Poster Image for the documentary "Power of the Dream" featuring a graphic with bold black serif text on cream reading "POWER OF THE DREAM," with a cutout photo of a woman basketball player mid-dribble tucked between "POWER" and "OF THE," and the U.S. Capitol dome silhouetted after "DREAM." Below, a red panel with black-and-white cutout portraits of five women featured in the doc.
July 30, 2026 / 0 Comments

Common Sense Bigotry and the WNBA’s Golden Goose

In the summer of 2020, Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were underdogs in Georgia until incumbent Senator and WNBA team owner Kelly Loeffler fully aligned with Trump’s MAGA movement and their attempts to turn the Black Lives Matter activism of the league’s players into a campaign strategy.

The players turned their attention to ousting Loeffler from her seat of power both in DC and in the owner’s box, and they succeeded in doing both, helping to put Ossoff and Warnock into the positions they now hold and are fighting to keep in this year’s midterm elections.

This summer, though, while Ossoff and Warnock continue to be a thorn in the side of, incredibly, a second-term Trump, the activist in the W that we’re being presented with is Sophie Cunningham and her “common sense bigotry.”

It occurred to me early in this thirtieth-anniversary season, now that the league has its watershed media rights deal and the players have their historic CBA, that both sides of that equation may have chosen to turn down the temperature on being so publicly politically active, even if it was never discussed explicitly. And even if their approaches are wildly different.

Players stay on the floor for the national anthem this summer. “Statement Tees” are infrequently worn unless you are Coach Cheryl Reeve or the always outspoken Natasha Cloud. Despite the dreadful record of the current administration and the progressive enthusiasm heading into this fall’s election cycle, there’s no collective action to be found among these women in 2026.

And that is their right. I’m not demanding action, just noting its absence.

Meanwhile, the league front office has taken a different approach. Or, perhaps, an approach similar to one popularized by their parent organization’s biggest star of the 1990s: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”1

Caitlin Clark’s arrival in the professional ranks a few seasons ago brought a fan base that does not share the same values as those this league has been cultivating for most of its life. That they have glommed onto her, her team, and her teammate, Cunningham, seems to have inspired the most Corporate America thing possible from the association: protect the goose that lays the golden eggs at all costs.

I imagine they see it as being apolitical. But nothing is apolitical in this country, and when that stance becomes just not trying to antagonize “common sense” Americans, what you really get is what we’ve seen over the last week. 

Cunningham spouts her “common sense bigotry,” doubles and triples down,  and gets rewarded with halftime show appearances on national broadcasts.

Meanwhile, a coach who might have a different perspective on her comments and the rights of trans people to play sports is cut off by her team’s PR team for a statement full of baby pablum.

When a team owner’s arena is invaded by bad-faith actors seeking to fabricate an incident, her understandable reaction and interaction with them result in disciplinary action from the league. 

That seems pretty political to me. Choosing to coddle the bigots because you want them to keep spending their money is a devil’s bargain.

It also completely ignores what else has happened over the last five years and the groundswell of youthful progressive enthusiasm that has organically built around the league during that time. That fanbase, the one that will stick around long after Clark and Cunningham ride off into the sunset, has the values that underpin this league. And it is the fuel that drives all who thrive in and around women’s sports. 

The lifeblood of women’s sports is inclusivity. We are here because we want to cheer for these women, this bountiful, broad, cornucopia of athletes, who compete like hell while also clearly being about something greater than themselves. 

The billionaire NBA owners, both at a league and team level, may not want to hear that, but ignore it at your peril. Chasing fickle fans who have no respect for the people who have kept this thing going for the last 30 years may turn away the folks who get it better than you ever will. 

And then you’ll be left holding an empty bag.

That’s just common sense.

  1. Yes, I know that Jordan denies saying it. ↩︎

Illustration of a man with short black hair in a purple shirt, surrounded by social media icons: a magnifying glass, thumbs up, speech bubbles with hearts, a checkmark, thumbs down, a notification badge, and a "Subscribe" button. Four circular profile avatars connect to him with thin lines, each showing a different person. Set against a solid yellow background.
July 11, 2026 / 8 Comments

I Hate The Way We Talk Online

A little over a week ago, I asked on Threads:

Without googling or using a chatbot, do you know what the top songs (by chart position) in your favorite genres are right now? Could you sing, rap, or even hum them if asked?

What I expected in return were answers from acquaintances and strangers alike about their awareness of what’s actually popular, rather than the hyper-personal, algorithmically curated music being piped into their ears or the tunes that the hyper-niche online music fandom they may be a part of was promoting. 

What I got instead were weirdly defensive or hostile replies that seemed to take my innocuous question as an invitation to debate the merits of charts including conspiracy theories about their purpose.  Others merely wanted to pat themselves on the back for having edgy tastes.

I’m desperate for some sense of a shared cultural language or zeitgeist right now, but not like this.

On a recent episode of Brittany Luse’s It’s Been A Minute podcast, Wired’s Jason Parharm argued that this current stage of overly algorithmic social media has fostered a “main character” mentality where the primary currency is attention and everything, and everyone is judged through that lens. In this world, platforms reward “algorithm-speak” over individual expression and nuance, and any sense of a monoculture around anything other than the algorithm is almost non-existent.

The price of engaging with topics I care about or content I enjoy in spaces where I know like-minded folks exist is that I earn the attention of those who care more about winning algorithmically than connection. Much like literacy, social skills have atrophied in this age of social media. 

As the World Cup has been showcasing lately, we can still find commonality and shared language around live sports, but even that is being fractured by the ways we experience the world through our digital frameworks.  I’ve written before about how attending WNBA games in-person is nothing like the tribalism rampant when discussing the W online. I’d amend that today to note that fandom around one particular player and team can sometimes feel like the comments section IRL when they come out in full force at your home arena.

They reek of that “main character” mentality in which people assume they are the most entitled to everyone’s attention rather than reading the room and being good guests. 

It’s infuriating.

I’m rejecting the shifting social mores that place the highest value on attention. I’m done with aura, rizz, maxxing, and mogging. I’m not accepting a post-literate society. 

I refuse!

Let’s discuss topics without feeling the need to win a non-existent argument. 

Hot takes? No.

Unsourced Breaking News from non-journalists? Nah, B.

Engage with nuance. Show the grace you would extend offline to those you meet on these virtual streets.

Have something real to say? Write a blog.

Want to better understand the world we live in? Read a book. 

Want to be a creator? Don’t let AI write your shit, render your art, or make your infographics.

Don’t be a “main character.” Be a person. 

Don’t make me enter my curmudgeon era.

Despite how far back I have to scroll to find my year in age verification features, I’m too young and pretty to be a full-time crank. 

Photo of a boy in sunglasses and a white polo shirt waving an American flag, smiling, in front of a wooden fence.
July 4, 2026 / 1 Comment

What to this Negro is America at 250?

As I entered our local grocery store this morning, the security guard called me over.

“I like your shirt,” she said. I was wearing Angel City FC’s Immigrant City tee.

“Thank you,” I replied.

“I said to my church women’s group today, ‘Happy 4th of July to the Americans first and also…” 

She stammered a bit.

“Wait, I am trying to get my words.”

I waited.

“Happy 4th of July to the Americans first and also for the immigrants. Like your shirt.”

“Well, none of our people are originally from here. We are all immigrants,” I said.

“Except the people who were on this land,” she retorted.

“And yet, those are the ones whom our nation considers least American. But, as my shirt says, ‘Los Angeles is for everyone.’ So is America.”

As we parted, I said loudly, “My African sister, my American sister, Happy Independence Day!”

She smiled widely and yelled back, “For all of us!”

For all of us.

Photo by Janay Peters on Unsplash

The New York Knicks celebrate their 2026 NBA championship, holding the Larry O'Brien trophy and wearing gold medals and white championship hats, surrounded by team members in navy championship apparel.
June 18, 2026 / 1 Comment

The Power of Friendship

“It’s us,” Shannon said when I wondered aloud some twenty years ago about who would fight for what’s right. She’s been gone for over a year now, but I’ve returned to her moral clarity again and again as we navigate the overwhelming selfishness that has always been a core part of the American psyche, but in this faux gilded age of Trumpism, is a genuine crisis.

Back in April, Sophie Haigney wrote that the word “courage” has fallen out of fashion because it requires you to have some kind of moral-based conviction.

The valorization of ‘high agency’ is emblematic of a moment when risk-taking is overvalued. It’s an ethos for a gambler’s time, and we’re living in one. ‘Courage’ has a moral valence that agency doesn’t. Agency is about action, but it tells us nothing of direction.

Even using the royal “we” in our fractured society feels as quaint and outdated as courage apparently is. But that kind of overwhelming selfishness is not a winning posture if you value your soul. And, more importantly, if you value and respect those around you, near and far, you know that what we need more of is earnest courageousness in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. 

Even if we’ve fallen out of the habit of using the word, the folks who have been out in the streets doing the work to protect their neighbors against ICE over the last year have shown nothing but courage. For those of us who haven’t become stuck on the perch of skepticism and cynicism that so dominates our hyper-individualized media consumption, we can recognize those who stand up and do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. Sometimes they do so individually, but collective action seems most effective in this age of “high agency” individuals who seem to value only fealty to getting rich and getting over.

Maybe that’s why the 2026 New York Knickerbockers winning has been such a euphoria-inducing victory. Ever since their come-from-behind win in Game 5 of the NBA Finals—their first championship in 53 years—a meme has been circulating online. In it, the joke is that the Knicks defeated a stacked, favored San Antonio Spurs team with the “Power of Friendship.”

Meme showing a large figure in San Antonio Spurs gear labeled "3 top five picks, best player since Wilt, Champagne legacy game" beside a small figure in pink New York Knicks gear labeled "The power of friendship."

The image makes light of that collective power but, historically, movements built on courageous, unified, collective action filled with belief, determination, and an unwavering will to win, not just for self but even more so for each other, are celebrated as the greatest when they finally break through. Throughout their historic playoff run, Knicks players repeatedly talked about their effort being driven by a desire to see each other win and by their commitment to their fans and the city of New York. You would think that in a team sport, that kind of sentiment would be common, but given how high the monetary stakes are, that kind of selflessness is consistently usurped by showcasing what one can do individually.

I think we’re off individual profiles of courage, though. We’ve been starving for that “We Shall Overcome” energy. Individualized action, absent any grounding humanistic principles, is the claimed modus operandi of the power brokers in our society. 

Rebecca Solnit has been arguing that “maybe the community is the next hero.” As the five boroughs come together to celebrate their conquering basketball team this week, I think she’s right. Because part of the “Impossible Joy” surrounding the way the Knicks won is that it’s validation of something community-centered folks want to believe. If that long-doubted team could do it, then we can, too. We, the people, can win together and do the hard things not merely because we can but because we must.

There’s no soul in doing only for self. The consequence of doing nothing is untenable.

I’d been searching for new language that effectively describes this idea of collective courage. Solidarity is where I keep ending up, but it doesn’t quite cut it. 

Maybe I should stop looking. Shannon already provided the perfect terms. 

Us.

It’s us.

The Power of Friendship wins again.

Illustration of a melting snowman tipped sideways out of an upside-down ice cream cone. The snowman has a mustache and a deadpan expression. A Santa hat sits knocked off to the side. Drawn in loose black line art on a white background.
May 29, 2026 / 0 Comments

Make Them Care

I tried. I really did. It’s been two weeks since Drake’s ICEMAN came out, and after giving the album a few fair listens, I can acknowledge the bops and his skill as a rhyme slinger when he’s properly motivated. And while there are many things he’s trying to make the audience do on his most important release since the early part of his career, the one thing he couldn’t do is make me care. He acknowledges early on in “Make Them Cry,” the introductory track, that he should be maturing. He says “40” is pressing him to dig deeper, but over the next seventeen songs, he doesn’t do that. Instead, before he even gets to the end of this opening salvo, he reverts to his toxic masculinity and tendency towards ruminating over transactional relationships. 

In the last six months, I’ve been buoyed by fresh music from De La Soul, Nas, and Conway the Machine that showcase points of view that have matured with age. Each artist acknowledges how life has affected them while still delivering the boom-bap in their own unique ways. In between spins of ICEMAN, I’ve found Conway’s You Can’t Kill God With Bullets to be a palate cleanser. The East Coast rapper whose face doesn’t move tells an incredible story of loss and grief that runs in parallel with his success in hip hop and business, all while elevating his lyricism and delivering the motivational hustler anthems he and his upstate New York compatriots are known for. 

De La Soul’s Cabin in the Sky is primarily a beautiful eulogy for Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jalicoeur, a seminal member of the trio who passed away in 2023. This is the group’s first release since his untimely death, and it never sways far from reckoning with his absence, celebrating his life, and honoring his spirit with what is ultimately an uplifting collection that fits right in with their long discography filled with records that have reflected where they have been at each stage of their life.

Nas’s collaboration with DJ Premier, Light-Years, has remained in rotation since its release, particularly his collaboration with AZ, “My Story, Your Story.” What I have appreciated about Nas’s most recent bodies of work is that you can feel his status as an elder statesman without him having to depart from the style of rapping with which he came onto the scene over 30 years ago. You don’t have to change what makes you you to show growth. Just don’t hide who you are, and we will connect with it on wax.

At some point in a long musical career, you should want to trade disposable hits for substance, especially after your crown has been tarnished and your character has been questioned but that seems beyond Drake.

Losing the 2024 beef with Kendrick Lamar gives him an opportunity ripe for showcasing emotional work, and I give him credit for acknowledging his defeat, but what he goes for on this album isn’t reflection or even resurrection but revenge. “Make Them Pay” is the strongest song on the album, with rhyme schemes and flows that are effective flips and rebuttals of those two-year-old bars from Lamar. None of those directed at Dot land more than a glancing blow, but those aimed at people to whom he has real relationships and affection sting. There’s genuine sentiment behind the clever barbs for Lebron James, J. Cole, and DJ Khaled. Ultimately, though, there’s little meat on the bone. He comes across as an internet reply guy, self-satisfied with finding the perfect meme or attempting to ratio the Original Poster over interrogating his own role in the situation.

Maybe the problem, though, is that Drake is more of a character to be portrayed than who Aubrey Graham is as a person. We don’t know that guy. We only get to know “the boy,” a nearly 40-year-old man-child who can’t believe that these transactional relationships he’s been in may be emotionless arrangements for the other parties as well, be they women he’s dated, collaborators, or famous friends. Is the real man, Aubrey, the kind of person who thinks shouting out Adin Ross and Samuel Bankman-Fried in 2026 is a flex? That’s the kind of person whose album cover gets adopted by Trump’s White House for feeling MAGA-coded. For every time I get amused by a punchline or the way something is delivered, there’s another where I just shake my head at the incredulity. Being a memelord at this big age is not the move.

We almost get to something approaching self-reflection on “Firm Friends,” ICEMAN’s penultimate track. Over a stripped-down Conductor Williams production dominated by slow-tempo piano strikes, Drake’s rhymes glide over the song, earning the popular compliment of modern hip-hop fans, “He’s talking, bro!” And he is. He talks directly to individuals, institutions, and, perhaps, even himself as he explains where his head is at right now and how he plans to operate in the future. At one point, he threatens to turn “The Boy” into “The Man,” but worries that people won’t understand. 

And that’s where he loses me again. If you’re truly the greatest rapper alive as you continuously claim, that’s what you’re supposed to make us do.

Understand.

Photo of whole crab in black bean sauce served in a rustic clay pot, garnished with sliced green onions, with chopsticks resting across the rim. Shallow depth of field, muted background. Photo by Vernon Raineil Cenzon.
April 25, 2026 / 0 Comments

Earthly Treats

Crab in black bean sauce, at least as it is served in American Chinese restaurants, starts with a whole crab, most likely Dungeness here in LA, still in the shell, chopped into sections, and stir‑fried until the shells are bright red. It’s then simmered in a fermented black bean sauce. The sticky, unctuous umami bomb was among my father’s very favorite meals.

We observed his birthday this past week as a family by ordering a take-out feast in which this signature dish took center stage. As we sat around my mother’s dining room table, sharing updates on the extended family, job interviews, what’s going on in our fair city, and anything else that came to mind, I imagined my dad there with us, listening and smiling as was common in these kinds of situations, content with letting the loudest voices in the room ramble on from topic-to-topic as love, friendship, and warmth filled the space.

While I’m sure we all had at least a bit of melancholy visit us on that day, it didn’t find me when we were together. 

Dave McMurray, a Detroit-born saxophonist, composer, and bandleader whose decades-long career spans jazz, rock, R&B, funk, and pop and includes work as a sideman with artists like Albert King, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, offers a thesis statement about dealing with grief right at the start of his late 2025 release, I LOVE LIFE even when I’m hurting.

“I know despair don’t care, but be strong!”

It’s a matter-of-fact recognition of truth rather than an exclamation, yet it still stings like an unexpected slap back from the brink. McMurray’s album has been my soundtrack for finding a grounded sense of hope and optimism when those feelings of sadness and loss compound.

Throughout the work, he uses his mastery of the genre to show where and how he finds the will to keep going: in a smile, a joke, or a kind word (even if not explicitly for him), in music that can ignite something within. Beyond “This Life” and the title track, I’m drawn to “We Got By,” a cover of the tune from Al Jarreau’s debut album, with neo-soul vocalist Kem joining McMurray, honoring a lineage of Black resilience. The track is immediately followed by a cover of Yusef Lateef’s “The Plum Blossom” that knocks my socks off. McMurray picks up the flute here, and the performance never fails at lifting my spirits.

I first became aware of McMurray as a sideman on Kem’s debut album Kemistry, the 2003 release by the also Detroit-born singer and songwriter whose warm, romantic songwriting helped define a quieter, emotionally grounded lane of early-2000s R&B. Kemistry returned to regular rotation around this time last year because it was a connection between a friend who died unexpectedly and me. 

The opposite of staying stuck in that loop of sadness and despair is to turn to our creative sensibilities. A loss of his own inspired McMurray to say, “I love life even when I’m hurting.” He told Downbeat Magazine’s Bill Murkowski that, a month later, he’d write the track of the same name as a way to give form to what he had been feeling.

The opening track, This Life, was written last. While its original intention was to reckon with physical trauma, that same pain he’d seen in a friend that inspired the title song, he now sees its connection to the precariousness of this cultural and political moment, both at home and abroad.

It is difficult these days to escape the doomscrolling. With a flick of my thumb, real-world turmoil—uncertainty, anxiety, and violence that feels both distant and imminent—plays on an endless loop.

On one of the social media apps, a painter I don’t know asked, “Does art really matter right now?”

A friend replied to her with a quote from the American writer, filmmaker, and activist Toni Cade Bambara:

“The role of art is to make revolution irresistible.”

As McMurray’s work reminds us, living is not optional. Loving is not frivolous. Optimism is not a luxury reserved for easier times. Creating transforms that which ails us into something that might heal those wounds.

And sometimes you’re mended by wishing a silent happy birthday to your father while sharing one of his favorite earthly treats with the people he loved most.

Photo of the UCLA women's basketball team gathered around the 2026 NCAA National Championship trophy, wearing black Champions caps and shirts, smiling and holding up four fingers. Blue and gold confetti covers the trophy and floor.
April 19, 2026 / 0 Comments

Bleed Blue, Pt. 2

Early during this year’s March Madness, I said, “My annual worry with the Bruins: they don’t have enough  ‘dawg’ for the SEC teams and Coach Cori overcoaching in big games.” Well, I was proven wrong on both counts. The 2026 National Champions got there by defeating the two best teams in the SEC, and by the end, Cori Close had ascended to join the ranks of the most quotable and noteworthy coaches in basketball. It wasn’t the Xs and Os that garnered so much attention for UCLA’s leader, though I think that’s an underappreciated aspect of her attributes; it was how she talks about the culture she’s cultivating, the lessons and habits she’s building in her locker room, and her commitment to never losing sight of her role as an educator and dream merchant. The best coaches in women’s basketball all seem to have these qualities, but what clicked for Close this year is that she’s figured out how to do it her way: earnest, selfless, demanding, hokey, and, perhaps most important of all, joyful.

“I love these girls,” is what Most Outstanding Player, Lauren Betts, has been saying during their whirlwind media tour since winning the championship. There’s something going on in Westwood. Unabashed happiness. Relentless care. Both in pursuit of excellence. We’ve seen it at gymnastics meets and volleyball matches, and most recently at Easton Stadium with the ninth-ranked softball program.

Last year, I couldn’t put my finger on what was behind my allegiance beyond proximity, but on a beautiful day watching the Bruin bats dismantle the Cal Bears in a doubleheader, I realized that it’s about more than being able to get to campus in twenty minutes or less. The softball squad exhibited characteristics similar to those of the championship basketball team. During every pitch, infielders constantly encouraged whoever was on the mound. When someone was at the plate, the coach was, to use the parlance of athletes, pouring into them. Before blasting her 31st homerun of the season, senior Megan Grant was encouraged by Coach Kelly Inouye-Perez to “send a missile.” And over the back wall, she did. On the rare occasion a pitch made it past one of her players and was called a strike, Inouye-Perez turned into their advocate, informing the umpire that “it wasn’t a good pitch,” calling out the particulars that made it as such. Regardless of the outcome of each at-bat, hitters were told they had made good choices. “Pro choices.” “Team choices.” Each person seemed encouraged to bring their unique flair to their position, while all were incredibly invested in their collective performance rather than individual success. During the afternoon, Grant and fellow senior Jordan Woolery became the first teammates in NCAA Division I history to collect 30 home runs in a single season. The Bruins would break three other school and conference records during the two wins. 

After the games, three graduating seniors were informed that they had been given golden tickets to be drafted by the fledgling Pro Softball league, AUSL. “She wants her girls with her,” Elle Duncan would say after Meg received her ticket. She’d get her wish granted. Twice.

Like Betts and the basketball squad, it’s team over everything.

In this era of “I alone can fix it” ruthless individualism, I’m most inspired by evidence of earnest, joyful, hardscrabble people working together.

I shouldn’t have been searching for the dawgs on the bench; the interlocked hands and confident smiles were more than enough.

Can I get an eight-clap?

March 21, 2026 / 1 Comment

51

Tiffany asked me what I wanted for my 51st year, and my quick answer was “to get to the money.”

To sit courtside at Los Angeles Sparks games and say hi to Dee, our favorite bartender in the Delta Sky lounge.

To travel for basketball reasons on a whim. To join our wealthier friends in donating to the arts.

To become fluent in opera.

To be a patron of the spaces that generate the vibes I want to see in the world.

We stood in line at the home opener for ACFC, surrounded by people who want to live in the same inclusive, collaborative, and supportive society that I want, and that’s what I desire.

More of this.

More reminders that the chaos on our screens isn’t always reflective of the realities of our neighborhoods.

I want to love my neighbor like atoms sharing a cell.

I want to love my body like a turtle loves its shell. 

I want to be where joy is.

I want to be joy.

I want joy.

Joy.

What do I want in my 51st year? 

To rain down joy on my loved ones and enemies alike. 

I want to be a warrior of light.

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 / 2 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

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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:

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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.

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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.

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