One last dispatch from our dystopian present: MKBHD has a new video with the clickbait title, “The Truth about Drone Deliveries!” I found it worth watching, if only because it’s the first time I’ve seen a vision of aerial drones bringing you stuff where the service seems potentially useful rather than exclusively dangerous and scary. I still find these deeply upsetting, but I can see how under Silicon Valley logic they might also be inevitable.

The big miss in the video is that the only possible downside Marques sees fit to mention is light pollution. Ummm… 1984 would like to have a word. Every police force in the world is going to want their own little fleet of these bad boys! Talk about a parole officer’s dream. We’re like five years away from a droid reading you your Miranda rights. (Already when we drive to our pediatrician’s we always pass a programmable road sign that flashes between two messages: “WELCOME TO BEVERLY HILLS” and “POLICE DRONE IN USE”.)

The latest scandal from the “losers with aircraft carriers” currently running our federal government is that they made a big group chat to share war plans, on a consumer chat app, and they accidentally added a journalist. Classic buffoonery from a group of people for whom hypocrisy is a fun way to show dominance. But for me, the most ghoulish detail from the text messages themselves is a casual reference to the open secret that the U.S. military now routinely carries out single-target assassinations even when civilian bystanders are guaranteed to die en masse. Here’s the passage that got me:

[National Security Advisor] MICHAEL WALTZ

The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.

[Vice President] JD VANCE Excellent

[CIA Director] JOHN RATCLIFFE

A good start

MICHAEL WALTZ

👊🇺🇸🔥

Nice emojis, bro. I hope no one you love ever makes the mistake of having a military leader’s girlfriend for a neighbor.

I can’t say I recommend the breathless AI girlfriend thinkpiece in this week’s New Yorker. It reminds me of the Sam Altman move of waving your hands about how scary AI is and how it’s going to change everything, all just so we give him our attention and investment dollars. Here the message seems to be: get afraid that your kid will soon be dating their telephone’s operating system. (?!) This makes a good deal more sense when you google the article’s author (Jaron Lanier) and realize that for the last 19 years he’s been working at OpenAI’s main partner, Microsoft. It’s telling that he’s chosen to mix his labor with the most charmless of the evil five; of course he indulges the thrill of worrying about AI. (Kate Folk dealt with this whole train of thought more succinctly and with infinitely more humor and insight in her short stories “Out There” and “Sur”.) All that said, I did crack a smile with this sentence:

A.I. conferences and gatherings often include a person or two who loudly announces that she is in a relationship with an A.I. or desires to be in one.

My brother in Christ, no matter what the New Yorker’s style guide says, the indefinite pronoun you are looking for is they.

Check out the instructions for “How to Build an Electrically Heated Table” over at Low-Tech Magazine. Doesn’t a heated table in a chilly room just sound cozy as can be?

(Also: what a cool website! I love how all the images are dithered—ostensibly to keep filesizes minimal (for their solar powered website) but also (I just know) because they look cool and vibey, the digital equivalent of a risograph print)

I had two reminders in my Notes app for topics to write about: “Our mail carrier giving Orlando and us oranges” and “Lisa’s newsletter.” But then I read the latest installment of Not Know How and saw that Lisa had herself written a beautiful meditation on walking around our neighborhood, worrying about the state of the world, and, would you know it, receiving unexpected gift oranges:

On the last block before our building, we met our mail carrier, sitting in her parked truck. She handed my son three oranges, one for each of us, the second time she has given us this gift.

You should read the full essay. Plus, after the essay there’s an interview with noted graveyard writer Jessica Ferri. And a plug for You Know What’s Good, which she described as a “delicious, ASMR-adjacent vignette series.” (!!!) I may be biased, but I find Not Knowing How to always be full of beautiful insights and literary genius.

Our kid’s backpack was breaking, the stitching that connects the top handle to the rest of the backpack pulling out. So my partner suggested we take it to the dry cleaners in the strip mall by our kid’s preschool. The kid and I dropped it off, and three day’s later, we came back, the kid handed the proprietor our ticket, and we received the bag. They had fixed the handle and cleaned it. It nearly glowed. Want to wear my new backpack, he said.

What if we changed it so “new” just meant “lovingly, recently cared for”?

I loved this beautiful portrait of a woman, her son, and the apartment in San Francisco’s Noe Valley that they have lived in for the last 31 years.

Now renting for $2,211 including water and trash, it’s an absolute steal in a neighborhood where a three-bedroom can rent for more than $6,000 and houses can sell for $2 million.

Quietly, with glowing photographs and precise text, it builds a case for rent control, for a regular nurse being able to live in the city she works in, and for the idea that for us non-millionaire humans to thrive, we don’t need so incredibly much, but we do need more than our society currently affords most of us.

Everyone who loves poetry should read “The Los Angeles Times Insults Iconic Poet Sharon Olds.” In this latest installment of Not Knowing How, Lisa Locascio Nighthawk calls out the Times for its slimy, misogynist invocation of Olds’s writing in a piece about her son’s criminal defense. “Gone are the accolades, the years of work with students, the ordinary domestic joys and sorrows described exactly,” she writes. The piece not only raises the alarm about this specific piece but also warns of a cultural shift towards anti-intellectualism and anti-feminism. De plus, it contains rich memories of visiting Olds at her apartment and two favorites of her poetic oeuvre.

I was trying to explain to my kid a slightly complex concept—that we weren’t going to see our friends today, we weren’t going to see them tomorrow, it would be the day after tomorrow when we saw them—when I realized the clunkiness of this formula. The best we can do is the day after tomorrow? It’s fine for a movie title; as shorthand for the concept of two days hence, well, it’s neither short nor handy. Russian has it so much better: poslezaftra. Literally “after tomorrow.” Three syllables, and they roll off the tongue. So, I thought, what would that be in English? Aftermorrow.

My feelings of unique genius didn’t survive an encounter with an internet search engine. (When do they ever?) It turns out not only have others already proposed this coinage, our language already has a term that’s similar but even better: overmorrow.

Let’s bring it back!

Speaking of newspapers, I finally canceled my Washington Post subscription. After many last straws, it was this bit from Jeff Bezos:

There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.

Get bent, loser! God I hate billionaires. Get rid of em! Let em just be $999 millionaires! There are worse fates!

In the latest n+1, the opening editorial (about Frederic Jameson and ways of seeing the present and the future) coins a new term:

…in one of the stealth editorials it calls ‘News Analysis,’ the Times proclaimed the end of the ‘Post-World War II Era of US Leadership’…

Stealth editorial! I’m immediately stealing that.

I also loved this towards the end of the piece:

No—real futurelessness is the terrain of the Democrats, a party stuck in a cycle of impotence that, come to think of it, resembles nothing so much as the contemporary English department: visionless, gerontocratic, hobbled by a structural incapacity to meet or even recognize its many sectoral crises.

n+1 is always a cover-to-cover read for me.

Restaurant recommendation: Chengdu Taste in Alhambra. I haven’t had Chinese food this good since I was last in China, a decade ago. If you’re in greater LA, strong recommend checking it out. I was particularly delighted to once again have what their menu called “Garlic Arden Lettuce 蒜蓉A菜.” So green and bitter and garlicky-sweet and crunchy, the winning lottery ticket of leafy vegetables.

For a vegetarian like me, it doesn’t get better than good Chinese food. This meal reminded me of a James Beard quote: “In all the world there are only two really great cuisines: the Chinese and the French. China’s was created first, untold centuries ago, and is judged to be the greater-when executed by superb chefs. It is the most complicated cuisine; it uses ingredients no other employs; and it is distinctive in that, for the most part, it is cuisine à la minute.” (I don’t know the source; it’s the epigraph of Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo.)

My partner and I first got into the comedian Connor O’Malley through his serialized vertical videos about being a disturbed, chino-wearing superfan of would-be presidential candidate Howard Schultz (“because only the coffee guy can defeat the covfefe man”). He has since then put out dozens of conceptually bizarre YouTube videos (“Smoking 500 Cigarettes for 5G,” “Top 10 Wisconsin Dells Haunted Houses For Free Pulled Pork”) in which he really claims the lane of deranged physical comedy about millennial masculinity. So we were delighted to find that his new video, “Rap World,” might be his best yet. Upsetting, hilarious—and so sharp. Part Safdie brothers, part found footage / mockumentary / haunted fiction, and featuring some of the worst rapping you can imagine. Rating: must-watch.

(More than a few friends we’ve showed his stuff to just find it upsetting and not funny, so if you hate it, you were warned!)

Speaking of these vehicles that are so dangerous to pedestrians that they’re illegal on the entire continent of Europe, a recent 404 Media report on the vandalism and mockery being reported on a Cybertruck owners’ forum included one owner’s recording of his Cybertruck being flipped off by a man driving a budget sedan. Under that video, another Cybertruck owner commented this gem:

I am baffled at how any male can have that much audacity while driving a Ford Fiesta. Dude probably sits when he needs to take a piss

It’s almost like some people get their confidence from other places, right? (I might be deluded, though, as a proud Ford Fiesta driver myself…)

Now, for something completely different! The NBA season is winding towards the playoffs, and my Warriors are on a six-game win streak. They traded for Jimmy Butler a month ago, and the vibes, as they say, are good.

Despite this, most people still think that last year’s champs, the Boston Celtics, are a better team. Maybe they are. But they play a style of basketball on offense that I find deeply unpleasant—almost the inverse of the joyous improvisation of the Warriors. So I was so delighted by this sick burn from the writer John Saward:

The Celtics, a kind of perverse, analytics-defiled basketball project joylessly hunting 3-pointers with the cold determination of a hedge fund manager…

The rest of the piece, about the surging Detroit Pistons and the idea of “momentum” in sports, is also excellent. (I’ve been really enjoying my subscription to Flaming Hydra, the daily newsletter it was published in.)

I’ve avoided politics for many posts, but these days being what they are, I can’t make it any further. This week I’m finding the extrajudicial abduction of American permanent resident and father-to-be Mahmoud Kahlil to be a very bad sign of where things are going.

It’s also the week when California’s governor, the Democrat Gavin Newsom, decided to soft-launch his 2024 presidential campaign by starting a new podcast and using the first episode to identify the true threat to American freedom: underage trans girls competing in sports. I just want to register how sick this makes me feel. As you’re reading this, roughly 50% of trans and nonbinary teens have “seriously considered attempting suicide” in the last year. Meanwhile here’s one of the most powerful people in the country, a cis-man, and he’s going to use his platform to amplify some invented panic about a high school triple jumper. What a creep. What an evil cretin.

Beyond indignation, I do have one insight to offer here: remember November when there was a minor obsession among liberals with finding “the liberal Joe Rogan”? The timing is too obvious for this not to be true—Newsom thinks that that’s him. He’ll be the one to do it. By selling out trans people. What a loser.

If you’re in LA, you really should go see “The Spiral Universe,” a solo show of artworks by Madam X that just opened at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz. (It closes April 19.) The show has many intricate, mandala-like paintings, textiles, and sculptures by this visionary outsider artist, who spent decades in near-total obscurity until last year’s “Circumnavigating the Sphere of Time” at Space Ten Gallery (a show organized by friend-of-Lightplay Axel Wilhite). That initial show resulted in a beautiful catalog, which I’m delighted to have a copy of. This latest show, which runs through April 19, lacks a catalog, but it has its own magic, partly stemming from the setting. Madam X’s alternately metaphysical and satirical works are presented in the occult complex of the Philosophical Research Society, a strange space built by the prolific magical-tract-writer Manly P. Hall. I plan to eventually write more about Madam X’s work in this space (here’s a blog post I wrote after her previous show went up). For now I heartily recommend seizing the chance to see her work in person.

My dear friend Abraham Cohen has been pursuing music as his primary art form for at least as long as I’ve been pursuing writing. They have cultivated a fantastic talent. Yet till now, he’s never recorded an album or EP or anything. That’s hopefully going to change, this May. Abraham’s band Queer Country has studio time lined up with Oz Fritz (producer of Tom Waits’s Alice and Mule Variations, among many, many others), and they’re intending to professionally cut at least four tracks.

Right now Queer Country is running an online fundraiser for the many costs that will go into this endeavor. If you can spare some money, I think it’s a worthy project to support. Donate here.

(Also check out this cool bios page on the Queer Country website (which I host!))

Did you know that mussels reproduce via broadcast spawning? That on one lucky day, all the mussels just send their eggs and sperm out into the world? I have been thinking about this video on at least a weekly basis ever since I saw it:

In high school some of my friends became obsessed with banana slug sex (look up at your own peril). I never really got into it, though. But then I found out about mussel spawning, and now I’m obsessed. It makes me want to take up a daily tidepooling practice, just so I could be there on the wild day when this happens.