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.”

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.