As the NBA season winds towards the playoffs, my team, the Golden State Warriors, is currently looking like, as they say, “a problem.” (Friday night they overcame the best player in the world, Nikola Jokic; it was lovely.) This is good news, because a few months ago they looked dead in the water, and for a month or so I even gave up on watching them.

Their season turned when they traded for the wily small forward Jimmy Butler, and I want to just quickly give my appreciation to Butler here by calling back to the time a few season back when he showed up to NBA Media Day—when players take the pictures that will be used in TV graphics all season long—in full goth. Can you believe this guy plays for our team? It’s just awesome.

The latest edition of Sarah McColl’s Lost Art is an audio essay about folk singer Connie Converse. It explores the life, stifled ambitions, and legacy of this singer from the ’50s who never broke through and eventually disappeared into the thin blue air. (The leading theory is that she drove her car into a lake.) Throughout the essay, Sarah interweaves Converse’s story with her own life. It’s a beautiful piece of writing—and even more beautiful read aloud in Sarah’s voice, with graceful editing and snippets of song.

In the intro, Sarah reveals that this is the essay that started the whole Lost Art project—Lost Art is a longrunning newsletter project that explores the “creative lives & works of (mostly) dead women.” By releasing an audio edition of the essay, Sarah revives and improves on the original.

We’re big fans of this project in my household, and I love that Sarah’s now pivoting to audio essays. It’s a delightful way to consume a lyric essay about a singer-songwriter. If you have half an hour to spare, there are a million worse ways to spend it.

Yesterday there were “Hands Off!” protests all across the country. We needed them, and we need more like them. We need to start building momentum and assert our right to protest. As they say, use it or lose it.

The project of taking action against fascists has me thinking about the Battle of Britain, and the country-spanning magical (or magickal) resistance effort organized in the U.K. by Dion Fortune. This essay by Sable Aradia about the “Magical Battle of Britain” speaks so clearly to our present moment and its perils that I have to say I was shocked to find it was first posted in 2015.

One of my favorite insights is that Fortune “invoked the ancient spirits pledged to Britain’s protection, including King Arthur, Merlin, St. Michael and St. George.” And Aradia considers whether American magic-workers, resisting fascism on our own shores, might invoke this land’s protector deities:

Perhaps we can ask Paul Bunyan or John Henry to fight for the working class. Perhaps we can ask Lady Liberty to stand fast against those who would take our liberty from us; perhaps we can ask Mother Canada to cry out against the suffering of Her children.

I think this could be not just a strong piece of magic but also a successful protest tactic: to reclaim these American archetypal spirits and tie them to positive values of freedom, community, and justice. The “Tea Party” fifteen years ago invoked just one archetypal figure, the tri-corner-hat-wearing colonist, and they have had an impact that reverberates to this day. (Of course propped up by billionaire cash infusions.) Here’s my expanded list of figures to dress up as, put on protest signs, and invoke in your workings:

• Lady Liberty
• Paul Bunyan
• John Henry
• Rosie the Riveter
• Johnny Appleseed
• John Brown
• The Cowboy

To be effective, they shouldn’t be historical personages, but instead archetypes. (John Brown sneaks in because his one public act led directly to martyrdom.) As a white person I don’t think it’s my place to nominate Coyote or Guanyin or the Chupacabra, but I could see them fitting in, too. The big point here is: America at its best used to stand for something, even if it never lived up to it. We shouldn’t give up on that dream.

And: can’t you just see a photograph of ICE agents arresting Lady Liberty splashed across every newspaper and social media feed in the land?

One last dispatch from our dystopian present: MKBHD has a new video with the clickbait title, “The Truth about Drone Deliveries!” I found it worth watching, if only because it’s the first time I’ve seen a vision of aerial drones bringing you stuff where the service seems potentially useful rather than exclusively dangerous and scary. I still find these deeply upsetting, but I can see how under Silicon Valley logic they might also be inevitable.

The big miss in the video is that the only possible downside Marques sees fit to mention is light pollution. Ummm… 1984 would like to have a word. Every police force in the world is going to want their own little fleet of these bad boys! Talk about a parole officer’s dream. We’re like five years away from a droid reading you your Miranda rights. (Already when we drive to our pediatrician’s we always pass a programmable road sign that flashes between two messages: “WELCOME TO BEVERLY HILLS” and “POLICE DRONE IN USE”.)

The latest scandal from the “losers with aircraft carriers” currently running our federal government is that they made a big group chat to share war plans, on a consumer chat app, and they accidentally added a journalist. Classic buffoonery from a group of people for whom hypocrisy is a fun way to show dominance. But for me, the most ghoulish detail from the text messages themselves is a casual reference to the open secret that the U.S. military now routinely carries out single-target assassinations even when civilian bystanders are guaranteed to die en masse. Here’s the passage that got me:

[National Security Advisor] MICHAEL WALTZ

The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.

[Vice President] JD VANCE Excellent

[CIA Director] JOHN RATCLIFFE

A good start

MICHAEL WALTZ

👊🇺🇸🔥

Nice emojis, bro. I hope no one you love ever makes the mistake of having a military leader’s girlfriend for a neighbor.

I can’t say I recommend the breathless AI girlfriend thinkpiece in this week’s New Yorker. It reminds me of the Sam Altman move of waving your hands about how scary AI is and how it’s going to change everything, all just so we give him our attention and investment dollars. Here the message seems to be: get afraid that your kid will soon be dating their telephone’s operating system. (?!) This makes a good deal more sense when you google the article’s author (Jaron Lanier) and realize that for the last 19 years he’s been working at OpenAI’s main partner, Microsoft. It’s telling that he’s chosen to mix his labor with the most charmless of the evil five; of course he indulges the thrill of worrying about AI. (Kate Folk dealt with this whole train of thought more succinctly and with infinitely more humor and insight in her short stories “Out There” and “Sur”.) All that said, I did crack a smile with this sentence:

A.I. conferences and gatherings often include a person or two who loudly announces that she is in a relationship with an A.I. or desires to be in one.

My brother in Christ, no matter what the New Yorker’s style guide says, the indefinite pronoun you are looking for is they.

Check out the instructions for “How to Build an Electrically Heated Table” over at Low-Tech Magazine. Doesn’t a heated table in a chilly room just sound cozy as can be?

(Also: what a cool website! I love how all the images are dithered—ostensibly to keep filesizes minimal (for their solar powered website) but also (I just know) because they look cool and vibey, the digital equivalent of a risograph print)

I had two reminders in my Notes app for topics to write about: “Our mail carrier giving Orlando and us oranges” and “Lisa’s newsletter.” But then I read the latest installment of Not Know How and saw that Lisa had herself written a beautiful meditation on walking around our neighborhood, worrying about the state of the world, and, would you know it, receiving unexpected gift oranges:

On the last block before our building, we met our mail carrier, sitting in her parked truck. She handed my son three oranges, one for each of us, the second time she has given us this gift.

You should read the full essay. Plus, after the essay there’s an interview with noted graveyard writer Jessica Ferri. And a plug for You Know What’s Good, which she described as a “delicious, ASMR-adjacent vignette series.” (!!!) I may be biased, but I find Not Knowing How to always be full of beautiful insights and literary genius.

Our kid’s backpack was breaking, the stitching that connects the top handle to the rest of the backpack pulling out. So my partner suggested we take it to the dry cleaners in the strip mall by our kid’s preschool. The kid and I dropped it off, and three day’s later, we came back, the kid handed the proprietor our ticket, and we received the bag. They had fixed the handle and cleaned it. It nearly glowed. Want to wear my new backpack, he said.

What if we changed it so “new” just meant “lovingly, recently cared for”?

I loved this beautiful portrait of a woman, her son, and the apartment in San Francisco’s Noe Valley that they have lived in for the last 31 years.

Now renting for $2,211 including water and trash, it’s an absolute steal in a neighborhood where a three-bedroom can rent for more than $6,000 and houses can sell for $2 million.

Quietly, with glowing photographs and precise text, it builds a case for rent control, for a regular nurse being able to live in the city she works in, and for the idea that for us non-millionaire humans to thrive, we don’t need so incredibly much, but we do need more than our society currently affords most of us.

Everyone who loves poetry should read “The Los Angeles Times Insults Iconic Poet Sharon Olds.” In this latest installment of Not Knowing How, Lisa Locascio Nighthawk calls out the Times for its slimy, misogynist invocation of Olds’s writing in a piece about her son’s criminal defense. “Gone are the accolades, the years of work with students, the ordinary domestic joys and sorrows described exactly,” she writes. The piece not only raises the alarm about this specific piece but also warns of a cultural shift towards anti-intellectualism and anti-feminism. De plus, it contains rich memories of visiting Olds at her apartment and two favorites of her poetic oeuvre.

I was trying to explain to my kid a slightly complex concept—that we weren’t going to see our friends today, we weren’t going to see them tomorrow, it would be the day after tomorrow when we saw them—when I realized the clunkiness of this formula. The best we can do is the day after tomorrow? It’s fine for a movie title; as shorthand for the concept of two days hence, well, it’s neither short nor handy. Russian has it so much better: poslezaftra. Literally “after tomorrow.” Three syllables, and they roll off the tongue. So, I thought, what would that be in English? Aftermorrow.

My feelings of unique genius didn’t survive an encounter with an internet search engine. (When do they ever?) It turns out not only have others already proposed this coinage, our language already has a term that’s similar but even better: overmorrow.

Let’s bring it back!

Speaking of newspapers, I finally canceled my Washington Post subscription. After many last straws, it was this bit from Jeff Bezos:

There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.

Get bent, loser! God I hate billionaires. Get rid of em! Let em just be $999 millionaires! There are worse fates!

In the latest n+1, the opening editorial (about Frederic Jameson and ways of seeing the present and the future) coins a new term:

…in one of the stealth editorials it calls ‘News Analysis,’ the Times proclaimed the end of the ‘Post-World War II Era of US Leadership’…

Stealth editorial! I’m immediately stealing that.

I also loved this towards the end of the piece:

No—real futurelessness is the terrain of the Democrats, a party stuck in a cycle of impotence that, come to think of it, resembles nothing so much as the contemporary English department: visionless, gerontocratic, hobbled by a structural incapacity to meet or even recognize its many sectoral crises.

n+1 is always a cover-to-cover read for me.

Restaurant recommendation: Chengdu Taste in Alhambra. I haven’t had Chinese food this good since I was last in China, a decade ago. If you’re in greater LA, strong recommend checking it out. I was particularly delighted to once again have what their menu called “Garlic Arden Lettuce 蒜蓉A菜.” So green and bitter and garlicky-sweet and crunchy, the winning lottery ticket of leafy vegetables.

For a vegetarian like me, it doesn’t get better than good Chinese food. This meal reminded me of a James Beard quote: “In all the world there are only two really great cuisines: the Chinese and the French. China’s was created first, untold centuries ago, and is judged to be the greater-when executed by superb chefs. It is the most complicated cuisine; it uses ingredients no other employs; and it is distinctive in that, for the most part, it is cuisine à la minute.” (I don’t know the source; it’s the epigraph of Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo.)

My partner and I first got into the comedian Connor O’Malley through his serialized vertical videos about being a disturbed, chino-wearing superfan of would-be presidential candidate Howard Schultz (“because only the coffee guy can defeat the covfefe man”). He has since then put out dozens of conceptually bizarre YouTube videos (“Smoking 500 Cigarettes for 5G,” “Top 10 Wisconsin Dells Haunted Houses For Free Pulled Pork”) in which he really claims the lane of deranged physical comedy about millennial masculinity. So we were delighted to find that his new video, “Rap World,” might be his best yet. Upsetting, hilarious—and so sharp. Part Safdie brothers, part found footage / mockumentary / haunted fiction, and featuring some of the worst rapping you can imagine. Rating: must-watch.

(More than a few friends we’ve showed his stuff to just find it upsetting and not funny, so if you hate it, you were warned!)

Speaking of these vehicles that are so dangerous to pedestrians that they’re illegal on the entire continent of Europe, a recent 404 Media report on the vandalism and mockery being reported on a Cybertruck owners’ forum included one owner’s recording of his Cybertruck being flipped off by a man driving a budget sedan. Under that video, another Cybertruck owner commented this gem:

I am baffled at how any male can have that much audacity while driving a Ford Fiesta. Dude probably sits when he needs to take a piss

It’s almost like some people get their confidence from other places, right? (I might be deluded, though, as a proud Ford Fiesta driver myself…)