We were heading out the door to meet some friends at a playground and our six year old was rarinâ to go. While my wife was still gathering things, he wanted to go outside and wait in the driveway until we were ready to depart.
âItâs a head stop, papa,â he said. âLike a head start but weâre still stopped.â
What a genius term! Hereâs hoping he continues to pursue word nerdery like his old man.
The Naked Gun (2025). Cheers to a movie that knows exactly what it is and how to be that for just the right amount of time. Still giggling about random bits from this days later.
Weapons. Iâm typically a matinee guy but I stayed up past my bedtime to go see this in a theater, and Iâm glad I did. We were in whatever you call this thing together.
A Little Prayer. The kind of movie that inspires you to listen more intently to the birds singing outside your window in the morning, or linger longer at a park bench. âTwas a pleasure chatting with the writer/director Angus MacLachlan about this movie, Jane Levyâs knockout performance, and more.
Lost in the Stream: How Algorithms Redefined the Way Movies Are Made and Watched by Jeff Rauseo. Wrote a review of this over at Cinema Sugar.
The Assessment. Itâs been a minute since a movie gave me as many belly laughs of recognition as chills up my spine like this one did.
Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwellâs acquired a bit of a divisive reputation, but he remains a great writer with unique and insightful perspectives. Not to mention a great podcast guest.
Eephus. Gonna be a great autumnal rewatch.
Sinners. This has several A+, capital-C Cinema sequences that had me thinking âHere we go, hell yeah.â It also had a lot of stitching around them that perhaps a rewatch will feel more seamless but on the first go seemed to stick out a little. Overall though, an absolute pleasure to see an original film by an amazing auteur and inspired creative team.
The other day this line popped into my head:
When despair for the world grows in me
Itâs the opening line of the Wendell Berry poem âThe Peace of Wild Thingsâ. Iâm sure there were many reasons it surfaced from my subconscious (*gestures at everything*), but regardless I was grateful it did because brought to mind the rest of the poem, which was one of the first I memorized.
Then it dawned on me: Poetry is artificial intelligence.
What is poetry if not a large language model comprised of vast amounts of text created by humans about every conceivable topic? And what is a poem if not a response to a specific prompt that can be summoned for whatever question or trouble you have?
Iâm being cheeky, but the power of the arts and humanities is no joke. They’re reliable companions that can enrich our lives and help us understand and contextualize and prophesy if we just ask them to.
The sequence of events this morning:
In whatâs becoming an accidental yearly tradition, here’s a selection of creatures big and small I’ve captured.
A tree frog:
A milkweed tiger moth:
An oriental beetle:
A zebra spider:
An ovenbird just chillinâ on our front porch:
A great blue heron:
It always blows my mind when I see people of all ages biking around with no helmets on.
Teenagers, I get itâtheyâre too cool for school and have undeveloped prefrontal cortexes, so theyâre dumb by design. And motorcyclists without helmets? They clearly have a death wish. Good luck to them.
But grownups? Especially parents riding with their kids who are also without helmets? What are you doing?
Are you afraid of looking dorky? Because when I see someone without a helmet, I donât think âWhoa, that person looks totally rad.â I think, “I hope their health insurance is good enough to cover the hospital bills coming their way.”
And if youâre thinking, âWhy do I need a helmet when Iâm not on the road? Iâm just going on a leisurely ride through the park.â Good questionâdo you know how many times Iâve been biking on a bike path and had a squirrel or bird zoom past and force me to suddenly swerve away? Or witnessed another biker get T-boned by a car despite riding on the sidewalk? Not zero!
If you wear a seatbelt in a car, you should wear a helmet on a bike.
But don’t just listen to me. Listen to the “Every Day is Helmet Day” PSA that aired nonstop throughout the mid-’90s in the Madison area and remains burned into my brain:
Derek Thompson on why science is a special kind of faith:
We owe our electric age to scientists who were crazy, ignorant, or both. In his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard Feynman writes that âScience is the belief in the ignorance of experts.â I used to hate this quote for its entreaty to conspiratorial thinking. After all, if scientists automatically distrusted every expert opinion, how would truths coalesce? How would knowledge accumulate over time? Wouldnât we all just claim our own private reality in the face of expertise? But itâs the following lines from Feynman that make his point clear. âWhen someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it.â In other words, science is the opposite of blind faith. It is a reflexive skepticism toward received wisdoms or arguments from authority. It is the conviction that our own experiments, if carefully constructed, can reveal once-obscured truths. Science is a special kind of faithâa belief before evidence that the previous generationâs âtruthsâ are, at best, half-truths, with half-lives, which will one day pass away and make room for the next generation of even more useful half-truths.
More photography here.
Life finding a way through a tennis court:
Exploring the ice rink at our local sports complex:
Angles at my parentsâ house:
Summiting the little hill at my childhood park:
More angles and shadows at the library:
The six year old just kickin’ a brick wall while we waited for the splash pad to open:
Reaching, always reaching:
What do you do when you encounter the impossible? Something that doesnât compute with your understanding of reality and drastically challenges your worldview?
You can ignore or deny it, confident the existing story you tell yourself can render any mystery or inconsistency meaningless to your everyday life. You can resent it and lash out in anger, yearning for the time before this thing crashed into your conscience and caused irrevocable change. You can also lean into it, treating it not as a threat but as a thread that needs just the slightest tug to unravel.
On my journey away from the religion of my youth, I did all three pretty much at the same time. And not only that, but I saw those very same dynamics play out among the three core characters in Max Barbakowâs 2020 film Palm Springsâa terrific time-loop comedy (5 years old today) with a lot on its mind.
Read the rest of my latest essay at Cinema Sugar, which touches on the movieâs magical combination of humor and humanity, how the time loop is like a religion, and how all of us find meaning to make sense of the nonsensical.
Thatâs me at our local No Kings rally back in June. Itâs the energy I’m bringing to Fourth of July this year, what with the United States government having been taken over by orcs, goblins, and all manner of Mordor-worthy villainy. May we the people soon topple their treachery and an Aragorn-esque leader one day unite the forces of good against such reckless hate.
(Yes, Tolkien nerds, I’m aware “Forth Eorlingas” is a Rohirrim rallying cry and thus not an Aragorn thing, but I couldn’t turn down the title pun.)
Fellow millennial Chloé Hamilton on how millennials became uncool:
In recent years, millennials, the former hip young things that once seemed so cutting edge when cast side-by-side with the out-of-touch baby boomers and the rather nondescript generation X, have become, well, a bit cringe. âŠ
But, Iâll confess, being part of a generation that felt so progressive compared with its predecessors, bridging the gap between analogue and digital, felt significant, essential, and yes, bloody cool, actually. Itâs a shock, then, to wake up one morning and realise youâve been usurped.
The first thing I thought of while reading this? June George from Mean Girls:
I canât for the life of me track it down, but there was a tweet long ago that stuck with me that said basically: cool doesnât exist, itâs a made-up concept that makes people act dumb and itâs pointless to chase after.
Just be yourself, like what you like, and forget about trying to impress strangers on the internet or IRLâespecially people younger than you.
âCause you know whatâs cool? A billion dollars Not obsessing about whatâs cool, whatâs cringe, or whatever the latest Gen Z slang is. Embrace the freedom that aging and earnestness provide.
Gracy Olmstead is back with another excellent issue of her Granola newsletter, this time on mundanity, the mind, and AI:
While doing the mundane, we lose ourselves in process and place. The mundane roots us in the present, stubbornly refusing the demands of clock or calendar. It will take as much time as it requires. And so we pull at a thread of argument, uproot weed after weed, or sweep every nook and cranny until the room is clean. We sink into a new experience of time and place, in which everything diminishes but the now and here. Ironically (and sometimes, maddeningly) we may have to do it all again: Sit down to rewrite, hone, edit, and polish. Return to the nasty weeds that pop up day after day. Tackle the dust and grime of another week.
Yes, the mundane is not always pretty. What these experiences shape is not always a finished product that we can hold up and boast about. Sometimes, yes. But not always. What is always true is that these processes are shaping and honing us. They are showing us who we are, how to be, and what it means to think and live. The work of the mundane tethers us to place, to our bodies, to the people we love and live with, andâperhaps in a way I never realized before AIâto our minds themselves.
If the mundane elements of our lives show us who we are, how to be, and what it means to think and live, then what will become of us when we outsource that being, thinking, and living to AI or other ideologies? We sacrifice those essential elements of existence and become their opposite: nothing.
And as it becomes ever more evident that relying on AI degrades your critical thinking skills and cognitive abilities, putting your mind to work matters even more. But why? Olmstead nails it here:
Because itâs the process of slogging through an argumentâfeeling out its contours and edges, remolding and reshaping them like a potterâthat teaches us how to think. Strong arguments do not spring fully formed from the mind. They simmer and stew. They emerge half-formed, and have to be reshaped. Essays materialize when you start to write, and realize you did not yet know what you thought. In the process of verbalizing thoughts, there is room to grow, stretch, and challenge the mind. There is even room to change your mind. AI short circuits this opportunityâin giving us what we ask for, it in fact steals opportunities for growth. It cheats the process of becoming that the mundane offers.
This really spoke to me in relation to writing specifically, whether for this blog or Cinema Sugar. Some writers bemoan the writing process itself, slow and tedious and frustrating as it can be. âI love having written somethingâ goes the trite phrase. And itâs indeed satisfying to finally arrive at the end product. But I also love being in the weeds of the thing. Thinking and rethinking, writing and rewriting, arranging and rearranging, rinse and repeatâthat time spent with my hands in the metaphorical dirt, in the mundane, is where the real magic happens.
Mandy Brown with a barnburning breakdown of what “AI” is and isn’t:
“Artificial intelligenceâ is not a technology. A chefâs knife is a technology, as are the practices around its use in the kitchen. A tank is a technology, as are the ways a tank is deployed in war. Both can kill, but one cannot meaningfully talk about a technology that encompasses both Sherman and santoku; the affordances, practices, and intentions are far too different to be brought into useful conversation. Likewise, in the hysterical gold rush to hoover up whatever money they can, the technocrats have labeled any and all manner of engineering practices as âAIâ and riddled their products with sparkle emojis, to the extent that what we mean when we say AI is, from a technology standpoint, no longer meaningful. AI seems to be, at every moment, everything from an algorithm of the kind that has been in use for half a century, to bullshit generators that clutter up our information systems, to the promised arrival of a new consciousnessâa prophesied god who will either savage us or save us or, somehow, both at the same time. There exists no coherent notion of what AI is or could be, and no meaningful effort to coalesce around a set of practices, because to do so would be to reduce the opportunity for grift.
So what is it? An ideology:
… A system of ideas that has swept up not only the tech industry but huge parts of government on both sides of the aisle, a supermajority of everyone with assets in the millions and up, and a seemingly growing sector of the journalism class. The ideology itself is nothing newâit is the age-old system of supremacy, granting care and comfort to some while relegating others to servitude and penuryâbut the wrappings have been updated for the late capital, late digital age, a gaudy new cloak for todayâs would-be emperors. Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the foolâitâs to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. Itâs to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.
Oliver Milman writing for Noema on the cult of the American lawn:
âThe American lawn is a thing, and it is American, deeply American,â Paul Robbins, an expert in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of the book âLawn People,â told me. âThere becomes a kind of local social pressure to make sure youâre not letting down the neighborhood â youâre keeping up the property values. Those then become morally normative.â
This devotion has turned the U.S. into the undisputed global superpower of lawns. Around 40 million acres of lawn, an area almost as large as the state of Georgia, carpets the nation. Lawn grass occupies more area than corn. Each year, enough water to fill Chesapeake Bay is hurled collectively onto American lawns, along with more than 80 million pounds of pesticides, in order to maintain the sanitized, carpet-like turf. In aggregate, this vast expanse of manicured grass rivals the area of Americaâs celebrated national parks.
The typical suburban lawn is zealously mown, raked and bombarded with chemicals. Flowering plants that would typically appear in an untended meadow are sparse. For insects, reptiles, birds and many other creatures, these places are hostile no-go zones. Closely cut grass is neither habitat nor food for most insects.
Most of the houses around us are zealously mowed and bombarded with chemicals by landscaping companies, but not ours. Weâve surrendered to the dandelions, Creeping Charlie, wild violets, burdock, and other weeds because we simply donât have the time or energy to fight them, nor the desire to use pesticides. Luckily our neighborhood isnât fancy enough for that to matter much (though shoutout to the empty-nester two doors down who dotes on his pristine, carpet-like turf).
Would I love my lawn and garden areas to be as pristine as his? Absolutely. But the cosmetic appeal is rather fleeting compared to the costs in time, money, wasteful water use, and/or chemical exposure. Iâd also love to transform at least part of our sizable lawn into a biodiverse garden, but that too takes an immense amount of work and dedication that we just donât have in this time of life. So a weedy, grassy yard it is!
Continuing my unofficial series on problematic parenting clichĂ©s, thereâs one Iâve heard a few times recently and must address:
âLittle kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems.â
Setting the condescension aside, the idea is that all the challenging aspects of parenting babies and young childrenâe.g. diaper changes, loss of sleep, tantrums, potting training, keeping them from accidentally killing themselvesâarenât actually challenging compared to what parents of older kids and teenagers have to deal with like adolescent attitude, busy schedules, college applications, and tricky conversations about sex, drugs, technology, and so on.
Respectfully, this is a mound of malarkey.
Obviously Iâm slightly biased as the parent of young children. But as a former teenager myself, Iâm clear-eyed about the challenges of that phase even if I havenât yet been on the other side of it. So when I hear an older parent trot out that trite un-truism (which happened to me recently on two separate work calls), Iâm inclined to diagnose them with early-onset gramnesia.
Which is understandable. If youâve been out of this phase for a while, itâs easy to forget what the day-to-day is like. You can look back fondly on the cute pictures and innocent personalities without also feeling the toll of the daily grind that facilitates them. But for us currently in that stage, itâs a big problem if a nap gets skipped or a tantrum derails an outing or a car ride turns traumatic with a screaming toddler. Because all of those things directly affect our everyday life and psychological state.
Just go to any playground and look at the parents. While the ones with older kids (say, ages five and up) are reading or on their phones or otherwise checked out from the action, I am trailing my freshly minted two year old to make sure he doesnât pick up garbage, try to put said garbage in his mouth, get bowled over by the bigger kids running around, or fall off a high spot on the playground. And this isnât even overprotective helicopter parentingâitâs just life with a toddler. A joy and adventure, yes, but also constant.
Which is why I teared up at this reel from Oh Crap! author Jamie Glowacki, which validates what I already know to be true: that parenting almost always gets easier the more they age.
If you think little kid problems are small or insignificant compared to yours, then I hate to break it to you but in the grand scheme of things, no one besides you is concerned with your teenâs college search or team practice schedule or social media use.
Being a parent is hard. Period. Different stages present different joys and challengesânot big or small, just different. And if you ever want to gripe about them, no matter the age of your kids, I will validate your feelings and in solidarity send a â or, more likely, a Katniss Everdreen salute. Because we parents always need the odds in our favor.
Ross Barkin ponders what kids of today lack compared to their 20th century predecessors:
When I consider the geniuses of that eraâor any, really, before the last ten years or soâI think of time. Talented children, until the incursion of the smartphone and immersive videos games, had much of it.
One big reason for this:
Children could only be enchanted by gizmos and gadgets for so long. The television was stationary, rooted in the living room, and it might have only featured a few channels, depending on the decade. Movies, similarly, were confined to physical theaters. Even in my own childhood, in the 1990s and 2000s, video gaming was largely a social activity. I brought my friend over to play Nintendo Wii or we went to his house to battle in a Dragon Ball Z video game on the PlayStation 2. Unique among my peers, I didnât own a video game console until I was a teenager, and this meant, to my benefit, I had a childhood free of such seductions.
I too did not own a video game console growing up, except a Game Boy (on which I did spend many maddening hours trying and failing to conquer the Toy Story game). That lack was something I lamented at the time but am grateful for today, because it meant video games werenât constantly commandeering my time and attention. Instead they were a special occasion, something to be enjoyed with others. I have fond memories having a Halo party with my youth group friends and playing Ready 2 Rumble Boxing with my uncles on a PlayStation rented from Blockbuster.
Barkin spotlights Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys as an example of the kind of genius who had an abundance of time to be able to develop his talent. Then he asks what the Brian Wilsons of 2025 do with their weekends:
Brian was a preternaturally gifted child who deconstructed vocal harmonies on the radio and spent hours over his piano. A child today with such genius might tinker around with music but devote far more of his days to Minecraft, Fortnite, and MrBeast. The child might drown in a sludge bath of AI. The same could be true of the budding novelists, poets, and painters. All of these technologies are arrayed against dreams and imagination. The contentâthe YouTube, the video games, the TikTok videosâdoes all the imagining for you. The brain devolves into a vessel for passive consumption.
And that consumption happens (literally) right before their eyes:
For all the obsessing modern parents do over the fates of their children, theyâre happy to toss out an iPad or a smartphone or a Nintendo Switch and let their boys and girls melt, slowly, in the blue light. A person close to me once suggested that wardens should start giving prisoners iPhones because thereâs nothing that will more rapidly pacify an unruly and restless population. If iPhones were teleported back in time to the twentieth century, would we have a twentieth century?
Pacify, yes, but only temporarily since once you turn it off itâs like trying to quash a prison riot.
A while back we severely curtailed our now six year oldâs screen time after finally getting sick of how it was negatively affecting his mood and behavior (and thus everyone else in the house)ânot to mention time spent on creative endeavors. What used to happen almost every day after lunch plus some evenings is now maybe an hour on the weekend, and sometime none at all. No iPad, no more YouTube or garbage shows, the N64 every once in a while. Putting the TV away was a big help in removing the temptation, but just as important was holding firm on the boundary. It didnât take long for him to accept the new normal and find other things to do like coloring/crafts, reading, and listening to Yotos.
Barkinâs post is about kids, but itâs just as applicable to us grownups too. I would benefit immensely from the same screen time limits imposed on my childrenânot because Iâm a nascent genius but because I donât want to melt in the blue light or drown in a sludge bath of AI either. I too want time enough at last.
Tia Keobounphengâs really cool and colorful weavings inspired by geometry and Finnish/Sami heritage.
I want this 1961 National Library Week poster.
Want to de-junkify your Google search results? Just add &udm14 to the URL.
A handy tool to compare the true size of countries.
We underwent several significant home improvement projects recently. I say “underwent” because we didnât do the actual work but instead paid contractors who knew what they were doing.
One of those contractors was a local handyman who brought in his wife to help with the multi-day project. Their kids are grown but they enjoyed interacting with our youngâuns.
In a moment when the boys were being particularly rambunctious, I asked if she missed this phase of having young kids.
âIâm glad we lived it,â she said.
In the moment I took that to be a polite way of saying âIâm grateful we went through it but also that itâs over.â Which was probably accurate to an extent. But I see it now as a richer sentiment: to be glad you got to experience something even though it was challenging, and that you really lived itânot just suffered through.
It was yes-and parenting in the wild, and very much appreciated.