The good news is that I finished drafting Part I of my book in Chicago, just a few days after Thanksgiving. I was sitting at my cousins’ dining room table, dance music blasting in my headphones, writing longhand in the notebook I’ve been drafting the book in this year. A giant snowstorm was beginning to blanket the whole region in sculptural white fluff. (The next day we made a snowman.) It was a great, cozy, victorious morning. The bad news is that, since then, I’ve been a bit stuck. I’m bogged down by big-picture questions. How do I want Part II to go? Should I write it in the same style as Part I? Or strike out down a new path? Take a shortcut? I have been sitting with this quantum uncertainty for the last month-plus. It has stopped me from really doing any work on the book at all.

But the last two days I have felt the call to press forward again. I have been rising early and spending some time transcribing my scrawling, crossed-out handwriting into my big Google Doc. (226 pages and counting.) I have 18 more handwritten pages left to type up. I’m cautiously hopeful that by the time I finish transcribing, I will have enough clarity on how to proceed that I can begin.

I like to believe that projects have rhythms, and sometimes you need to listen to your body and wait. In fact, I must believe this, otherwise I would exclusively feel jealousy at the 1000-words-a-day crowd and self-loathing at myself for failing to Churn It Out™. So much of the mental game of writing is coming up with excuses not to give up. One more piece of good news: in returning to the manuscript I found this:

This is my first time trying out Sandor Ellix-Katz’s incredibly simple recipe for Vinagre de Piña. I’ve been wanting to try it ever since reconnecting with his book Wild Fermentation in September as I wrote my Lightplay, “An Archipelago of Life-Promoting Culture.”

Saturday evening, the kid watched me cut up the pineapple. Then together we filled a half-gallon jar with sugary water, stuffed the roughly chopped pineapple skins into it, and covered the jar mouth with cheesecloth. We set it to ferment on the far end of the kitchen table. I ate my portion of the pineapple flesh in the bath.

Now we’re waiting, sniffing it daily, and occasionally skimming some scum off the surface. The liquor is definitely getting a bit funky. On Saturday we’ll strain the pineapple skins out and then let the clear liquid keep fermenting for a few more weeks. I’ll keep you posted on how it comes out.

The day after Christmas, I spotted some likely red cabbages at the store, bought four, and carried them home. That night I sliced them thin on the mandoline. The kid helped me pack the crock, adding salt between layers of cabbage. It has been going for a bit over two weeks now.

The other night I pulled some young kraut out to eat with nachos. I like how the acid and salt and vegetable energy of the kraut balances out the rich earthiness of the corn chips and black beans and cheese. This kraut clearly will keep getting better. But it’s already yummy: crunchy, cabbage-y, lightly sour, with a complex flavor.

When we took it out, the kid said with pride: “We made it, and no one else.”

(Real ones will remember that the third issue of Lightplay, back in May of 2020, was titled simply “Sauerkraut”.)

With the President of the United States admitting, boasting even, that the federal government will use its military to seize another country’s oil, I appreciated journalist and climate activist Bill McKibben on the climate / petrochemical angle on the invasion of Venezuela: Just possibly it’s the oil? I find this concept in particular to be highly compelling:

What if we could, simply by supporting an environmentally and economically sound transition to clean energy, remove the reason for the fighting? I don’t know how to stop the bully from beating people up for their lunch money—but what if lunch was free, and no one was carrying lunch money? Not for the first time, and not for the last, I’m going to make the observation that it’s going to be hard to figure out how to fight wars over sunshine.

The deeper suggestion here—that solar power technology might be inherently decentralizing, peace-promoting, dare I say anarchist—is not a new one. But it’s a good thing to think about in these days.

I first heard this idea from my brother Elias, who is currently finishing up a master’s degree in energy technology and policy. The other day, as I chewed on these ideas again, I hit him up for a reading list on the subject. He texted me back:

I don’t know about you, but I love a good syllabus. More to read!

Follow up Benn Jordan’s primer on anarchism with David Graeber’s Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art & the Imagination, which has more thought-provoking ideas in each essay than many full books muster. You can read many of the essays for free on Graeber’s website. A favorite is “Army of Altruists,” which refutes the so-called Effective Altruists en passant and includes this incredible observation about missionaries:

Almost invariably, they end up trying to convince people to be more selfish, and more altruistic, at the same time. On the one hand, they set out to teach the “natives” proper work discipline, and try to get them involved with buying and selling products on the market, so as to better their material lot. At the same time, they explain to them that ultimately, material things are unimportant, and lecture on the value of the higher things, such as selfless devotion to others.

I just finished it a few weeks back, and I’ve got more books of his essays waiting in the wings. Graeber’s work feels deeply relevant and illuminating to the experience of being alive here in 2026.

Benn Jordan has another barn-burner of a video out: “Gadgets For People Who Don’t Trust The Government”.

It’s a “gift guide” of adversarial, open-protocol, anti-surveillance tech, interlarded with a pretty good summary of anarchism. The word “anarchy” is, for a lot of people, a hot pan handle—too scary even to touch. This video gives a zero-entry-pool explanation of what anarchism actually means in practice. This subject is, um, relevant right now.

A user by the handle of @epstinian had a good comment:

If someone told me 10 years ago that I’d follow a musician turned into a fighter against AI technocracy I’d call them crazy.

A month ago, a day before the first rains of the season, workers covered the perennially unfinished luxury condos across the with a vast blue tarp. Watching them attach it I groaned, anticipating its loud flapping and chaotic energy. I hated it.

Then my mom visited. She pointed it out and said, “I think that’s the biggest tarp I’ve ever seen.” I started to feel a little proud.

Gradually I came to acknowledge that it’s actually, alas, beautiful. These days, I look forward to windy Saturday afternoons when I can sit on my couch with a cup of hot herbal tea and enjoy its magnificent billowing.

Yesterday, on the way home from the kid’s preschool, I walked beneath it. I suddenly recognized it as a giant, trapped wave, tall as Nazaré and in its way just as strange.

Best practice in linkblogging is not to recommend the same author or publication over and over. Unfortunately, my partner Lisa just published another great essay—this time a sprawling, intense, intimate account of our evacuation from the L.A. fires one year ago. I don’t want to quote any section out of context, so I’ll just share this picture she includes, one that our friend David took of us on Ocean Beach just a few days after our panicked evacuation:

I’m too close to the author and the story to be an impartial reader. So go read Lisa’s essay for yourself, see if it’s as powerful as I think it is.

One more tech update: after complimenting Apple Maps for including an accidental (I assume) fidget spinner, I’m annoyed at the application for withholding key pieces of directions until the last possible moment. For instance, here’s a screenshot from a recent drive to the beach:

I was ~200 feet from needing to steer myself onto the 10 West instead of the 10 East; how entirely unhelpful to be told to take “10 East and 10 West.”

Now I’m sure that branching exits are an interesting and confounding UI problem—but come now, this can’t be the best solution!

An update from my mote last month about the unintentional humor of auto-zooming and -panning on Zoom calls. It turns out this wasn’t an Apple thing. Instead it’s a new-ish “feature” on Zoom. If you or someone you know is afflicted, here’s how to turn it off: click the little carat symbol next to the camcorder symbol and then uncheck “Auto-frame my video.” (At least I think that’ll do it.)

After about 18 months of deteriorating functionality, our old gooseneck kettle finally died. We bought a new one on a Black Friday sale, and for the most part it’s neither more nor less than fine. It boils water quickly and pours it slowly and precisely. Great! But it has one killer feature: the “keep warm” button. How often in my life have I set water to boil, walked away, and come back ten minutes later only to find it has cooled? Often. But no longer. Bless this feature!

Over the holidays we saw not one but two puppet shows put on by the Bob Baker Marionette Theater here in LA. Both were great, high recommend.

Puppet shows are one of those activities—like clown performances, singalongs, and campfire ghost story sessions—that our society classifies as kid fare. One of the great things about being a parent is receiving regular reminders of how stupid these distinctions are.

Getting to know this new-to-me artform, I’m learning about all the different bits of artistry you can enjoy. Some pleasures are obvious: the way certain puppets, in the hands of certain puppeteers, do briefly seem to come to life; the novelty of seeing different marionette designs and discovering what they can do. But I’m coming to appreciate some of the subtler pleasures, too: the way a show can play with size and timing and depth; the craftsmanship of the marionettes; the beautiful vacant expressions of the puppeteers.

I sometimes think about getting into opera, another medium in which I’m utterly unversed. It’s exciting to know that in just about any artform—or for that matter activity, profession, skill—there inheres an invitation expand your capacity for appreciation, enjoyment, and pleasure.

Lisa wrote a big end-of-year post with the great title, “Ode to a horny universe.” I of course love the part of the newsletter that gives it its title, an essay about gooning, gooning discourse, Heated Rivalry, and the braindead-but-sexy-or-is-he TikToker William White. It includes both the term “no-nut nirvana” and,

… maybe every book is about seeking a state of pleasure that lasts forever or as long as possible, sticks in the mind, draws your attention back to it, gives the rest of your life a vaguely sick-making shimmer, a nasty secret that gets you through the rest of everything?

Lit-gooners of the world, unite!

I also loved the meditations in the post about the strange work of running an MFA program while being a writer oneself. I nodded intensely at the part about how in 2025 it was not only hard to write, it was hard even to find time and energy to attempt to write:

If I am staring at the blank page, freaked out, I have already won.

How cool is it that when there’s a king tide and you happen to visit the beach at the right moment, the pilings under the pier reveal themselves to be teeming with tens of thousands of barnacles and mussels?

A secret abundance of mollusks? Their whorls and queer intelligence lurking just out of sight, just below the waterline, beneath the utter consumerist mundanity of the Santa Monica Pier? A good reminder. (Related: the sex lives of mussels.)

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.”