Mid-March to April
The glories of Syrian cheese and sour beers, thoughts on The Atlantic's recent article on Israel/Palestine POV's at Stanford, and political realities that prevent the building of personal bonds
What I’m Eating
The first weeks of March were decadent, so I’ve been eating at home more. I usually eat Mexican-inspired breakfast if left to my own devices. But things are changing. A particularly bad hangover a few weeks back made me crave a smoothie. Luckily, I had a Costco quantity of frozen berries on hand, so I picked up some bananas — yellow/green with no freckles — for a simple smoothie. My preferred recipe: two bananas, a handful of frozen berries, half of a mandarin orange, plus some water.
When it gets warmer, I crave fresh and uncooked food. Smoothies excepted, I’m not much for sweet breakfasts, which is why I can’t get behind yogurt + fruit + nuts as my first meal of the day. But I’ve had several Lebanese-style breakfasts these past few weeks that really hit the spot. The typical platter that I now crave: sliced cucumbers, sliced tomatoes, sliced Syrian cheese (think of a smoother textured queso fresco that slices rather than crumbles), a small dish of zaatar and olive oil, a small dish of olives, a small dish of labneh, and a bowl of ful (fava beans) lightly mashed and topped with olive oil, lemon juice, red onions, and tomatoes.
What I love about this breakfast is that every bite is an adventure and every bite feels healthy, which I cannot always say about the Mexican breakfasts that I love and sometimes leave me sluggish.
I am generally inclined towards rich, hearty meals. But I’m making an effort to eat lighter, fresher foods. One such meal of note: Win Son, a Taiwanese spot in Brooklyn. I was quite fond of the fried eggplant with black, vinegar, and spiced cashews. But the thing that I wished I’d ordered two of was the chicken wontons, which were topped with scallions and sat in a lake of firewood bean paste butter.
What I’m Drinking
In the past year or so I’ve concluded that I don’t love how beer sits in my body. One beer makes me sleepy. Two beers make me feel bloated. Three or more beers will break the seal of my bladder and cause repeated trips to the bathroom. The next day, my stomach will protest the beers from the night before.
I really only make exceptions for an occasional pint of Guinness or when it gets warm and bars serve sour beers again. Last night at Duck Duck in East Williamsburg, I had a delightful Guava Gose Sour by Collective Arts Brewing. This sour was tart and fruity and sat peacefully in my stomach.
What I’m Reading
Caitlin Clark and Iowa find peace in the process
I am pointing you, once again, toward a surprisingly thoughtful piece published on ESPN. This piece, written by Wright Thompson, details the emotional development of Caitlin Clark during her time at the University of Iowa. Clark’s maniacal work ethic is a central focus of this piece. Wright recounts several tense moments over the previous seasons where Clark had to learn to trust teammates that she did not watch work as hard as her and if you finish this piece, you’ll come out of it noticing several Kobe-like qualities in Clark.
The Children Who Lost Limbs in Gaza
There are no words sufficient to describe the horrors that the Israeli army has perpetrated on a generation of children in Gaza.
America’s trustbusters wage war on Apple
This article in The Economist is an accessible look at Apple’s various anti-competitive practices that have earned it scrutiny from the Department of Justice. Of particular note is Apple’s continuous shafting of competitors and preventing them access to Apple’s devices via the Apple Store.
Can AI Replace Human Research Participants? These Scientists See Risks
The question posed in the title of this article should have an obvious answer — no. Unfortunately, a gaggle of morons in the scientific research community are excited by the possibility of using generative AI in fields like human behavior and psychology and market research. The arguments in favor — “it could increase speed, reduce costs, avoid risks to participants and augment diversity” — are foolish at best. A research paper for the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems concludes, gently, “these research methods would conflict with central values of research involving human participants: representing, including and understanding those being studied.” No fucking shit.
Eric Adams Tells New Yorkers: Stop Listening to Eric Adams
Hellgate is a worker-owned publication that reports on New York City politics, culture, and more. The work published on Hellgate is thorough, scathing, and oftentimes, quite funny. This piece on Eric Adam’s fearmongering about crime in New York lists an exhausting and hilarious amount of instances in which Adams has warned against Adams-like fearmongering. It is at least 100x times funnier than anything Andy Borowitz ever published in aggressively mid career as The New Yorker’s humorist.
Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute summarizes a recent report published VTPI in partnership with the London School of Economics that details the economic costs of bad urban planning, aka, sprawl. The short of it is: city planning should not prioritize cars and instead focus on multi-modal transportation, i.e, building cities that allow its inhabitants to walk, bike, or drive. I was struck by the economic costs and inefficient land use associated with sprawl and the conclusion that “automobiles typically use more land than is devoted to an urban resident’s house.”
It feels cruel to dunk on a 19-year-old, the author of this piece was set up by his father and his friends to be dunked on, so let the dunking commence. Theo Baker is the son of Peter Baker, a New York Times political correspondent. Peter Baker is famously apolitical, or so he believes. Baker takes his supposed apoliticism to absurd extremes. Baker does not vote and refuses to state political opinions — even, allegedly, to his own family — in order to maintain the impartiality he feels is necessary to be a journalist. Baker is, unsurprisingly, a classic NYT both-sides-brained reporter. Despite purporting not to express political opinions, Baker did so in action when he decided against participating in a work stoppage at the Times that was related to contract negotiations with the paper. Enter Baker’s son, Theo. A 19-year-old rarely gets published at The Atlantic. But of course, Theo Baker is no average 19-year-old. What other college sophomore would have access to the higher-ups of The Atlantic and thank them after publishing his piece? The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was one of the people Baker thanked for their help. Goldberg was a prison guard in Israel during the First Intifada, which is something worth remembering when The Atlantic decided to publish a 19-year-old Stanford grad’s extensive piece on extremism at Stanford University in the wake of October 7th and Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. Theo Baker might turn out to be a good journalist someday. I don’t doubt he’ll be better than his dad, someday. But this piece, shocking and vivid as it might be in moments, is poorly written and poorly edited. A few examples: “‘We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!’ students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation.” This slogan chanted by these students does not advocate a single Arab nation. An attentive editor operating in good faith would have noted that and corrected this incorrect statement. Another particularly grating section: Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel. [...] It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising. How exactly does Baker know the majority of the protestors are not deeply connected to this issue and that their devotion is not principled? Baker does, to his credit, observe some jarring moments of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. But those observations are marred by the conclusions that Baker paints with a broad brush. It is one thing to observe and recount what specific individuals said, but is intellectually dishonest to use those observations to make the conclusions that Baker does in this piece to dismiss the sincerity of people’s outrage and chalk it up to groupthink.
What I’m Thinking
Turning down the distortion
My dad saw two of my bands play while he was in New York for my birthday. His advice after both shows was identical: turn down the distortion and the effects on all the guitars.
I’m reluctant to go straight into an amp because I do like modulation and delays and sustaining reverbs and expression pedals. But there is value in not using too much distortion and even though I felt like my current guitar rig was lower-gain than it has been, I decided to turn down the distortion.
So far, I’m happy with the results. Reducing some of the flub and low-end on the boosts that push my distortion channel does allow instruments to come through with more clarity. I did tweak my amp’s settings a bit to make these changes, primarily by trading in saturation and gain for increased treble and harmonic quality at lower distortion levels. It’s a trade-off worth considering for any guitar player who likes distortion pedals.
To hammer my point home, I’ve linked to a YouTube video where a guitar player takes a shot at recreating the guitar tone of AC/DC’s Angus Young. The comments will point out (correctly) that Angus’ amps were modded to run hotter (more distortion) and that he used the volume knobs on a Schaffer-Vega wireless cable system to boost his amp’s output, but forget all that. Listen to how crisp and articulate every note is in this video with the amp’s channel volume (on a plexi Marshall, the channel volume also serves as gain) at a gentle 6.
For a more contemporary example of music that is hard as fuck with minimal amounts of distortion, I’ve linked below to a live video of Tera Melos’ Trash Generator:
Take particular note of the heaviness at 1:12 in the video. The bass and drums do the heavy lifting here in the low end and the guitar provides clear mid-range content that does not oversaturate and impose upon the other instruments.
Civility and talking politics with The Other
I went to an event at NYU last week about speaking across the aisle. The attendees of the event seemed to trend toward younger undergrads and white-haired MSNBC viewers who miss the days when political discourse was civil. The highlight of the event was a discussion between Amina Amdeen, an Iraqi-American refugee, and her uncle. Amdeen came to some prominence in a documentary film, (Un)dvided, where she recounts the story of her friendship with Joseph Weidknecht, a Trump supporter from Michigan. The friendship between those two sparked during a rally in Austin, Texas, where Weidknecht had a MAGA hat snatched from his head and Amdeen rushed to defend him.
At the event I attended, Amdeen recounted the story of their first encounter. Seeing the hat ripped off his head, she said, reminded her of people trying to rip the hijab off of her head. Weidknecht and Amdeen became something like pen pals and would discuss politics. Their discussions softened Weidknecht’s views on Islam, which were practically Neo-Nazi adjacent before Amdeen.
Weidknecht did not attend the event at NYU and it has been years since he and Amdeen corresponded with any regularity. In his absence, Amdeen brought her uncle, Ghassan, to this event. Ghassan is also an Iraqi-American refugee, but he is a former Trump voter who has consciously taken a step back from politics to focus on family. Only when it is closer to the election, Ghassan explained, that he would engage with politics and decide who to vote for. Both Amina and Ghassan lamented that Biden and Trump were their only tangible choices for president in 2024. I’m still a Bernie Bro at heart, Amina told the crowd.
The reason that Amina and Ghassan could civilly speak about politics is that their bond was deep before the 2016 election. This bond allowed them to question each other’s politics from a place of love and respect. Amina had some helpful advice for engaging with people of political factions. Ask these people questions that don’t have to do with politics, she said. Make them feel like you care about them. These are simple but undoubtedly effective suggestions and in my own life, I’ve also found that speaking politics with people after knowing them in a personal or professional capacity is possible specifically because our relationship to each other was not formed around politics.
But if we are not placed in circumstances that allow us to create bonds that are at first, apolitical, how do we ever reach the point of having political discussions with people we disagree with?
In my experience, these apolitical bonds need to happen in a social or professional environment in which politics is not centered. Living in a big city like New York does make that easier.
But what of people who live in places where such social interaction is more difficult? What of WFH employees who live in suburban sprawls where they move from place to place in their car? How often are they presented with opportunities to create apolitical bonds with others?
If I lived in one of those such towns and had a job where I worked from home, I would, frankly, be picky about the type of places I frequent for social interaction. I would seek out people I perceive to be in my in-groups or have shared values with. Frankly, I’d rather sus out the vibes of a few bars to find my perceived in-group and try and frequent a place that hits my sweet spot rather than, say, frequent an Irish bar crawling with cops.
I’m probably not the only person who prefers to hang out with my in-groups rather than with out-groups. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to seek out social comfort. I suppose I’m more willing to expose myself to social discomfort if it has a wage attached to it, which is why I think many learn to work alongside people we disagree with or are not fond of.
So what other opportunities do we have to bond with people on apolitical grounds? Luckily in New York, we have plenty of chances to do such things. I play basketball at the many parks in Brooklyn. I’m sure I’ve passed the ball to misogynistic adolescents and people with anti-Semitic beliefs and so on — that’s simple math. A city like New York has the infrastructure to push strangers together, whether it’s at a public park working together to defend a pick-and-roll or pressed up against each other on the B38 bus that goes through wealthy neighborhoods like Fort Greene and poorer, gentrifying ones like Bed-Stuy.
I feel somewhat dogmatic about my belief that proximity to other people makes people more amenable to political beliefs that value the lives and dignity of others. I am making a lazy material analysis here but I am also not wrong to make some connection between the more left-leaning politics of metropolitan areas compared to the more conservative ones of rural and suburban places where human interaction is intentional and often by necessity.
My dogmatism is, perhaps, not unlike the dogmatism that guided Francis Fukayama’s belief in the “The End of History.” Now that the USSR had fallen, Fukayama wrote, Western liberal democracy was the inevitable and final evolution of human political ideology — we had only simply to wait for every government to embrace this inevitably and neoliberal technocrats would tinker till the end of time.
Fukayama has been proven dead wrong. But I kind of understand how one comes to feel dogmatic about what is right. Of course, I believe funding a robust public transit system is right, and doing so would make us kinder to each other via familiarity. Of course, I believe it is right to reduce people’s reliance on cars to turn parking lots into parks and affordable housing. Of course, single-payer healthcare for all citizens is right, even for those whose political views I condemn. Of course, I believe these views could be appreciated by strangers if I had the chance to create bonds with them in apolitical contexts before learning about their politics.
What I ultimately found frustrating about this event at NYU was that it offered little to no blueprint for where people could make apolitical bonds that could eventually turn into political discussion. I do believe that political civility and discourse need to be stimulated by policies that create bonds between humans. But without opportunities to have those encounters, Amina’s advice to ask people questions about their interests and talk about things other than politics felt idealistic and not reflective of the social bonds, or lack of, many Americans are condemned to by policy.