Jason Toney

A yellow 3D speech bubble with a white smiley face floats above a pale smartphone lying flat against a deep blue background.

November 14, 2026 / 0 Comments

Confessions

Around 9 p.m. on Election Day, I was sitting in my car, waiting for Tiffany to finish her final shift as a vote center clerk here in Los Angeles. Polls had been closed here for about an hour, while most others across the nation had wrapped up hours before. What I didn’t yet know was that a week of joyscrolling had begun.

On Threads, my social media hangout space of choice, the feed was ebullient. Post after post was in euphoric shock over the Blue Wave (Blue Tsunami? Bluenami?) and the amazing candidates who are now set to take over much of federal, state, and local government across the nation. I was learning about Scott Colom and his “Pick another protein” campaign video.

I was weeping with the Texans who couldn’t believe what they had just accomplished. I was blushing at people “thirst trapping” and “going feral” for democracy (Ed. note: I’m not linking to those; go be thirsty on your own time). I was laughing at all the jokes and memes that had sprouted from what many of us had hoped for but didn’t dare believe possible to this degree.

A week later, I was writing in my journal that I probably needed a social media break.

Threads is unhinged, and the algorithm seems to like it that way. Seven days of shifting my attention away from my usual communities on the platform—WNBA, NWSL, Los Angeles, TV Threads, and Black Threads—meant I was now inundated with liberal voices getting hostile with each other over who will be Speaker of the House and who will lead the next Senate. Those blue-leaning lusty creators had opened the door for the full-time thirst-trappers to show up way too frequently in the timeline. I’m a fan of the human body, but I don’t need surprise boudoir photos or booty-out gym pics while I’m at work.

The good vibes were waning in my normal neighborhoods, too. The surprise ouster of James Gunn and Peter Safran immediately led to an overwhelming amount of unsourced rumor-mongering and hair-on-fire assumptions about the future of characters, shows, and films that we care about. Women’s basketball fans on the platform love mess more than anything, so without WNBA games being played, every nugget of information becomes overly dramatic. Meanwhile, political Angelenos are figuring out how to talk to each other after our liberal mayor lost to her slightly more progressive opponent in a campaign that had turned unnecessarily vitriolic by its end.

I was no longer joymaxxing. I was lost in the chaos.

As Franchesca Ramsey and Kate Lindsay pointed out on a recent episode of ICYMI (link), this is not a bug of the platform; it’s a feature.

As Threads has become the de facto virtual town square for many former Twitter users who could no longer stomach the Muskification of that service, it has also merged two internet cultures with very different levels of digital literacy and language. The netizens of Facebook—who mostly live online there—are now in conversation, sort of, with we digital goblins of “Old Twitter,” who have honed a language and rhythm unique to that text-based space that rewarded clever, quick-witted wordsmiths. Wires regularly get crossed.

Just this week, there was “Joyce Yoder, NOT Joyce Roads.”

I don’t like how it feels when I can sense my digital diet tipping over into terminally online status. There’s often a cruelty and sadness to it that is not for me. It’s performative for the algorithm, and every time I recognize that in myself, I feel like I’m losing my humanity.

I get why these crossed communication moments are funny, especially in an absurdist internet way, but it’s in these moments when I think I should go read a physical book, get back to my Spanish lessons, or decamp to the woods like some doomsday survivalist.

I keep coming back, though.

Perhaps this blog post is really my confession. I may hate the way we talk online, but when it’s delightful, there’s something quite magical about these shared online spaces, even if evil corporations run them. (I can hear Anil Dash’s many correct lamentations about Meta in my head as I write this.)

And yet, what are text-message conversations with my wife and friends if not mostly the sharing of jokes, memes, and news nuggets from these platforms, increasingly via Threads?

After letting out a shocked guffaw at a very raunchy but very funny Black Threads post recently, I said to Tiffany, “Aren’t these people citizens? How can they just be posting this stuff online?! Won’t their co-workers see? Their neighbors? The church folk?!”

I was smiling as I said it.

Clearly, I need help.

The movie poster for the film You Can See Everything featuring white block letters of the title over a very blurry image of the smile of Elizabeth Holmes

November 3, 2026 / 0 Comments

It’s not a lie if you believe it

I keep thinking about the exchange between Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes as he tries to explain one of David Blaine’s magic tricks. Blaine presents an impossible act to his audience: pushing an ice pick through his hand. There’s no blood. He’s not in excruciating pain. It is rooted in similar tricks where something appears to pass through something else, like a pen or pencil through paper, yet when it’s removed, the item is still whole. Unlike sawing someone in half, these tricks are often done in the open, with little to hide the misdirection. In Blaine’s ice pick presentation, however, the trick is that there isn’t a trick. He has burrowed a hole through his hand for the purpose of the performance. He is actually impaling himself.

It just isn’t the first time.

The lore of how You Can See Everything came together comes from a conversation between Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder at The Magic Castle. Fielder, himself, is a trained magician. His absurdist comedy has evolved into elaborate spectacles of artifice to say something about the human condition. I can’t say what that something is, for sure, because cringe comedy is not my bag. I haven’t seen much of his other work. I may try out The Rehearsal soon, but I doubt I will find my way in even with this renewed appreciation for what he and Oppenheim have done in this documentary.

I’m a couple of weeks past watching YCSE and the experience remains on my mind. I care less and less about what we learn, or don’t, about Elizabeth Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, or about Amanda Seyfried and Nathan Fielder. I think their performances are perhaps a distraction from the film’s real intrigue: the existential questions it leaves in its wake.

In this age of nearly constant artifice and performance, what even is reality?

As George Costanza said, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”

You Can See Everything is also a magic trick that, perhaps, isn’t a trick.

What if it isn’t trying to deceive us? If everyone can experience the same moment and come out of it with completely different interpretations and recollections, maybe the point is that we’re constantly deceiving ourselves?

In conversation with Trevor Noah, the comedian Tina Friml asks the question:

What actually exists more? Is it how I appear to the world that I cannot change, or is it this internal outlook that I have? It really became which one, not just which one is more important, but which one exists.
Tina Friml

Friml has cerebral palsy. As she puts it, in her head she sounds normal despite how the world sees her, so which matters more: her interiority or how people perceive her?

Which is real?

In You Can See Everything’s pivotal breakfast-making scene, we’re left wondering: did Holmes weakly beat the eggs? Was Billy a control freak for taking the bowl away from her to do it himself? Did Holmes trick him into taking that action? Why does Billy say what he says about his reasoning for taking the eggs? Why does Elizabeth immediately undercut that explanation? How would this exchange differ if Nathan Fielder wasn’t there? If the cameras weren’t there? What if they were in their actual home instead of this beachfront rental? What if they were normal people and not Lizard people from another planet poorly blending in with the rest of us as they appear over the course of these three hours?

Is any of this knowable? And, perhaps more importantly, as Friml asks of herself, what exists more? Our perception of the event or the participants? Or how each of them perceived what they were doing as it was happening?

What’s disorienting about the film is that we want to be certain of some things. We want to have belief and faith and, ultimately, truth. And yet, it never provides it.

I don’t think it even wants to.

Ta-da.

Nneka Ogwumike and Kahleah Copper reach for the ball at the rim, one stretching to block a shot, while fans, including the blog author, Jason Toney, watch from courtside seats.

October 24, 2026 / 1 Comment

No.

Unless we’re traveling, like we were this most recent season when Angel Reese and the Dream came to town and dropped a 40-piece on our heads, it’s hard to convince me to give up games featuring the league’s most exciting teams and stars. I acquiesced, under protest, to giving up an early-season Dallas Wings game.

I want to see the stars play!

Well, with one exception.

Like many of our season-ticket-holder friends, we have gladly and quickly put our Indiana Fever tickets on the market whenever they’ve come to town. It has nothing to do with the basketball or their players. The Fever and their high-octane offense are thrilling to watch. Hell, I was in the arena in Vegas last year for that overtime Game 5 semi-finals instant classic. There’s a financial component, sure. Those games tend to command a premium on the resale market, but the main reason is that when that team’s fans show up in any other WNBA arena across the country, the vibes are off.

Fever fans arrive with a brashness that doesn’t feel good-natured. They don’t enter an opposing team’s venue as guests interested in supporting their team and enjoying the game as a community. No, they show up like barbarians trying to overwhelm, conquer, and intimidate. As has become a common refrain on social media, it’s not all Fever fans, but it’s always a Fever fan.

They come with the same kind of energy I experience at Los Angeles Chargers games. At SoFi, I accept the norms of NFL fandom. The aggressiveness comes with the ticket.

That’s not the WNBA fan culture.

After their home loss in the second game of this year’s WNBA Finals, Golden State Valkyries fans in attendance stayed past regulation time shouting “G-S-V!” as their team walked off the court defeated and the Atlanta Dream celebrated. I had never seen anything quite like that, but it reflected how women’s sports fans operate. Those Bay Area fans have decided that their primary function is to lift up their team. Valkyries fans “pride themselves on making noise without making nonsense.”

For the Dream, the party atmosphere they developed in their tiny home arena expanded to fill State Farm Arena for game three, with a very Atlanta-specific Black energy that was as warm as it was a ruckus. It was a cookout and Dirty South concert, all in service of supporting their team and being entertained as a family. They even figured out how to deflate a bad actor’s antics by offering him service with a smile as he entered the arena.

So when someone says about Fever fans’ antics, “that’s just what sports fans do, get used to it,” I’m Becky Hammon:

Cartoon on a red-orange background.Becky Hammon, wearing oversized glasses, hoop earrings, and a pinstripe suit, leans into a press-conference microphone and says, “No.” Beside her, A'ja Wilson in a gray sweatshirt peels a banana and stares sideways, wide-eyed. Signed Thee W Artiste. — *Illustration by Thee W Artiste*

No, we really don’t have to accept that behavior at all.

For long-time women’s sports fans, there’s an existing culture that doesn’t include the kinds of obnoxiousness that dominate those other spaces. As we open the tent and welcome this expanding fandom, we can maintain those sensibilities while making it more inclusive.

On a recent episode of The Grill Room podcast, Jason Wright of Ariel Investments’ Project Level says the research shows that this growth period in women’s sports is expanding rather than recycling the sports audience.

Our best estimates suggest that, across all women’s sports franchises, the overlap with their men’s counterpart season-ticket bases is very, very low. Low teens and below in the overlap. So this is a net-new fan who is now participating.

These “net-new fans” come in with little frame of reference for established men’s sports culture. In fact, they are likely engaging with women’s sports because it’s explicitly not that.

As Emily Tisch Sussman, co-owner of the NWSL’s Gotham FC, puts it, “Traditionally, we’ve had fandom built through generations, top down, the grandfather to the father, maybe to the daughters, maybe to the granddaughters. When we think about building fandom in the women’s space, we don’t have that.”

This means that women’s sports fans don’t have to replicate, emulate, mimic, or accept what men’s sports or their fans do. It’s critical that we establish new, wholly authentic ways of being sports fans that don’t center the kinds of things that are acceptable in those other leagues. We can’t let the worst tendencies of other professional sports fans become the norm where women play. The outcomes are already more dangerous when they do. Women athletes get seven times more violent threats per capita than men, and abuse aimed at women targets identity rather than performance.

It’s telling that, in the comments on this piece in The Athletic about the reckoning the Fever organization is going through this off-season, many Indiana fans try to reconcile their experience through the lens of how they participate as Pacers fans. The refrain seems to be, well, this is how we act for our NBA team; we’re just, perhaps, louder for Caitlin Clark and the Fever.

It misses the point entirely. Even if they share a state, an ownership group, and an arena, your WNBA team lives in a different house, and there are different rules.

So, take off your shoes, bring something nice for the host, and show us that you know how to act right.

Big Daddy Kane performs at the Blue Note Los Angeles, rapping into a microphone in a white jacket and gold chains, pointing toward the crowd. The club’s illuminated sign glows above him against blue velvet curtains, and the silhouette of an audience member’s hair frames the lower right corner.

October 19, 2026 / 0 Comments

Smooth Operators

It was hard not to get nostalgic for the 80s while we waited for Big Daddy Kane to take the stage for the early show at the Blue Note Los Angeles. The music mix ahead of the show stayed in the pocket of that dawn of hip-hop era, moving from KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions to Slick Rick, Eric B. & Rakim, and on and on to the early dawn.

Not really. We were back home in our PJs well before 10 p.m.

As the seats around us filled with people who grew up in the same era, Tiffany revealed she had never seen Beat Street.

I couldn’t contain my excitement and appreciation for that film. I was transported back to that time, when this art form and culture were just starting to figure themselves out. Nearly every day, I came home after school, turned on the TV, and let some new song, rhyme, dance, or experience set my mind ablaze. Each time it was something I couldn’t quite believe existed from the comfort and confines of my suburban upbringing. Breakin’ and its sequel were the more popular breakdancing films, by far, but Beat Street was more real and, despite that grittiness, more magical. No one pop locked on the ceiling or made a broom dance on its own, but the dance crew battles featured the most thrilling moves I had ever seen in my young life.

That’s what got me to put cardboard out on the driveway and try backspins, windmills, and crabwalks before devolving into the worm or the popping and tutting I was much more adept at.

I encouraged Tiffany to seek out the film before looking around again and watching people silently mouth the words to another rap classic.

By the time BDK hit the stage and put on his energetic one-hour set backed by an excellent live band, I was wistful for that time some 40 years ago when I was experiencing these sounds for the first time.

Nostalgia’s a liar, though.

I’m reading Jonathan Kaufman’s When America Roared. It is a sober assessment of what many consider the most influential decade of the 20th century, defining the parameters we live in during this first quarter of the 21st. Through individual profiles, he reminds us that while hip-hop was rising, so were the Federalist Society, AIDS, massive deregulation, and Rush Limbaugh. Americans were retrenching into cruelty towards each other while solidifying a society that valued the corporation over all else. So, while it’s fun to be in a jazz club with other gray beards doing the Robocop, the Wop, and the Cabbage Patch from our chairs, no, I wouldn’t want to go back to that time.

Hell, we’ve been remixing those greatest hits ever since that other throwback to the 80s came down that gold-plated escalator to announce his bid for the presidency in the mid-2010s.

Hip-hop celebrated its 50th anniversary just a few years ago. We share similar timelines.

“It’s a trip being the same age as old people,” Tiffany said.

“Better than being the same age as dead people,” I replied.

“What a blessing to be here,” one of our seat neighbors said.

What a treat to see this street music we love so much be treated with such care and reverence. What a delight to be surrounded by so many Black and Brown faces enjoying this in a way we likely couldn’t have imagined when we were those kids flipping and flopping on broken-down boxes in whatever neighborhood we called home. I don’t need to wish to return to a time when this music was seemingly the only way to know what was going on in our communities. Instead, I’m grateful that those of us in that room made it this far and that our teen idols are reaping the rewards and performing in such a lovely space decades later.

So when Kane prompted us all to participate during one of the several call-and-response moments in his set, we roared, too.

Hip-Hop!

Don’t Stop!

Illustration of a smiling Black man with short curly hair and gray headphones, wearing an orange T-shirt and green pants, typing on a silver laptop in his lap. A blue mug and a potted plant sit on a wooden table beside him against a light gray background.

September 27, 2026 / 0 Comments

Intellectual Cosplay

At the tail end of a recent episode of The Grill Room, Dylan Byers and Julia Alexander discuss how each of them uses A.I. Julia is the vibe coder, Puck News’s heaviest Claude user, creating personalized apps and processes to help her do her job while employing strict guardrails that protect her thinking, voice, and authorship. She thinks deeply about how she would and should disclose how A.I. informs any article, analysis, or research she puts out, suggesting that maybe 5-10% of it could be credited to artificial intelligence. And all of that would be in the research phase and never in the writing.

Byers isn’t a power user. He rotates through Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini primarily as an answer engine. “Google 3.0,” as Julia puts it. While scrolling through his chat history live, he reflects on how he sneaks away after his eight-year-old son asks him a question he doesn’t know the answer to and prompts his way to one. Julia then asks, jokingly, if he takes credit for the answer ChatGPT gave him.

He doesn’t reply.

The main topic of this episode of their podcast was the fallout from billionaire investor Stan Druckenmiller’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, which he and Paul Gigot, section editor of WSJ Opinion, defended after it was identified as 100% A.I.-written when run through the A.I. content detector, Pangram*. These detectors are prone to over-detecting, so we don’t know how much of the piece was written by machine, but Byers doesn’t think readers care as much about this as professional writers do. While he agrees that there should be disclosure policies and that audiences will want to know when an agent wrote something, he thinks much of what gets published these days is recycled consensus or “human slop,” and he doesn’t think that’s materially different than slop made by machines.

How cynical.

The Journal can’t even agree on this in their own newsroom. James Taranto, their editorial features editor, wrote that professional writers have an ethical, and sometimes contractual, duty to keep their work original (while also noting the errors produced by Pangram). Perhaps Druckenmiller doesn’t fall under that standard, but it shouldn’t be the burden of the reader to figure that out when going from piece to piece under the same masthead. I’m of the opinion that if you do not either A) take a hard line on the usage of A.I. in written work—particularly that which comes from prestigious and trusted journalistic publications—or B) explain how it was used or is allowed to be used in the creation of articles or other material that comes under your banner, then you are breaking the foundation of your relationship with your readers, watchers, listeners, and subscribers. Byers’s argument is that it is already happening and the shift can’t be stopped. Journalists trying to “stand athwart history” will soon sound crazy.

Whether or not his prediction is accurate, the willingness to concede, especially by someone working in media, is crazy-making to me. A.I. is increasingly unpopular with regular people. The idea that everyone is going to just acquiesce is the fantasy of Silicon Valley, the investor class, and Fortune 500 C-Suites who have bet it all on A.I. doing everything.

The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel rejects this “the toothpaste is already out of the tube” framing outright. On his podcast, Galaxy Brain, he brings together Elizabeth Spiers and Teddy Brown to unpack the true value of writing as a defense against this push to hit the A.I. easy button.

They acknowledge that A.I. can do a lot of writing. As CNN reporter T.M. Brown notes, there is much utilitarian writing that was previously done by humans that can be done effectively by LLMs: white papers, product descriptions, SEO copy, corporate speak, LinkedIn posts. Perhaps we don’t lose much art and craft if a model does this stuff rather than a person. Unless, of course, you value the person(s) whose career and work experience would allow them to become a much better writer later.

I’d expand that to say there is even some basic journalism that doesn’t lose much if it’s mostly software-generated, from police and court dockets to weather reports and baseline sports recaps. That said, I prefer what I consume about the things I care about to be filed by humans who cover a topic religiously. In sports, that means I want the human beat reporter who’s with a team from practice-to-practice, game-to-game, season-to-season, and understands the people involved as much as the box score. Without that, we don’t get this piece by Rey Moralde on Rae Burrell.

Writing, or whatever your expressive medium, is how we convey our interiority to the world. It is our intellectual costume, as Brown puts it. Your heart and soul on display. Even if you accept Byers’s argument that original thought is somewhat rare, I’d still rather read derivative thinking from a real person’s own mind than plagiarized thinking from the open web, generated by ChatGPT via a prompt. Even the inelegant output of a less artful writer may have meaning. And, at the very least, I would know their argument or insight was honestly earned and worth my time. I may disagree vehemently with their stance, but I’d know I was debating their ideas, not those of a collectively plagiarized hivemind.

Why would I give my time to a machine’s backward-looking, unoriginal, overly long, and ultimately empty pieces about a human condition it can’t possibly understand when I could be in awe of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s raw and deft words? Or Roxane Gay’s? Or the many, many others who put out real human work worthy of grappling with.

Not revealing that you have used a bot to help you come up with an answer breaks the trust you have with your audience, whether that’s your kid or your reader.

I’m by no means taking a shot at Byers’ parenting, but I wonder if Julia’s gentle jab about credit got him to reconsider his stance a little.

I’m a dinosaur, but when I was a precocious elementary student with endless questions Mom and Dad couldn’t answer, my parents sent me to an encyclopedia, a reference book, or the library. If I wanted to learn something that couldn’t be found in one of those places, the best teacher was someone with that knowledge and the ability to convey it to me specifically. These tactics exposed me to the craft’s sources and methods and encouraged me to find my own solutions.

I can’t imagine my parents or teachers would take credit for someone (or some thing) else’s work as their own and definitely would not do so with pride. And neither would I. Not then and not now. To do so would feel duplicitous and hollow.

As I have written before, I’m no luddite. I’m not an absolutist or doomer taking a hard line against all A.I. use, but I do believe we have a responsibility to approach it as ethically as possible. Julia Alexander proposed a kind of gauge on columns that would show how much of the work could be credited to artificial intelligence. For my own work, I’m thinking about a kind of digital colophon, or something similar, that would outline how A.I. was used to create what you’ve consumed. It could, of course, expand to include other non-A.I. methods, but I think the specific challenge today is that people assume, expect, and want something human-made, so the appropriate and honest thing to do is reveal what role software played. That is not true when something leans heavily toward being A.I.-generated. I feel duped when I find out something was “made by A.I.”

Writing is hard. A.I. gives the illusion that it is easy because it generates many words quickly. In an age when technologists try to convince us that all our parts should be commoditized and human interiority should be given over freely to machines, we should be precious with our thoughts and the difficult process of turning them into something for others to consume.

Write. Wear your intellectual costume with pride. Don’t let some artificial intelligence engage in intellectual cosplay on your behalf.

Colophon

My spellcheck tool has incorporated A.I. features.
I use Claude to generate blog metadata (tags, SEO copy, etc.) based on my writing style guide and blog history.
I have a personal knowledge base that I query with Claude to recall research notes or previous thinking on a subject.
I write all my own copy.

*If you run this piece through Pangram, it will give it a 100% Human-Written score 💅🏾.

Photo of four raised hands in soft focus, forming the letters L, O, V, E in American Sign Language. Behind them, tall palm trees with dry brown fronds and a green canopy stand against a clear blue sky, with a faint moon above the center tree.

September 21, 2026 / 0 Comments

Melting Ice

What’s one thing that would instantly improve your city?
WordPress Daily Prompt

You and me in it, and ICE out of it.

I walked Duke through the idyllic streets of our neighborhood just south of the Boulevard this morning. Several other neighbors were doing the same. We greeted each other with smiles and nods and salutations. I grabbed a poop bag from one of the makeshift community offerings. My container was empty, and I had forgotten to fill it before taking our four-legged houseguest out to do his business. And business he had! That little anonymous bit of care we do for each other is just one of the ways we are neighborly here.

Just two miles away, though, ICE agents were likely lined up outside exits around municipal buildings in Van Nuys, waiting to scoop up unsuspecting folks as they were released from a weekend stay in jail or finishing up their appointments in our local courthouse. Perhaps they were even running them down on the road. There’s nothing neighborly about that.

Yesterday, for the second Sunday in a row, I was enjoying time with the Sparks faithful. Lisa Leslie was honored with a statue outside of ~~Crypto.com Arena~~ STAPLES Center. Inside the arena, Nneka Ogwumike reached another milestone in her penultimate home game. The Sparks won in impressive fashion, finding their footing too late in the season to make the playoffs, but playing with a joy and generosity toward their retiring legend that has been infectious. I’m mourning the end of our season here in Los Angeles. I’m mourning the end of our time sitting on the floor, too, as the league’s success prices us out of our preferred premium seating. But our friends aren’t going anywhere, and neither are we. This is our community too.

Recently in Louisville, ICE agents detained Aminata Seck, a student-athlete on Kentucky State’s women’s basketball team, at an airport and have held her for a month and a half (Internet Archive). The Senegalese-born student is recovering from an ACL injury that required surgery. That confluence of events is likely what caused her to miss an immigration check-in. Her coach has stepped up, and now a lawyer has stepped in, but the agency shows no compassion and seems intent on doing harm. Pushing back on these transgressions requires a herculean community effort.

As that lawyer, Sadiqa Reynolds, puts it: “It’s just so easy for us to get desensitized.” She continued: “There are so many people being picked up and arrested and taken and gone for days, weeks, months, years, and we can’t forget that their whole family’s completely disrupted.”

Louisville isn’t Los Angeles, but of course what’s happening there is happening here.

These are the kinds of things that ran through my head as I sat with two of my dearest friends last Friday afternoon for a late lunch in Burbank. Our conversation centered on our lamentations and frustrations with how difficult it has become to “hang out,” even when we were clearly hanging out. As were many others in the middle of the day. Our plans weren’t hard to make. They weren’t exactly impromptu, but they also weren’t elaborate or complicated. We all have lots going on, sure, and our digital lives, the ongoing aftermath of pandemic living, and the inertia we find ourselves in as we age all play a part. We aren’t too busy to hang, though. And for the most part, we aren’t living in fear that we’ll be kidnapped by federal agents because we missed an appointment or made a mistake on some paperwork.

We should be choosing the warm embrace, laughter, and comfort of our loved ones IRL. We should be choosing to do what we can to protect our neighbors who are afraid to leave their homes.

We should be in spaces so that ICE can’t be.

We should be together so ICE can’t break us apart.

Los Angeles is for everyone.

Except those bastards.

Illustration of two dark-skinned hands holding a smartphone, with icon-style app cards (calendar, messages, notes) fanned out above it against a blue background.

September 2, 2026 / 0 Comments

What Poor Timing

Daily writing prompt

What are your favorite 5 apps on your phone?

View all responses

NYT Games: part of my morning ritual, and I share my scores with a group of friends every day, a habit that started back during the pandemic. I like it as a way to get my mental juices flowing and a low-friction way to stay connected with several people I like.

Insight Timer: my meditation app of choice since Paramount finally took away my corporate benefit access to Headspace. I’ve completed over 100 days straight of meditating with the app. I thought I liked the consistent structure of the guided meditations Headspace produces, but Insight Timer offers more fluidity, discovery, and variety, and it clearly keeps me coming back. I’ve also enjoyed several of the multi-day courses.

Planta: I’m a plant dad, and most of my plants are truly thriving in no small part due to the scheduled upkeep, tips, and tricks this app provides.

Balatro+: the only game besides the NYT puzzles on my phone. I’ve played this on and off for years, and it remains very challenging. I just beat a new level yesterday and had by far my biggest score, and got the same thrill of accomplishment as the early days of the game, even though it didn’t unlock any new cards, decks, or other surprises.

Pocket Casts: I think I’ve written about this before, but I still haven’t found a more enjoyable podcast app. The only thing that could make it better is episode-specific recommendations based on what I actually listen to rather than just what I’m subscribed to.

But as you may have read, I’m trying to spend much less time on my phone.

View from behind a small tan-and-white terrier with tall, alert ears, looking out over a sunlit patch of green grass with tree shadows falling across the lawn.

September 2, 2026 / 1 Comment

See You Outside?

Last night, I sat in the gym for several minutes after my elliptical run, scrolling Threads in my phone’s web browser. I clicked like on fan art and memes about the latest episode of the HBO series Lanterns and news of first-round wins of some of my favorite players in this year’s US Open alongside a smattering of other Women’s Sports news and conjecture. What I was interacting with wasn’t the problem. These are all things I enjoy and am actively invested in. Very few empty calories in this session. The problem is that it shouldn’t have been happening at all.

A few weeks ago, I removed all the social media apps except for Instagram from my phone. No Threads. No Facebook. No Bluesky. No LinkedIn. Instagram is hidden and requires my face to unlock it. The impetus was realizing that idle scrolling sessions were getting longer. They were keeping me from falling asleep at night or getting out of bed in the morning. The meaningful stuff—women’s sports, TV & film discussions or industry news, Los Angeles news & culture, interesting reads, communicating with friends and acquaintances—were shifting to shocking or stupid videos, rage bait, or digital ephemera that was intended to keep my attention but not ignite my mind or heart.

And still, here I was in the terrible browser experience of my preferred social media timeline, and it keeps cajoling me to reinstall the app. I haven’t succumbed. Yet.

Jenny Odell, whose writing on this topic has long been a critical resource for my attempts at avoiding the brain-rotting effects of modern digital society, recently suggested on the How to Touch Grass podcast that one approach is to take an “outsider’s perspective” to our relationship with our phones and apps before attempting to change anything. Examine how what you’re doing in these spaces makes you feel, like a scientist observing a subject, without judgment, and then treat the findings as an experiment.

She describes digital habits as grooves formed geologically over time, which is why cold-turkey attempts fail. Social pressure and muscle memory pull us back. This is exactly how I ended up fumbling around threads.com in the Chrome mobile browser. Text mesages between me and Tiffany and our basketball friends are dotted with shares from Instagram and Bluesky and Threads and even though I know I can usually wait until I get back to a desktop experience to consume and enjoy the memes, jokes, and news, the thumb clicks because of course it does and now I’m looking at my notifications and here’s a good point about the latest episode of my favorite TV show and some stranger is wrong about the Los Angeles Sparks and there’s a random dashcam video of people doing stupid things on a freeway somewhere in America and what terrible thing did Pete Hegseth do now and, wait, where did the time go?!

I don’t want this on my phone, and I definitely don’t want to lose precious minutes of my life thoughtlessly while sweating post-workout in the middle of the gym or in the car for who knows how long after I’ve reached a destination.

Do I need a physical impediment to curb these habits, or can I figure out how to “stand apart” from the device on my own?

In Vauhini Vara’s Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, she examines how tech companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for understanding and connection by creating these experiences that we seem to find so useful and inescapable and then building so much wealth and power around them that it is nearly impossible to disentangle ourselves from them individually or as a society.

While reading through her own spelunking into the deep crevices of her Google search history, Amazon shopping orders, and ChatGPT chat logs, I smugly thought to myself, well, I don’t use these things like that.

Lies.

I used Google Search over 2600 times in the last 12 months. I watched over 2400 videos and shorts on YouTube in the last three months. I’ve made only nine purchases via Amazon this year, but as I dug into these troves of data, I realized that what I do online is ultimately beside the point. What I know and what many people are coming to the realization of lately is that when I think about the most meaningful experiences of my life and days, they are hardly ever connected to something I experienced on a screen. When my father passed, I, of course, looked to my digital world to make sense of things and found it lacking. I was using an AI-powered journaling app called Dot at the time—it’s now defunct—and while I was initially impressed by its seeming insightfulness, I quickly found that a software program cannot express true empathy and understanding. When the things in your life that you most wish would not happen occur anyway, healing comes in the presence of other people. I walked through my grief with my friends as we hid in my mom’s sewing room during the repast, sipping Japanese whiskey and laughing through the tears. I gave shape to my loss by listening to my mother, sister, and others as they expressed his departure’s impact through their own words and actions. No chatbot could give me that.

Vara similarly and to great effect exposes how she used ChatGPT as a partner in writing an essay about the grief of losing her sister at a young age. The piece brought her great acclaim, but ultimately, she realized the parts ChatGPT “created” were memories that weren’t hers. Even if clever, it wasn’t real.

I’m hungry for real things. When I write in my journal about the things I want to remember from the day, it is rarely a meme, reel, or back-and-forth argument with strangers online. Life is about the other humans in it. Really in it. Life is the people you share a domicile with or a street with. Life happens for me when I talk with a neighbor as I walk to the grocery store. What I remember is meeting people and learning about their hopes and dreams. I also remember being in a sports venue, hugging, cheering, and celebrating with my fellow sports fans.

I also remember when a real friend or family member texts or calls, and we get involved and invested in each other.

Odell fills the time she might have previously spent scrolling her phone or staring at screens with enriching experiences outside of the house. Standing appointments in nature and the physical world. I’ve been thinking about that too. Many of my day-to-day activities and hobbies currently default to an app or a website. Maybe, though, it’s time I sought out learning Spanish in person with others instead of with Mango. Maybe I need more standing appointments to volunteer rather than my ad hoc approach now. Maybe when I’m bored, I go to the park or the coffee shop or call a friend or family member and have an impromptu hang.

Like the old days.

Maybe I need a Brick.

See you outside?

P.S.

I originally intended to mimic Vara’s book and provide detailed examples of my digital activity (searches, purchases, YouTube videos), but that felt like too much navel-gazing and would’ve pushed me further down the digital rabbit hole, when I really want to be “out there” and not “in here.” My ego, though, is particularly proud of one aspect of my Google activity, so I’m going to share the words I’ve used the “define:” search function with over the last year.

quartile
disambiguation
artifice
fungible
forthwith
apprehend
epistemic
clarity
loyalty
totem
anathema
aegis
quatrain
heathen
heretic

I tend to look up words when I want to be sure I’m using them correctly or when I want to get into the etymology (I just googled to make sure that was correct) of a word or phrase.

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.

Yes, I know that Jordan denies saying it. ↩︎

July 11, 2026 / 9 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.