Zoo Kid is a passion project that I’ve been working on for awhile. It’s a deep dive on the history of zoos, the role they play in modern animal conservation, and what they teach us about our species’ relationship to nature. I’m thrilled to get to gush at book length about animals and the p…

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I’ve been entertaining myself for the last couple days imagining the type of person that still gets excited about Super Bowl ads in 2026. Growing up in the aughts, “I just watch it for the commercials” was an annoying but fully acceptable response to being asked about one’s feelings on the big game. Now, if I imagine some guy sitting through the Svedka …

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We live in hyperbolic times. The attention economy rewards our ability to attract eyes above all else, and going on twenty years into living algorithmically sorted lives, we’ve adjusted our language accordingly. We started by brutalizing perfectly functional words like “friend” and “literally” to the point where they lost all meaning. Then it spread to …

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We’re now over halfway into the first month of my escape from the Smooth World. This first month, the goal was to severely limit my access to social media apps by using Brick to keep them off my phone and Cold Turkey to severely limit them on my computer and for the first week, I was successful. I spent my days either hanging out with my daughter, bricked phone in my back pocket or working on a desktop that locked me out of all socials after a combined 45 minutes of wasted time. Then, ICE killed an innocent woman in Minnesota.

It’s impossible to overstate the extent of the tragedy taking place in Minneapolis right now. The city is under siege by its own federal government, kids are being held out of school, people are hiding in their homes, and yet more people are dying. It’s awful, unforgivable stuff. In those raw, first, hours after Renee Good was murdered, I’d been overcome with anger at what I was watching unfold. I felt sick seeing the footage make its way across my feed over and over again, watching people analyze the angles and begin writing posts about a woman whose blood still sat on the snow. Staying in my house and continuing to consume this woman’s death like any other piece of current events felt profane to me.

Since the pandemic ramped up everyone’s brain rot, I’ve had a distaste for the way that we talk about tragedy online. Posting, while great for making jokes and sharing basic facts, is not the form human grief is supposed to take. With the layer of removal it grants us, we are emboldened to indulge our basest instincts. We digest terrible things that happen to real people like chunks of bone in our trough, floating alongside podcast drama and videos of cats until the algorithm can learn to pulverize it all just a little bit more next time. How many memes of Jeffery Epstein, who perpetrated such incredible suffering on the world, does one person need to see to understand how good we’ve become at repurposing the worst day of someone’s life into a quarter second’s worth of entertainment?

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For each month of the project, I’ll be starting with a tone setting piece like this one explaining …

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Somewhere during the last month or so, my daughter started playing. Or, to be more exact, she started constantly knocking shit over. At six months old, she’s awhile away from the euphoric imaginary scenarios that we associate with childhood. For her, the most exciting thing in the world is grabbing a toy, shaking it around a little bit, and then throwin…

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“Just hang out with Dumbo,” the nurse says, “They’ll come get you soon.”

I’m sitting in an entirely beige hallway, empty save for the chair I’ve just been herded into and the small, framed picture of Dumbo on the wall across from me.

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I don’t have a lot to say about the Charlie Kirk assassination that hasn’t already been said. He died in the exact type of senseless, violent, act that he’d dedicated his life to defending. That’s 2025, baby! We’re having our cake and it’s killing us too.

Plus, there’s good incentive to keep things brief seeing as the Online Right has spent the last few…

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I'll often try to explain the social media environment of the aughts and early 2010s by comparing it to a good coffee shop. It wasn't any one thing to everyone, it was defined by the people you experienced it with and the way you all chose to spend your time there. You could argue about politics or chat up a stranger or sit alone with your thoughts. You…

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I'm thinking about the petroglyphs, the ones in the Arizona desert that are scrawled on stains in rust colored stone. They might be 2500 years old, though I guess it's hard to say. They overwhelmed me, even from a distance. All I could imagine was gently tracing a finger over the stone and feeling some warmth on the other side happily matching my own.

I …

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** Quick Heads Up! This week's installment features a detailed description of a baffling but upsetting targeted ad that I received. Anyone bothered by discussion of topics like complications with pregnancy may want to jump ahead a paragraph once I start describing an Instagram ad. **

I was a couple weeks into dumb phone ownership and things were going...…

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There was a point where I loved my iPhone. As a 19 year old freshman in college, my world had already been expanding every day as I learned to navigate life away from home. Adding constant access to the internet into the mix made that year feel like a springboard into the future. With a map in my pocket, I couldn’t get lost. With a (still functional!) G…

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I want you to imagine for a moment that there's a leaky pipe in your basement.

You have no plumbing experience or tools. As much as you wish you could, you're not able to fix the leak on your own. So, you turn to the local plumber.

He's not great, only ever stopping the leak for brief periods rather than fixing it altogether. You'd call another, but he's …

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The year is coming to a close and most of us are happy to watch it go. But some good things happened too! Here's a quick roundup of some stuff I really enjoyed this year and a handful of things I didn’t.

Books:

Finally, a year where I read as much as I wanted to! Turns out that a really rough freelance market leaves you with a lot of time on your hands. B…

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Just a few weeks ago, it seemed like Bluesky had done the impossible. With a bizarre update to Twitter’s terms of service and the presidential election’s surprising landslide serving as a wakeup call, hundreds of thousands of social media users had decided that they were done with Elon Musk and his diminished version of the platform. This horde of journ…

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The American pedestrian suffers no shortage of indignities. On my average day walking around the deeply car-obsessed city of Los Angeles, I am ignored, cut off, honked at, and regularly threatened with bodily harm. I am made to breathe through clouds of belched diesel, forced to keep my head on a swivel to avoid the aforementioned bodily harm, and confi…

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I had a creative writing professor who talked to us about how old stone walls were built. He told a story about early farmers on Cycladic islands carrying stones up steep hills to lay down the beginnings of what would become their town center. He described the laying of each stone as an act of intention and of community, as much about keeping thieves ou…

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