Business Insider’s video “Why Professional Colored Pencils Cost 14 Times More Than Crayola” has tons of hypnotic footage from within the Faber-Castell factory in Stein, Germany. It was of particular interest to me because I recently bought an on-sale set of 24 colored pencils of the Prismacolor Premier line, and I found myself rather in awe of how much more pleasant and responsive they are than the Crayola colored pencils we have. Artisan products: sometimes worth the markup! (I also recently enjoyed this WSJ video on Blackwing pencils: Why This Cult ‘$40 Pencil’ Almost Went Extinct.”)

There are some open questions that I ponder over the years, hoping to figure out a bit more of my own mind. One of these is the question of what to do with art made by hateful people. And maybe the place this most touches my own life as a reader is in the Harry Potter books, which were a lifeline and height of pleasure starting when I nine, and then through my teenage years. Their author, J.K. Rowling, has spent the last decade-plus reorienting her energy to be one of the leading haters and persecutors of trans people. What to do with these books, then?

This article—“Burn Harry Burn: Reckoning With My Harry Potter Fandom as a Trans Person”, by Sandy Ernest Allen—bothers this problem with a great deal of empathy and insight. If you haven’t been paying attention to this saga, or like me you have unsettled thoughts, I highly recommend giving it a read.

One bit that really resonates is a discussion of how discordant it is for Rowling’s committed and prominent transphobia to be common knowledge, yet the Harry Potter spinoffs and Broadway show and Disneyland rides are all endlessly promoted. (Lisa pointed out to me that Rowling is doing all this partially to re-cast and reclaim her characters after the lead actors from the movies all came out and denounced her bigotry). Here is Allen on this:

I have tried to ignore J.K. Rowling through these last years, as no doubt many still try to ignore all of this. But it’s also impossible not to notice she continues to be absolutely fine, even as she is relentless in her persecution of my people.

Her bigotry has only gotten louder as she continues to accumulate wealth from her toxic IP: the books, the movies, the merchandise, the parks, all that continues on just fucking fine.

I was in Manhattan earlier this year and all around me were advertisements for the Harry Potter show on Broadway; they followed me on billboards as I drove home on the thruway. Tourists bustling around Union Square carried bags from some Harry Potter café. Every day, more news about the impending show on HBO.

As a trans adult just trying to live life it’s impossible for me to even glance at the news without being consumed by dread. Given what’s coming for all trans Americans these days. Where on earth might I be safe? Like many of us, I wonder this now, a lot.

Last weekend, with its several, each-awful-in-their-own-way mass shootings, felt like the big finale to our snakebitten year, 2025. It was, however, informative to see mass shootings play out in parallel, in two different countries. In Australia the government swiftly moved to further tighten gun laws. Meanwhile I was particularly heartbroken by Katelyn Jetelina’s article, “Mass shootings continue to outnumber days in the U.S.” in the great newsletter, Your Local Epidemiologist. If you live in the U.S., how does this make you feel?

Mass shootings are extremely rare in Australia. Since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, strict firearm regulations (a buyback program and tight licensing) have kept mass shootings to zero or one per year on average in Australia. By contrast, the U.S. experiences roughly 400–650 mass shootings annually, with more than 46,000 deaths from gun violence each year. As the graph below shows, it’s not even close.

I know, I know, gun deaths in the U.S. are overwhelmingly suicides, overwhelmingly from handguns. But the answer has to be restricting handguns and high-capacity assault rifles, and, and, and… We must tackle all gun violence. Plus, let me just say, the psychic damage of facing 400-650 mass shootings per year, many of them at schools, cannot be overstated.

Cue the recurring The Onion headline, “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

Another story that hits harder as a parent: the scandalous cover-up of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s disgusting affair in the lead-up to his confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services. This roided-out shell of a man is working every day to endanger the lives of children, especially infants, and the elderly. And he was aided in attaining his high post by his ersatz mistress, the prose-mangling Olivia Nuzzi. For that reason, I appreciated the essay “A major Beltway scandal” by Scott LeMieux, which makes the case that Nuzzi’s disastrous roll-out of her tell-all American Canto isn’t just a funny media story, it’s a real scandal that should infuriate us. As he puts it,

The heart of this remains that Nuzzi’s goal was to suppress damaging information about RFK Jr. both to help Trump and to protect RFK Jr.s chances of becoming the Secretary of Child Murder, and she succeeded.

When you’re a parent, some stories just hit different. For instance, “From Jail, He Tears Intricate Pictures By Hand For the Family He Misses” by Lily Kuo. It tells the story of Gao Zhen, a Chinese artist who was living in New York City but traveled back to his home country to see his mother-in-law, only to land in prison. The art really hit me—something about the simple medium and how expressive it is in Gao’s hands. I was particularly moved by this homage to a painting I also love: Matisse’s “La Danse.”

I pray never to be locked away from my child.

(And for what? The crime of… sculpting yassified Mao?)

If you loved CharliXCX’s 2024 album-of-the-summer Brat, may I recommend 2023’s 10,000 Gecs by 100 Gecs? I’m not fluent enough in pop and “hyperpop” to know the chain of influences here, but a lot of this sound—and the use of autotune in particular—seems like a raw-er antecedent to the Brat sound.

(Chaser: 100 Gecs’s Boiler Room set, which I was briefly obsessed with a few years back. (Found it via Today in Tabs.) It’s still deranged!)

I got a new California Driver’s License and was surprised to find that they changed the typography again. The DMV’s press release focuses on the security features but doesn’t mention what the new font for “CALIFORNIA” is, which is really the big change for me. I poked around but couldn’t identify it. Does anyone know what this chrome-age slab serif is?

(Kinda crazy that Ima changed her name to Janice and reverted to her maiden name. Or, wait, judging by the birthdays, is that Ima’s mom?!)

S.I. Rosenbaum has a comic out in Flaming Hydra—“Lost and found”—that captures something of how this moment feels to me, too. I mean, I haven’t expatriated to Lisbon, I’m not married to a trans person, I don’t find myself compulsively looking for beads—and yet, I know that feeling of life passing, atrocities ongoing, and the mind trying to find meaning, trying to find mooring. It’s a beautiful piece.

Last week I watched the first episode of Heated Rivalry, the sex-forward show about two professional hockey stars who get physical. Unfortunately, it wasn’t for me—too much action, not enough actin’.

Last week I happened also to finish reading a different piece of art about two young men who get physical: the novel Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman. This is the one. I think it might be the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen or read. It has it all: a narrator obsessed with the semantics of small talk; longing; treatment of time in a way reminiscent of Bergson’s idea of la durée; hunger; edging; intellectuals; bodies; repression; the march of generations; Rome; the ’80s; music; swimming.

I loved the 2017 film adaptation (which launched Timothée Chalamet’s career). I suspected I would like the book. But I didn’t know it would be this good.

If you liked the movie but haven’t read the book, what are you waiting for? If you’ve seen neither the movie nor the book, correct your error swiftly! And consider starting with the original: the book!

PSA: Did you know that with those spam texts that end by saying “text ‘stop’ to end,” you really can just text “stop” back, and they will never text you again? I don’t know, maybe other folks aren’t as suspicious as me, but for years I resisted this because I thought, If I text back then they’ll just know that this is a real number. They’ll spam me MORE! But no, in my experience you really do just send “stop” back and it stops.

To whoever designed the automated zooming in and out feature on certain Apple videoconferencing products, I do whatever the opposite of tipping one’s cap is. I thumb my nose!

Recently, several of my colleagues have been plagued by this deeply unserious feature, and so far they can’t figure out how to turn off. Now their little window on our Zoom meetings features a deranged cameraman who does things like zoom in for a tight shot right as they blow their nose, then zoom back out. The unsteady, by turns tentative and overactive camerawork has the energy of a teenager holding a camcorder, or a mockumentary (think The Office or Telemarketers). What maniac in Apple corporate thought it was a good idea to turn this feature on (with no easily found off switch!) on millions of work computers!?

Over the weekend there was a snowstorm in Chicago—eight inches! This delayed our flight home by a day, and it also gave me the chance to make my first-ever snowman! (With, admittedly, help from my kid and his mom.) There’s something so satisfying about making a sculpture out of precipitation, and dressing it up.

Even better: getting daily melt reports from our hosts. So far not only has our snowman not melted at all, he’s actually gained a bit of snow!

Bourgeois confession: I bought an Apple TV, one of those little streaming boxes that plugs into your TV. It came on Monday. (Part of getting older under capitalism is you have less time to do things like watch movies or make music but you compensate by spending money on better tools for these activities you no longer do much of.)

I don’t yet have a full opinion on the little box, but I did have a thrilling experience with it: I figured out how to program the volume buttons to go directly to my stereo. It turns out the way you do this is by holding up the stereo’s remote near the Apple TV remote, then pressing the stereo remote’s volume switches as cued by the Apple TV software. The Apple TV magically intercepts the signal, learns it, and now can reproduce it. Yes!

During our trip to Chicago, we splurged on “high tea” at the Drake Hotel. It was ridiculous and fun. The best part was that for the first half of the meal there was a harpist playing, and then for the second half there were three professional carolers roaming the dining room, singing a tune for each table. (For us, Lisa requested “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”)

I noticed a sad trend, though: at many (most?) tables, when the carolers got to them, the diners each lifted their phones up to record videos. The carolers were maybe five feet away, and the phone seemed clutched like a shield, a tool to distance oneself from the intensity of being sung to, a way to get out of having to be present, to avoid having to experience the experience.

Because I myself am left ice cold by the “AI art” being shoved in our faces today, I was probably the perfect audience for this brief essay, “Alchemy,” by John Collinsworth. What a great metaphor, invoking just how stupid the literal attempt to turn lead to gold was. I especially appreciated this part:

The existence of the work itself is only part of the point, and materializing an image out of thin air misses the point of art, in very much the same way that putting a football into a Waymo to drive it up and down the street for a few hours would be entirely missing the point of sports.

The struggle that produced the art—the human who felt it, processed it, and formed it into this unique shape in the way only they could—is integral to the art itself.

The human behind it, and their story, is the missing, inimitable component that AI cannot reproduce.

I personally agree with this, but with the (big) caveat that all available evidence suggests that a whole lot of people don’t actually care about filling their lives with art. So many folks seem more than happy with different varieties of muzak providing a soothing background track to their lives.

Today we have muzak on the music streamers (see “ghost artists”) but also increasingly on the video streamers (I loved this Will Tavlin piece in N+1 about today’s Netflix) and even in novels (the Write a Book a Month Club—yikes).

Some people really like their AI slop! But art it ain’t.

Last-minute notice here, but if you’re in LA and don’t have Friday night plans you should come out to the book party for Xander Beattie’s new-ish book The President (which you may remember from the gift guide above). It sounds like it will be an intimate party, with drinks, a reading, a conversation, and hopefully some good conversation. RSVP here to get the details. (I believe that today is the last day to RSVP.)