s not all bad online. I enjoy reaction videos to popular media. I look forward to conversations with others about the things I’m passionate about, especially when I’m confident they won’t descend into the caustic debate tactics common on the worst parts of the internet. There are still those serendipitous moments of genuine connection that I appreciate.

But joy is offline. So is epistemic clarity. If I leave my house and keep that supercomputer in my pocket, I don’t have to question my senses. Seeing is still believing when my life isn’t primarily experienced through funhouse mirrors.

Surprisingly, this has made me better at social media. My Threads posts have been on fire lately. When I’m feeding my soul with the physical world, I show up more honestly in digital spaces.

I perform here. Out there, though, I just am.

View on Threads

Links & Things

Joan Westenberg on the case for blogging in the ruins.

Sasha Frere-Jones collected some outstanding writing about 2025.

Kai Cenat is learning in public.

Pam Ward retired from ESPN’s women’s basketball coverage, but she’s not done yet.

For Your Ears: You Can’t Kill God With Bullets by Conway the Machine.

For Your Noggin: Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer.

For Your Free Time: Celebrity Traitors UK.

A bright yellow poster on a city street pole reads ‘Creators Live Here.’ The background is softly out of focus, showing palm trees, buildings, and passing cars in a sunny urban neighborhood. — Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash

January 9, 2026 / 0 Comments

Joy is the Signal

Dylan Byers said something on an end-of-2025 episode of The Grill Room that stuck with me (paraphrasing):

The best media story of the year is about people who have created something on their own. I don’t know what their long game is as businesses, but they’re definitely having fun. And it’s joyful. I spend a lot of time in my inbox with people who are very upset at their media organizations. It’s nice to look out and see a younger generation genuinely enjoying themselves.

It crystallized something I’d already been feeling.

I noticed it at Bloomberg ScreenTime in 2024, right after I was laid off from Paramount: the vibes in legacy media were bleak, while the energy around podcasters, independent journalists, and digital studio mini-moguls was fully lit. Those in the Creator Economy were the ones with the glint in their eye, big dreams of making it, and often with impeccable skin.

No one knows the long-term financial viability of going out on your own—or the sustainability of always operating as an individual or a small team—but the joy is unmistakable. The people who leapt look alive.

I remember that feeling from the halcyon days of blogging, when staying up late to post on my little website—or editing LAist back when it was just a city blog—felt more energizing than my very cool TV job. One of the mindfucks of getting older is failing to recognize when those shifts are happening again. Or worse, greeting them with skepticism instead of curiosity.

That might explain why my initial reaction to Evan Shapiro’s rollout of his Attention Economy chart last fall was dismissive. It felt undercooked. Unlike his meticulous maps of legacy media, this one didn’t really show how creator businesses make money. Lumping creators, streamers, influencers, and brands together without distinction doesn’t help those of us trying to navigate what this ecosystem actually is.

Shapiro’s follow-up conversation with his co-host Marion Ranchet was more satisfying. They acknowledged the chart’s limitations and explained why mapping the ecosystem, rather than breaking down the financials, was necessary. Creators aren’t lone wolves. They’re small media companies that rely on platforms, agencies, white-label studios, and contractors to provide their teams.

For legacy media professionals contemplating the jump, that matters. The most abundant opportunities may not be in front of the camera or mic, or even directly with a creator doing those things, but in the infrastructure—joining partner companies or building businesses that serve new creatives in aggregate.

That entrepreneurial leap is the hardest part for those of us raised in corporate systems, where being excellent at a narrow role was enough. Clock in, clock out, collect a paycheck. Creators don’t work that way. They live to work—partly because the competition for attention is ruthless, and also because they love it. They expect collaborators to bring that same energy.

I include myself among those who need to get over themselves—and over our judgments about what “counts” as media in 2026. We’re not going back. I may never fully embrace the pejorative use of “plot-based media,” but I also have to admit: my wife is just as likely to find me watching a reactor video on YouTube as she would find me deeply engaged in a prestige drama on HBO.

What earns my attention is joy. Enthusiasm is infectious. I listen and watch because I can feel that the people making this stuff want to be there.

I still worry about the creator business model—financially and operationally—when you’re the sole proprietor, star, and producer of your own mini-media empire. Not everyone becomes a Joe Rogan, Joe Budden, MrBeast, or Ms. Rachel. But a “Creator Middle Class” is emerging. One that can control its business, build direct relationships with its audience, and sustain a career without celebrity status.

For those of us who love plot-based media and accept how much we’ve grown to enjoy the attention-based kind, the real work is figuring out where we fit in and having the humility to recognize that joy, not legacy, may be the clearest signal of where the future already lies between these two worlds.

Alt text: White sculptural figure of a tall Black man with locs extending his arms forward, gripping a small equestrian statue by the tail and holding it aloft; the miniature monument dangles upside down, emphasizing a reversal of power within a museum gallery.

January 4, 2026 / 0 Comments

MONUMENTS

A year before we married in the city, we spent a Memorial Day weekend in New Orleans. We stayed at Hotel LeCirque. It stands on what is now Harmony Circle, once called Place du Tivoli. In 2010, it was still known by the name it had carried for more than 130 years: Lee Circle. As in Robert E. Lee, the defeated Confederate general.

Our room faced the circle, where the enormous statue of Lee, mounted on his horse, was perched, looking down upon us and all those who came to enjoy what is, otherwise, a wonderful part of my second-favorite city in the country. Every morning when I opened the curtains of our room and was greeted by the long-standing monument to a man who led armies that killed tens of thousands for the express purpose of keeping people who look like me enslaved, I cursed his name and flipped him off.

That twelve-foot bronze monstrosity celebrating “the Lost Cause of white supremacy” no longer stands atop that perch. It was removed in 2017 during the great reckoning around Confederate memorials that followed the 2015 Charleston church massacre. That moment of overdue accountability, in turn, provoked a surge of white supremacist counter-rallies opposing the removal of these monuments, culminating in the “Unite the Right” rally in August of that same year — an event that ended, predictably, in violence.

It should come as no surprise, then, that despite the threat of rain, we recently trekked to Little Tokyo for First Fridays at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA to view MONUMENTS. The exhibition examines a decade of contestation over Confederate monuments in public spaces across the United States, pairing decommissioned statues with works by nineteen artists reflecting on the monuments themselves — and on what both their presence and their removal might mean. Robin D. G. Kelley has called it the most important exhibition currently on display in any museum in the nation, perhaps even the world.

Given the authoritarian tendencies of our current administration and the increasing comfort with which some Americans express supremacist ideology, I suspect he may be right.

While there are many monuments on display—several destroyed, dismembered, or defiled—the data reveals a more unsettling truth: four out of five Confederate statues in this country still stand. Though I delighted in being able to once again whisper “punk bitch” to statues of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and their ilk, the reality is that these losers are still honored as heroes in government-owned spaces—the people’s places—across this nation, and not merely in the South.

Inside The Geffen Contemporary, the people are represented by a wall of photographs taken by the nineteenth-century pop-up photographer Hugh Mangum. Despite working during the Jim Crow era, Mangum did not segregate his subjects. Everyday Black and white men and women gaze out from fragile glass plates, serving as witnesses to the era when many of these false idols were elevated in their name, supposedly for their benefit. The counterweight between these perspectives—common folk rendered vulnerable by time and decay, and monumental figures cast in bronze and stone—is striking. As in my memory of New Orleans, the gaze still moves upward, toward icons of oppression looming above the public.

Hamza Walker and Bennett Simpson, the curators of MONUMENTS, consistently juxtapose competing ideas. Nowhere is this more devastating than in the placement of white grievance in direct proximity to Black grief. It was impossible not to break down while watching Julie Dash’s short film HOMEGOING, in which Davóne Tines sings the souls of those murdered in the Charleston church shooting home. It was even harder to suppress the rage stirred by the glossy images of Ku Klux Klan members displayed in the very next room.

I was too overwhelmed by my visceral reaction to The Birth of a Nation to appreciate Stan Douglas’s reinterpretation fully. Still, encountering Descendant by Karon Davis—my favorite piece in the show—proved cathartic. The statue depicts a young Black boy, Davis’s son, with locs standing tall, holding a miniature monument of a Confederate General on horseback by its tail, as if it were vermin. The juxtaposition filled me with joy. When faced with the grave threat posed by the darkest hearts of our fellow Americans, Black folks have long mastered one enduring response: trolling.

After this whirlwind of emotion, Tiffany and I exited the museum ready to join the dance party promised as part of First Fridays. There was none to be found. BlackMuseumist was spinning, but the makeshift dance floor remained empty. Blame it on the rain. Or perhaps people don’t dance in public the way they once did, surveilled as we are from every angle.

We, however, would not be denied. After two-stepping to some rare grooves, we threw up a peace sign to the DJ. He answered with Fela Kuti’s “Water No Get Enemy.” Those afrobeat horns and drums got us sweating, shaking loose whatever heaviness had glommed onto us through the gallery.

MONUMENTS makes plain the weight of what this country refuses to reckon with. Our most violent truths occupy the public square. The hatred is sanctioned. The cruelty is celebrated.

Still, we dance.

a black man sitting on a couch surrounded by christmas decorations holding a fancy holiday themed pen as he prepares to write in a greeting card.

December 16, 2025 / 0 Comments

Season’s Greetings

Every year, when I check my unused holiday card inventory, I open up the old Apple MacBook box I use to store the best cards I’ve received and read through a few of the lovely notes people have sent. I admire the artwork of those cards—some beautiful, some witty, some handmade with care.

I don’t have a similar keepsake spot on my phone for the emoji-filled texts I receive on our shared holidays. I appreciate them, but in my personal etiquette handbook, the text replaces the phone calls we used to make all day on Christmas (or your winter holiday of choice). They don’t replace the mail.

I still send physical holiday cards.

I also try to keep up with birthday cards, anniversaries, and the occasional “just because” letter or postcard. I like the process of taking the time to find the right words to tell someone I was thinking of them, not merely because I got a notification on my phone or opened a social media app. I thought about them in advance. I went to a gift shop or paper store and saw something that made me think of you. I bought stamps. I sat down at a table or desk with a pen in hand and stopped to come up with something meaningful to say to you. I licked an envelope and sealed it. I used my address stamp. I walked to a mailbox and dropped it in.

We live in a time when we are the center of everything. Put your headphones on, pull that pocket-sized supercomputer up a few inches away from your face, and let it bring your algorithmically personalized world directly to you.

In the moments when I stop to send out a letter, I am not the center of my universe. The recipient is.

We had a lovely team holiday party today, including a White Elephant gift exchange and a poem-based game that a colleague wrote herself—no ChatGPT. It was delightful. Phones were face down. Eyes were on each other. Gratitude for our time together and our shared accomplishments wasn’t in Slack emotes or GIF boards; it was in the room where we shared reality for about 90 minutes.

It made me nostalgic for the pre-pandemic office card ritual. I miss taking two minutes out of a workday to write a Happy Birthday greeting to a co-worker and then passing it along to the next person who hadn’t signed. There’s friction and intention in these small acts, and that effort is meaningful to both the writer and the person being honored.

Maybe I’m a dinosaur, but with rare exception, I’d prefer that to something typed out in the brief moment when a notification pulled you away from doomscrolling.

Thank you, but I receive those messages as: I was too caught up in my own shit to do anything ahead of time, so here, have some emojis.

That’s how I feel when I send a DM instead of putting pen to paper as well.

A card says, You were alive in my mind, and I didn’t need a device to put you there.

This was handled with care.

No AI involved.

a construction engineer holding and reviewing blueprints

December 7, 2025 / 0 Comments

How I Made My 2025 Music Recap

I spent most of my free time over the last week turning twelve months of Last.fm scrobbles into something resembling what I might get from the digital music streaming platforms. The goal was to achieve narrative clarity about how my listening habits are shaped by genre, vibe, purpose, and pattern.

Two things became obvious fast:

The raw data is messy. Pulling a year of listening into a meaningful shape requires way more cleaning, classification, and context than I had done since switching from Spotify to Tidal. I’m not Every Noise at Once.
The story isn’t in the numbers alone. Meaning can’t be easily derived from play counts alone.

I wanted to be a more intentional listener this year, leaving Spotify’s algorithmic overreach for a more human, artist-centric product experience in Tidal. I achieved that. Now, if I feel like I’m in a rut, I can’t really blame the technology. I have to work my way out of it. Building more playlists helps with that, as does trying out more of the user playlists that the platform’s home page surfaces to me.

The Sources

Three inputs shaped the foundation:

Last.fm scrobble history for every play, including timestamps and track-level breadcrumbs.
My own tags and taxonomies:
This year, I built an artist descriptor system to replace Last.fm’s chaotic tag soup. I capped it at three genres and two descriptors per artist. For songs, I added a mood and a mode. I’m sure both dictionaries will expand in 2026.
Context logs:
I tracked my weekly and monthly top performers, which made it easier to tie shifts in listening to what was happening in my own life.

The Tools

A Last.fm data exporter. The one I used always pulls your full history (though you can download partial fills during the process). I’ve found another that allows you to draw an update based on a timestamp. I’ll be using it going forward unless I come across something better.
Google Sheets for merging, normalizing, and verifying counts.
A personal KPI tracker to keep genre weights, album totals, and monthly shifts consistent.
ChatGPT as an analyst assistant, primarily for structuring and processing data logs, similar to how I use AI to assist me at work, where I also have limited resources. It helped me think through how I wanted to set up a data analysis framework, and then I implemented it in tools outside the LLM that aren’t prone to hallucination, bad math, or fantasy. One area I intend to explore early in the new year is AI solutions explicitly designed for data analysis and exploration. I’ve gotten to play around with these kinds of tools in some enterprise products and marketing analytics tools, which I’ve found exciting and delightful, but as I have noted throughout this year, making this stuff work requires a ton of thoughtful setup under the hood.

The Structure

45 Descriptors (like 1980s or Underground or The South)

19 Genres (like Hip-Hop, Funk, or K-Pop)

12 Moods (like Cinematic, Energetic, or Spiritual)

12 Modes (like New Day Vibes, Working Out, or Still Processing)

I enjoy the classification process despite (or perhaps because) how challenging and time-consuming it is. I learned during my Paramount+ days that building a single, consistent metadata system is hard, and few want to own it.

I get it. It’s daunting to take on this task even if you’re the lone customer, but c’est la vie.

The Playlists

I do a lot more playlist management on Tidal than I ever did on Spotify, and this process has encouraged me to create more playlists.

Colorful gradient background featuring the text 'NEW DAY Vibes' curated by Jason Toney

Cover art for a music playlist titled 'THE COOL DOWN', featuring a cosmic-themed illustration of a purple planet surrounded by stars, with the subtitle 'music for heavy eyelids' and curated by Jason Toney.

You can find all my publicly available playlists on my profile.

The Stats

42.6k streams
17.3k tracks
9.8k albums
5.2k artists
~53% of my spins this year were categorized.

Top Artists

Top Albums

A grid of album covers showcasing popular tracks including 'GNX' by Kendrick Lamar and 'Let God Sort Em Out' by Clipse, along with their respective play counts.

The 2025 Mixtape

Improvements for 2026

On Saturday morning, I spun up a BigQuery project connected to a Google Colab notebook so I can process my Last.fm data at scale. Each month, I’ll ingest new scrobbles, update artist and song classifications, and sync them all to my active playlists.

The goal is 80% classification over the next 12 months. I want a much more comprehensive understanding of my listening patterns, defined on my terms.

The one data point I’m still missing: song length. The public metadata ecosystem is thin, and time-listened has become the backbone metric of every streaming recap. Getting accurate, open song-duration data may be an uphill battle.

Is it weird that I have been having a lot of fun nerding out on this little data project?

A futuristic cityscape. The copy reads "Groove Therapy: Black Cosmopolitan Music for Sinners Rebuilding in Public"

December 4, 2025 / 4 Comments

Not Spotify Wrapped 2025: A Scaffolding Year

“Scaffolding year” is the phrase that followed me as I put this together. 2025 has been about re-architecting my life professionally, creatively, emotionally, and spiritually. While I was learning to live more openly, intentionally, and courageously, the music I returned to again and again acted as support beams. Hip-hop drove my sense of agency. Soul music helped me sort through the interior renovations, while Jazz guided me through the always-chaotic, often-awful state of the world to more stable ground. And the score and soundtrack from Sinners framed the whole thing in cinematic relief.

Last year, I was an open wound: Love Heart Cheat Codes for West Coast Heads Having a Shitty Year.

This year, I’m on the mend:
Black-Cosmopolitan Groove Therapy for Sinners Rebuilding Their Life in Public.

Hip-Hop: The Foundation

Three men posing together, wearing hoodies and stylish accessories, displaying various tattoos.

About 38% of everything I played this year was hip-hop. No other genre came close. I started 2025 still living inside the great albums of 2024 (GNX, Chromakopia, GLORIOUS, Alligator Bites Never Heal), and they never really left rotation.

Summer ‘25 brought Clipse’s Let God Sort Em Out, and the gravity of that album shifted everything. Griselda and their extended family—Benny the Butcher, Westside Gunn, Conway the Machine, Stove God Cooks, Boldy James, Jay Worthy—kept feeding the momentum.

I embraced rappers who make albums, not trend-chasing content. I connected with artists who commit to atmosphere and let the world-building unfurl over a full-length. The Alchemist was often the patron saint of that kind of sonic architecture this year.

Hip-hop was the skeleton of my year. Headnodders and that ol’ boom bap motivated me through workouts, got me hyped on game days, and steadied my resolve in the mornings. Rap music provided the soundtrack for moments of levity and grit. For years, I worried that I had aged out of the genre. Turns out, it has been maturing as well, and I just needed to be patient. The old heads and old souls were always going to be right on time.

R&B/Soul: The Regulator

A stylish individual wearing black sunglasses and a fitted black corset top, striking a confident pose while holding their hands near their face.

If hip-hop kept me moving, R&B kept me whole.

One in five listens belonged to voices that know how to soothe, testify, and gently pull a truth out of hiding. Established faves like Beyoncé, SZA, Hiatus Kaiyote, Cleo Sol, and Erykah Badu were joined in regular rotation by Lalah Hathaway, Alex Isley, and Yaya Bey.

I took some archival detours, too: Teena Marie (inspired by a One Song episode), Amerie (rewarding on every revisit), and the epic works of D’Angelo after his untimely passing.

Generally, though, this soundscape was introspective. I leaned into R&B music that was intimate and sometimes devotional (despite my well-documented apathy towards organized religion). These were the sounds that kept the structure intact. When I needed to soften or steady myself, this was home base.

Listening with Purpose from a City in Crisis

Watch: Alex Isley’s Tiny Desk Concert and Erykah Badu’s NYT performance.

Jazz: The Structural Counterweight

A woman with curly hair wearing a green top and necklace stands confidently beside a harp, against a backdrop of floral-patterned wallpaper.

For most of my life, Jazz was familiar but distant. It’s my father’s language, not mine. Of course, now that he’s passed, I’ve found my way to an active relationship with the music he so loved and loved to make.

We’ll save the psychoanalysis of that for another time.

Writing about the art form for DC Jazz Fest helped me build fluency, and by October, the genre had quietly climbed into my #2 slot, surpassing R&B/Soul.

Brandee Younger was the first revelation: my favorite discovery of this year across all genres. Terri Lyne Carrington’s thematic releases inspired me with their cognitive depth, emotional nuance, and the conversations they have with both the issues of the day and the releases of the past.

While I appreciate the greats, if I’m going to listen to the standards, I’d prefer the women to take the lead. What I enjoyed most in 2025 was modern soul-jazz, often delivered by artists forged here in Los Angeles or across the pond.

Jazz is where I turned when I wanted to make sense of a chaotic world. It’s the music that challenges me. It’s what I listen to when I want to get comfortable with complexity. It is not an escape. I don’t listen to float away. Instead, these songs and artists encourage me to get beyond the algorithmic doomscroll. Jazz was my antidote to brain-rot culture.

Pop as Palate Cleanser

March sent me tumbling into a K-pop side quest thanks to LISA, The White Lotus, and her solo album press tour. June brought the 20th anniversary of The Emancipation of Mimi, which once again owned my entire life, as if it were still 2005. And in November, ROSALÍA’s LUX became the latest entry in my “artists whose entire catalog must be consumed front-to-back” collection.

These were the releases that got me to color outside the lines and explore beyond my tendencies.

Sinners

My album of the year is from Clipse, but the cultural moment of the year is Sinners.

Ludwig Göransson may have edged out Nicholas Britell for my personal composer crown. The soundtrack introduced Miles Caton and revived artists I’d drifted from, like Alice Smith and Brittany Howard.

Sinners got me to explore Blues, Folk, and other music in the American Roots tradition seriously for the first time in my life, from Geeshie Wiley to Lead Belly to Woody Guthrie, and many underappreciated artists on the margins.

Shout-out to the fictional Delta Slim and the very real Buddy Guy.

So, yeah, a scaffolding year. In 2025, the music kept pace with my growing honesty, porosity, and resilience. Press play and the blueprint unfurls. The vision is right there, if you listen closely.

A graphic titled 'JT unWrapped 2025' featuring a collage of top music artists, with Kendrick Lamar displayed prominently at the top, followed by Clipse, Tyler, The Creator, and Freddie Gibbs.

Playlist summary for JT unWrapped 2025 featuring top songs including 'The Birds Don't Sing' by Clipse, 'tv off' by Kendrick Lamar, '30 for 30' by Sza featuring Kendrick Lamar, and 'MUTT' by Leon Thomas.

A concert crowd with their hands raised many forming the shape of a heart with those hands. — Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash

November 20, 2025 / 1 Comment

Sometimes I Be Extrovert

We drove the backroads from Burbank to Hollywood, reminiscing about a time when our nights out felt more random: talking with strangers at the bar, late-night vittles, bad ideas powered by bartenders with heavy pours and better stories. Back in my day, we didn’t trade friction for convenience. Back in my day, we were outside.

What a bunch of middle-aged bullshit.

As I surveyed the near-capacity crowd at the Hollywood Palladium on a Tuesday night, I realized the city hasn’t stopped moving. I might just be comforting myself with old stories instead of paying attention. Folks still pack into venues, still dance and sweat and sing along. They’re still out on the sidewalk buying bacon-wrapped hot dogs. Randos still ask odd questions.

And I still have feet and hips that work.

Despite our comfortable balcony seats, I got up and danced for most of Little Simz’s final stop on her North American tour. Midway through her nearly two-hour set, Simz brought out her DJ kit and cranked the energy up another level. Even the usher paused her aisle-policing to break it down for a minute. I took that as my cue to see if I still had a little step-ball-change in me.

I do.

After the dance party, Simz shifted gears to talk about the creative process behind Lotus, her latest album. She called it “muddy waters.” She wasn’t feeling inspired. She didn’t trust her ear. There was self-doubt. But she kept showing up. She kept working. Eventually, she found her way through and made one of her most personal and mature records—raw, intentional, and honest.

On “Free,” she raps, “Love is every time I put pen to the page.” Hearing that live hit me harder than I expected.

I’ve been wading through my own swamp—circling ideas, hesitating, telling myself I’m waiting for inspiration while ignoring the truth: creatives create. A writer writes.

Before getting back to rocking the mic, Simz dropped one more gem: “It’s easy to get started. It’s much harder to finish.”

Whew.

It was a fantastic show.

When I complain things have changed, maybe I’m the one choosing comfort over friction. Am I becoming the curmudgeon wistful for the way things used to be? Or am I still the person willing to adapt, stay open, and lean in when things get difficult?

Because surprise, delight, and joy still show up for the people who put in the work.

And on a night when I said yes and stepped out with a friend for an adventure in Hollywood, the city rewarded me.

Sometimes I be extrovert.

four people holding hands and dancing in a circle with big smiles on their faces

November 2, 2025 / 2 Comments

Shake what your mama gave ya

As we tumbled out of BB King’s on Beale Street after a night of celebration, a family friend said, “This may be the drinks talking, but I never saw you dance with your mother.”

I had danced with her—there’s photographic proof—but she wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t danced much that night.

There was a time when I was always the first on the dance floor. My mother tried to awaken that version of me when Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Poison” came on.

But the dancing machine would not be roused.

I could offer excuses: my age, my weight, the era of constant surveillance and online judgment. But the truth is more straightforward, and harder.

I’ve struggled to find unabashed joy these past few years. And dancing, sweaty, silly, all-in dancing, has always been my most authentic expression of that relentless, unyielding, undeniable pleasure.

One of my mantras this year is get over yourself.

Another: don’t let these motherfuckers steal your sunshine.

When I don’t dance, especially with the people I love most, I’m not honoring the goals and values I’ve set for myself.

Worse, I’m not being true to who I am.

And worst of all, I’m letting the onslaught of negativity win.

No, ma’am.

I recently caught a clip from The Grits & Eggs Podcast about the power of Black joy: how it remains both antidote and anathema to the race-based authoritarianism rising around us.

It felt like a challenge.

So with two months left in the year, let’s shake what our mamas gave us.

An ofrenda from the 2025 Grand Park Dia de los Muertos exhibit featuring a skeleton wearing LA Dodgers gear and an open seat reserved for those kidnapped in ICE raids.

November 1, 2025 / 0 Comments

Halloween 2025 and the Spirits of Los Angeles

As we got closer to Halloween, social media was filled with creators, influencers, and regular folks dressed to surprise, scare, or delight. The holiday has become a showcase for imagination, titillation, and referential humor, with little connection to the pagan or Christian rituals at its roots.

I sometimes lament not feeling as compelled to dress up as I once was. That won’t change, though. As I get older, I’m less interested in wearing a costume to amuse colleagues and friends. There’s nothing wrong with that. I love a good Halloween meme. Someone came to the office party dressed as a Labubu, and it was terrific.

But these days, I’m drawn to something else: remembrance. Why ignore, mock, or ward off the spirit world when the evils of our time don’t come from beyond? They are right here in human form, adorned in the clothing of authorities.

This Halloween, Tiffany and I took the Metro downtown for a night at the Mark Taper Forum to see Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. The show was her idea—a last-minute addition to our social calendar—but it turned out to be precisely what I needed. We arrived early and wandered through Grand Park, where the annual Día de los Muertos installation had transformed the plaza into a celebration of color, reverence, and resistance.

After my dad’s passing last year, I began reading about Día de los Muertos and the significance of the ofrenda, the altars families build to honor and invite departed loved ones back into their lives.

One of the exhibits invited visitors to write a message to someone who had passed. On a small index card, I wrote:

Dad (KT),

Dominique is getting married soon. Your presence is requested!

You are missed and loved.

—JT

It was the first time I’d written directly to him rather than about him. Usually, when I write or speak for the dead, it’s for myself or others. A way for us to process loss. But this felt like a conversation, a hope he might hear, and that with open invitation, he might make his presence known, especially at such a momentous occasion. This spirituality is so unlike me, but I meant every word. I hope he joins us.

The Grand Park installation also honored the living, especially those in Los Angeles whose lives are made precarious by our country’s immigration enforcement policies. With City Hall glowing behind it, the exhibit called out the trauma caused by ICE raids and border policies that tear families apart. Surrounded by marigolds and the righteous indignation of our Chicano brethren and sistren, I was reminded why I love this city. Los Angeles isn’t perfect, but it shows up. We fight for one another. We build community from loss and struggle.

And that spirit carried into the theater.

Los Angeles is the final stop for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’s initial touring company and likely the last time so many members of the original ensemble will perform together. To do so here feels right. As playwright Jocelyn Bioh said, “to culminate in such a special city that understands the power of community and coming together, that doesn’t feel like an accident.”

Set in a Harlem salon where a group of West African women—many working under tenuous visa conditions—build a makeshift family, the show is sharp, funny, and profoundly human. It captures what it means to chase the American Dream while being told you don’t belong.

By the time the curtain fell, I felt grateful. For the play, for this city, for the way art challenges me to stay open and engaged in my community: to remember, to listen, to love.

To fight.

I love L.A.