Which led to playing “Mah Na Mah Na” and discovering it absolutely crushes with 2 year olds especially—just the perfect amount of silliness and melodic bounce
Which then led to playing the chicken version of “Forget You” from the same soundtrack followed by the original (non-chicken, censored) Cee Lo Green version and rediscovering it absolutely crushes with 37 year old dads—just the perfect soul-pop bop
It always blows my mind when I see people of all ages biking around with no helmets on.
Teenagers, I get it—they’re too cool for school and have undeveloped prefrontal cortexes, so they’re 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 don’t think “Whoa, that person looks totally rad.” I think, “I hope their health insurance is good enough to cover the hospital bills coming their way.”
And if you’re thinking, “Why do I need a helmet when I’m not on the road? I’m just going on a leisurely ride through the park.” Good question—do you know how many times I’ve 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:
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 “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” 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? Wouldn’t we all just claim our own private reality in the face of expertise? But it’s the following lines from Feynman that make his point clear. “When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it.” 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 faith—a belief before evidence that the previous generation’s “truths” 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.
What do you do when you encounter the impossible? Something that doesn’t 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 Barbakow’s 2020 film Palm Springs—a terrific time-loop comedy (and one of the best movies of the 21st century) with a lot on its mind.
A magical combo of humor and humanity
There are many reasons I fell for Palm Springs when I first saw it. The rock-solid execution of a smart, cohesive script. The magical combination of goofy comedy, heartfelt drama, mind-shifting philosophy, and a soupçon of sci-fi. The kickass cast with great chemistry keeping a high concept grounded in humanity, all within a 90-minute runtime.
Its obvious inspiration is Groundhog Day, which has Bill Murray’s Phil repeating the same day over and over again until he learns to be a better person, falls in love, and then manages to escape the loop for reasons just as mysterious as how he got stuck in the first place. But Palm Springs takes this concept deeper in two ways.
First, there’s more people in the loop. Nyles (Andy Samberg) has been stuck for a long time when we first meet him as the underdressed, overserved, and clearly jaded boyfriend of a bridesmaid at a Palm Springs resort wedding. Then there’s Sarah (Cristin Milioti), the equally jaded maid of honor who hits it off with Nyles but accidentally follows him through the loop’s mysterious portal. And there’s also Roy (J.K. Simmons), another wedding guest Nyles had clumsily invited into the loop while under the influence. How these three deal with each other and their circumstances is the core of the movie, and a pleasure to watch unfold.
The other way Palm Springs sets itself apart is how it treats the time loop. More than just a setting for the characters’ self-discovery or catalyst for conflict, it becomes a force unto itself—something that both teaches and torments the film’s triumvirate of trapped time travelers, and ultimately gives them meaning even as they attempt to escape it.
In other words: the time loop is a religion.
On suffering existence
In the book Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious, the writer David Dark explores one etymology of the word religion (fitting there isn’t One True Meaning of the word), which comes from the Latin religare, meaning “to bind fast” or tie together. Dark uses this understanding to interpret religion as a “controlling story”—something we bind or devote ourselves to that provides boundaries to our beliefs and gives our earthly existence greater meaning.
That’s what Christianity was for me. Growing up in a conservative Christian household, I went to church regularly and lived out the staples of a Christian upbringing: weekly youth group, summer camp, Bible studies, mission trips, See You At The Pole (Google it), True Love Waits (don’t Google it).
I didn’t do all of this reluctantly—I was a true believer. From childhood all the way through adolescence, college, and into my mid-twenties, the Jesus story provided the foundation of how I understood the world and myself. It was the lens through which I saw and interpreted the things I loved doing like reading, writing, listening to and making music, and watching movies. Even as I wrestled with the inconsistencies of the Bible and grew frustrated with the hypocrisies of religious figures and church doctrine, I maintained an earnest devotion to the notion that faith superseded all other earthly forces and permeated everything we understand about existence.
For Nyles, Sarah, and Roy, the time loop has in effect become their religion, their controlling story. Not only because they’re literally controlled by its parameters and seemingly powerless to escape, but also in a larger sense in that they all come to discover a kind of teleological understanding of the loop and the meaning they’ve derived from it. Nyles shares his with Sarah in one exchange:
NYLES: I don’t know what it is. It could be life, it could be death. It might be a dream. I might be imagining you, you might be imagining me. It could be purgatory or a glitch in the simulation that we’re both in. I don’t know. So I decided a while ago to sort of give up and stop trying to make sense of things altogether, because the only way to really live in this is to embrace the fact that nothing matters.
SARAH: Well, then what’s the point of living?
NYLES: Well, we kind of have no choice but to live, so I think your best bet is just to learn how to suffer existence.
Each of them suffer their existence in different ways, all of which felt exquisitely familiar to me because I lived out all of them during my long journey out of my original controlling story.
Nyles has surrendered to his circumstances, comfortable in the literal and metaphorical pool he’s been swimming in for so long that he doesn’t even remember his life from before, or fathom the possibility of leaving his present one. Likewise, I’d grown so familiar with the beats and boundaries of my controlling story that the thought of forming a new one felt inconceivable, even dangerous.
In contrast to Nyles, Roy feels tormented by his circumstances and takes out his anger on Nyles as retribution for trapping him in an ever-presence he can’t escape. And while I wasn’t perpetrating vengeful acts of violence like Roy, I often felt disturbed by the destabilizing effects such deep-seated change had on my worldview and resented losing the comforts a controlling story provides. “I’m not going to see my kids grow up,” Roy later laments to Nyles at his home in Irvine, revealing that his anger was just grief in disguise—his way of dealing with the pain of being severed from his own life and concept of reality. Yet now, awash in contentment with his fate, Roy implores Nyles to seek out a similar peace: “You gotta find your Irvine.”
Sarah, meanwhile, is wracked with guilt over a haunting mistake she now has to relive over and over again, and despite coming to enjoy her time in the loop with Nyles she eventually hits a breaking point and resolves to figure out the mechanics of the time loop (which she later determines is “a box of energy”) in order to escape it. Similarly, as I grew more claustrophobic within my own metaphysical box, I ultimately found a way beyond it through curiosity. I entered a period of voracious reading, when I was drawn to books about psychology, science, human history, and other topics that spoke to the big-picture questions I was pondering. Slowly but surely, the discoveries I was making gave me new lenses to look through and see what had been there the whole time, like the Benjamin Franklin spectacles in National Treasure.
I wasn’t trying to destroy my existing worldview, and there wasn’t one particular thing that pushed me over the edge. Just a long series of small nudges that only when I looked back after a long while had accumulated into a big distance from where I’d started: a book here, a revelatory podcast there, the small epiphanies and paradoxes compounded slowly over years until they proved too overwhelming to ignore.
A nonsensical new story
There’s an idea in cognitive science that human consciousness is merely a story the brain tells itself. Humans are meaning-making machines—we crave relief from the chaos of existence and will find or create meaning however we can as a way to make sense of the nonsensical.
Palm Springs features three people who lived a nonsensical new story together, day after day, trying and failing and giving up and trying again to find meaning in the messiness. It’s the kind of movie that inspires me as a work of art and as a cri de coeur for a better, more wholehearted life.
(It’s a cruel irony indeed that a movie about purgatory remains caught in a different kind of purgatory, where “streaming exclusives” can’t break free from their digital dungeons into the freedom of physical media. #ReleaseThePalmSpringsBluray!)
We all have a controlling story. It could be ancient (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) or au courant (hello Peloton partisans, Bitcoin bros, and Disney Adults). Mine has changed, and yours probably has too. It has to, or else I don’t think you’re really living.
Ideally you have someone who can change with you too. I was fortunate to have a life partner throughout this journey who had shared a similar controlling story yet was just as ready as I was to, like Nyles and Sarah, take a scary step into a new one together.
“At least you have each other,” Roy tells Nyles about Sarah’s entry into the loop. “Nothing worse than going through this shit alone.”
Dark makes a similar conclusion in his book: “People come to consciousness in relationship. This is the phenomenon—oh, how it enlivens a heart!—of shared meaning.”
That’s me at our local No Kings rally back in June. It’s 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.)
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. …
But, I’ll 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. It’s a shock, then, to wake up one morning and realise you’ve been usurped.
The first thing I thought of while reading this? June George from Mean Girls:
I can’t for the life of me track it down, but there was a tweet long ago that stuck with me that said basically: cool doesn’t exist, it’s a made-up concept that makes people act dumb and it’s pointless to chase after.
Just be yourself, like what you like, and forget about trying to impress strangers on the internet or IRL—especially people younger than you.
‘Cause you know what’s cool? A billion dollars Not obsessing about what’s cool, what’s 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, and—perhaps in a way I never realized before AI—to 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.
Because it’s the process of slogging through an argument—feeling out its contours and edges, remolding and reshaping them like a potter—that 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 opportunity—in 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. “I love having written something” goes the trite phrase. And it’s 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 repeat—that time spent with my hands in the metaphorical dirt, in the mundane, is where the real magic happens.
“Artificial intelligence” is not a technology. A chef’s 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 “AI” 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 consciousness—a 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 new—it is the age-old system of supremacy, granting care and comfort to some while relegating others to servitude and penury—but the wrappings have been updated for the late capital, late digital age, a gaudy new cloak for today’s would-be emperors. Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s 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. It’s 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.
“The American lawn is a thing, and it is American, deeply American,” Paul Robbins, an expert in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of the book “Lawn People,” told me. “There becomes a kind of local social pressure to make sure you’re not letting down the neighborhood — you’re keeping up the property values. Those then become morally normative.”
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 America’s 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. We’ve surrendered to the dandelions, Creeping Charlie, wild violets, burdock, and other weeds because we simply don’t have the time or energy to fight them, nor the desire to use pesticides. Luckily our neighborhood isn’t 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. I’d 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 don’t have in this time of life. So a weedy, grassy yard it is!
Continuing my unofficial series on problematic parenting clichés, there’s one I’ve heard a few times recently and must address:
“Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems.”
Setting the condescension aside, the idea is that all the challenging aspects of parenting babies and young children—e.g. diaper changes, loss of sleep, tantrums, potting training, keeping them from accidentally killing themselves—aren’t 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.
Untruer words were never spoken
Obviously I’m slightly biased as the parent of young children. But as a former teenager myself, I’m clear-eyed about the challenges of that phase even if I haven’t 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), I’m inclined to diagnose them with early-onset gramnesia.
Which is understandable. If you’ve been out of this phase for a while, it’s 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, it’s 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 doesn’t 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 isn’t even overprotective helicopter parenting—it’s 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 teen’s college search or team practice schedule or social media use.
Being a parent is hard. Period. Different stages present different joys and challenges—not 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 ✊ 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 era—or any, really, before the last ten years or so—I 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 didn’t 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 weren’t 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 friendsandplaying 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 content—the YouTube, the video games, the TikTok videos—does 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, they’re 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 there’s 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 it’s like trying to quash a prison riot.
A while back we severely curtailed our now six year old’s screen time after finally getting sick of how it was negatively affecting his mood and behavior (and thus everyone else in the house)—not 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 didn’t take long for him to accept the new normal and find other things to do like coloring/crafts, reading, and listening to Yotos.
Barkin’s post is about kids, but it’s just as applicable to us grownups too. I would benefit immensely from the same screen time limits imposed on my children—not because I’m a nascent genius but because I don’t want to melt in the blue light or drown in a sludge bath of AI either. I too want time enough at last.
We underwent several significant home improvement projects recently. I say “underwent” because we didn’t 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 young’uns.
In a moment when the boys were being particularly rambunctious, I asked if she missed this phase of having young kids.
“I’m glad we lived it,” she said.
In the moment I took that to be a polite way of saying “I’m grateful we went through it but also that it’s over.” 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 it—not just suffered through.
We have one of those all-in-one turntables that plays vinyl, CDs, Bluetooth, and the radio. One day my wife started putting on our local jazz station, WDCB 90.9 FM (“Chicago’s Home for Jazz”) and it’s been a nice burst of smooth vibes when we want a change from our usual rotation of kids music. I could always find something to play from my digital or vinyl collection of jazz records, but sometimes it’s nice to let serendipity take the wheel.
