It’s been a while since I’ve updated this page. My intent was to keep this a place to check in roughly quarterly, but the last 14 months have made a lot of intentions go out the window.

Some things happening now:

• I decided to go back to small group training at the gym, feeling confident in their protocols and my own protection due to having received the vaccine. After a month, the results have been great, both physical and mental.
• We have booked a vacation. I will be getting on a plane for the first time in about a month.
• I went to a restaurant and sat for dinner, indoors, for the first time.
• When I have extra time and brain space, I’m trying to make my way through some Elixir courses.
• Some things I might have blogged or shared publicly in some way in the past I am now redirecting to Day One.
• I have entirely stopped posting to Instagram in favor of posting photos here.
• A while back I added a Uses page that I’m trying to keep up to date.

I still feel like my world is uneven. There are still stutter steps and false starts. Many of the changes of the past year linger on, some permanent, others hard to shake off. I don’t know if I think the rest of 2021 will feel normal or better, but I’m hoping.

Current Home Screen

I feel like home screens require some more explanation these days. The widget on the top has both Carrot Weather and Fantastical. The smaller widget has Lose It with my remaining calories and macros in the stack as well. I do have a “page 2”, and that page has an expanded, agenda-style widget from Fantastical on top and the 8 Siri Suggestion apps widget on bottom.

Previous Now Page - March 2020

I have family in Israel that I love. I have had three incredible trips there, including the very last trip my grandmother made. In some ways, there’s no where I want to go more with Elsa and with my parents, who haven’t gone since the early 80s.

I cannot in good conscious spend money in Israel.

I have had complex feelings about Israel nearly all of my life, but the rightward swing of its government and people in the last 10-15 years is not complicated.

Because of my frustration with bad UX and no visible product improvements, I was already internally discussing leaving Basecamp behind at Allovue. Now that I know they’re a milkshake duck, we’ll be cancelling within the week.

For what it’s worth, we started doing Shape Up— it kind of works. There are pieces that are really well aligned to the way we do product, but a whole lot that does not work at all if you’re not a mature product throwing off a few million that you make only incremental feature improvements on.

Things we’ve liked:

• Scoping work to 2 or 6 week long stretches is pretty natural/doable.
• Bringing together leadership to talk about and confirm our direction every 8 weeks is great.
• Developers creating their own tasks is mostly great.

Things that we’ve not figured out:

• Bug and chores are not really a thing people want to do in “cooldown” & hard to “spend” budget on upfront.
• Greenfield projects and ideas are hard to write 2-6 week pitches versus “see how far we get”
• Devs would rather do work than make tasks.

Things I need to do now:

• Codify what we keep somewhere that doesn’t send people to Shape Up.
• Quickly choose a better tool than Basecamp that can serve a similar role— to be a place for research, pitch writing, and ultimately, task management for devs.

I’ve always found Basecamp to be a weird company with weird founders that sometimes said really interesting things that I 70% liked and 30% cringed. There were things to admire, not the least of which was their success at achieving total financial independence. But the product is just… not that good. And their current situation with “politics” and “society” issues can only be interpreted one way:

They said they wanted to grow and be more diverse and better, but as soon as their absolute control was challenged, they took their ball and went home.

“At least in my experience, it has always been centered on what is happening at Basecamp,” said one employee — who, like most of those I spoke with today, requested anonymity so as to freely discuss internal deliberations. “What is being done at Basecamp? What is being said at Basecamp? And how it is affecting individuals? It has never been big political discussions, like ‘the postal service should be disbanded,’ or ‘I don’t like Amy Klobuchar.’

Hansson’s response to this employee took aback many of the workers I spoke with. He dug through old chat logs to find a time when the employee in question participated in a discussion about a customer with a funny-sounding name. Hansson posted the message — visible to the entire company — and dismissed the substance of the employee’s complaint. ❡Two other employees were sufficiently concerned by the public dressing-down of a colleague that they filed complaints with Basecamp’s human resources officer. (HR declined to take action against the company co-founder.)

– from Casey Newton’s Platformer, What really happened at Basecamp

Over the course of that 10-day Moral Quandaries case investigation and discussion, it became clear to me that the only way to move you two was to prostrate myself. To violate my own sense of personal privacy and list out in excruciating detail example after example of how I have experienced hate and harassment. So I did, and at the end, hate speech and harassment were added to the list.

– Jane Yang, Basecamp Data Analyst

Change is fucking hard. I’m sure people have left Allovue thinking we wouldn’t change. I’ve been here long enough to know we are constantly changing. We have fucked up for sure, but we try and do better every time. There are still struggles we go through. I still have struggled mightily to attract non-White, non-male candidates every time I hire for the product team– like, single digit percent of all applicants. I have personally struggled with building strong relationships across teams at different times and making sure people feel heard. There have been conversations where I failed to speak up and support the way I could have and should have as an ally. Worse, there have been times I didn’t even realize that I needed to because I didn’t see what was happening in front of me. I struggle daily with being a White guy, in a position of societal privilege and power but with actual positional authority in the company that I don’t always realize I walk in the room with. I struggle with how to struggle as a full person in front of people.

This shit is hard. I have made mistakes. I am sure there’s a host of skeletons in my closet. Some things that left a mark on me, but worse, things that I don’t even see as remarkable in my own life. My feeling about this is the only thing I can’t do is take my ball and go home. I don’t know that my mistakes are excusable, and I hope they are redeemable. I hope they are fewer and far between. But mostly, I think the greatest sin of all would be deciding to use my power and privilege to stop struggling at all.

The worst thing I could do is use my power to enhance my own safety.

One thing I try and do a lot more of these days, with some success, is try really hard about being explicit about my feelings and where I’m at, especially if I start to get that sour feeling that my tone is not lined up with my actual feelings.

A weird thing about positional power is you don’t realize that your own excitement, intensity, bad mood, and feelings in general can start people down a path and feeling a certain way you don’t want. Sometimes, because we’re human, our feelings leak into how we communicate, but those feelings are not always about what we’re talking about or who we’re talking to. But that’s obviously how anyone you’re talking with will see them.

So after I critique a piece of writing, I might say, “By the way, to be clear, this is already much better and much closer to what it needs to be. My critique is detailed and specific and strong because it’s so much closer to what we need." Or I might say, “Sorry, I’m just having a morning and I wanted to make sure I really understood that feedback so I knew if this was going to throw my day for a tailspin." Or I might try and talk out loud about why I’m asking the questions like, “I’m just trying to figure out if this is specific to this customer, to a particular data situation, or a general thing.”

I don’t know if it helps, but it can be really hard for me to modulate my tone or how people read the way I write or communicate and much easier for me to say out loud “here’s what’s going on in my head right now”.

Because there are going to be times where I am not at my best and don’t have my best faculties, I try and really do my best when I can. I hope that if I can show the thoughtfulness I wish I always had when I’m at my best, I will be afforded some grace when I fall short.

What happens when you can’t have a political conversation at work?

Political conversation continues at work, between coworkers. If these are conversations that people were having when it was “ok”, they are going to keep having them in “unsanctioned” ways. The politics now just become a little less visible.

What happens when you can’t have a political conversation at work?

By making people feel unsafe discussing anything “political” at work will result in screwing up. All of our work is to build systems and processes that other people have to interact with. Bias, unfairness, and unintended consequences are always built in. If employees cannot object on “political” grounds, you will miss the ways that your system/process/product gets it wrong.

What happens when you can’t have a political conversation at work?

People who have power in your company will continue to voice opinions that they don’t even acknowledge or recognize as politics. Power and privilege is all about a shallow understanding of how your own actions are not apolitical, they are just aligned with existing power.

Politics at work

Politics at work does not mean campaigning or soliciting for campaigns. It does not mean an endless battle royale of cable news level debate among coworkers in a Slack all day long. Politics at work looks like:

• Are we paying women and men the same for doing the same job?
• Are our recruiting and hiring practices leading to a non-diverse workforce and missing out on great people who should work here?
• What problems does our company solve and for whom?
  • How do we solve those problems?
• How can we make sure our employees are safe at work, but also feel safe when the various things in the world, out of their control makes them so unsafe? This is not because safe workers are productive workers, although they are. This is because we give a fuck.

Workers don’t choose their work any more than their family. Some people have highly desirable skills that lets them choose wherever they work and change on a whim, but most people need their jobs, took the offer at the only job that gave them one, and don’t have the safety to just exit. But employers do choose their employees, and this asymmetry is critical to remember. The power that gives employers is considerable. So employees do limit their speech for fear, and that’s totally understandable. That power also means that employers need to take seriously their responsibility to care for their employees. We chose them, we want them here, we need them, and we have too much power to not bend to care.

The city’s design review board did things like postpone the approval of a 400-unit, transit-oriented development with 168 subsidized homes because they didn’t like the color, the presence of a ground-floor day care, the shape of the façade, and the ground-floor residential units. A “passive house” project—six stories, 45 units, ultralow energy use—was required to attend a third meeting after the board asked for more bricks, though it eventually approved the building without bricks, 19 months after the builders first applied.

From this great piece in Slate on the ways that we build in huge construction costs not because of the cost of better designed buildings, but instead, because of the cost of appeasing design review boards that you have the right aesthetics.

I’ve had two successful runs at getting healthier and losing weight in my adult life. One involved very close dieting, done at a time when my life was more routine and far less stressful. The other involved an expensive gym that was entirely scheduled, small group training, coupled with dieting that was not quite as extreme.

About six months before the pandemic, I stopped going to the gym with small group training. I had been there a few years. I felt I learned how to work out successfully, how to keep a routine, and what to do. I thought maybe I could save a little money and try and do this on my own. My travel schedule was increasingly erratic, and it was stressful trying to find my three slots a week to head to the gym. My consistent 12-14 days a month started to drop to 10, so it felt like time to try. I didn’t do great in those six months before the shut down– I did go to the gym more often than past memberships would suggest, but my 10 days a month dropped to 3-6 pretty quickly.

We have plenty of space to work out from at home, and during the pandemic we were all set to make that happen. Elsa has done a pretty great job getting on the bike, doing yoga, and occasionally a bit more. I have not. My motivation to do anything in this time but get to work and get to bed has been poor, at best.

Throughout the pandemic, my old gym still sent emails. I was very impressed with their protocols. It’s one of the places I might have trusted most to go indoors during this time. But I wasn’t ready to spend the money or the time, and I wasn’t motivated in the slightest to go.

Now I’m fully vaccinated, and I’m unhappy with my health. I’m snoring again. I’m often tired from lack of good sleep. It’s just, not what I want or need to be. I feel worse, and the math is pretty simple. I’m sleeping 7 hours and 20 minutes a night versus 7 hours and 40 minutes when I went to the gym. I consistently weighed 7-10% less than right now, all while I was much stronger. So this morning, mask on, I got back on the horse. Tomorrow I will be sore. Monday I will go back. No more staying in bed until after 9. No more once or twice a week taking a longer walk and calling that enough.

Let’s see how I do this time.

The Internet has generated one huge machine to press upon every self-doubt I have. Any small victory looks paltry when compared against the people I think are great, who are all the more greater as time goes on and it’s easier and easier to be exposed to the true Rockstars. We are all surrounded by the best of the best of the best at what they do, or at least, people who are very good at promoting that version of themselves.

Too few of us, myself included, will ever be that kind of rockstar. I am not going to be one of the top 100 or even top 10,000 people in the world at anything I try to do. There are too many people, too much brilliance to hope for that. I am old enough and exposed enough to know I don’t shine that bright. Honestly, I’m mostly fine with that, though I can imagine how much healthier my self image would be if my world was smaller, even as I would be so much poorer for not knowing what else there was.

That’s why it’s so powerful when someone else truly believes in you. I will not be a rockstar. I’m not a rockstar. I have little hope of being a rockstar. I see that completely and objectively. But having someone in your life who sees that in you, who believes that potential exists but for luck and opportunity, is still so powerful. On the surface, I might believe the are delusional or exaggerating. But in my heart, it makes me wish I could prove them right.

I am better, because I have other people who truly believe in me, people I treasure and respect. It makes me want to be who they see and pushes me farther than I could go on my own.

From /r/dataisbeautiful, a dose of reality to the many who still have not come to grips with how serious this pandemic was in the United States.

Slave-owners were particularly afraid of allowing democratic control over property because they were literally afraid of their property. They were haunted by the threat of slave insurrections, as well as foreign armies turning their slaves into enemy soldiers through offers of freedom (as the British had recently done). Einhorn concludes that “if property rights have enjoyed unusual sanctity in the United States, it may be because this nation was founded in a political situation in which the owners of one very significant form of property thought their holdings were insecure.”

How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism

Perhaps the only piece I’ve read in Jacobin that I’ve liked.

What Leno gets wrong is exactly the headline, “In my heart, I knew it was wrong.”

This quote is more honest:

“At the time I did those jokes, I genuinely thought them to be harmless.”

That’s real. What he thought was wrong, and he should have figured out that he was wrong sooner, and today he knows that.

Forgiveness requires contrition. And I do believe that Leno is contrite, but that’s not for me to decide. We’re doomed if we cannot find a way to forgive anyone for any transgression in society, but we (largely white men) also need to do a better job. We need to learn faster and better, by listening more often and more closely. Part of that is learning how to apologize.

Leno said things in the past that he thought were funny. He thought they did not create harm, directly or indirectly. He failed to listen to peoples’ pain, and he failed to consider their pain or impact adequately before making these statements to begin with. We all do this at times, especially when we’re young, though hopefully not so much by the time we’re adult professionals.

Own it. Be wrong. There was no “In my heart, I knew it was wrong.” You didn’t feel anything in your heart at all about it. If you did, it would mean that your empathy was triggered and there’s no way you would have made those jokes, or stood behind them when called out.

I have said terrible things I wish I could forget. But worse, I have said terrible things I have forgotten because in my heart, they meant nothing to me. I feel sadly certain that I will do so again.

I am sorry. I hope I learn better, faster. But when my heart knows anything at all, it prevents me from making those mistakes. That’s its job.

This tweet was originally embedded but has been replaced with a screenshot due to changes in the Twitter service

Prospect has that look, the industrial, aged, space junk of our 1980s future. There’s only three days left before this system is going to be abandoned by civilization, but there’s riches to be found on the surface first. We begin with Damon and his teenage daughter, Cee. Damon is a drug user, a hustler, and broke. Their pod is broke. He’s pushing to do this one last job in the small amount of time they have left.

They land on a lush forest world, the Green, whose air is full of a particulate dust that makes for a beautiful reflective haze over all things. We learn that Damon can remove a gem from dangerous, living deposits found in the Green, and although they quickly find one worth plenty to change Cee and Damon’s fortunes, it’s not enough. They’re in the Green because Damon has been hired by mercenaries to dig up a cache that will make everyone rich.

In comes Ezra (Pedro Pascale) and Number 2, also diggers in the Green who stumble upon Damon and make clear that life in the Green is not just dangerous because of the elements. Without getting too deep into spoilers, the remainder of the movie is 2 parts Western, 1 part survivalist, including meeting settlers and the mercenaries.

This movie does all the things I love about smaller sci-fi. It lets its characters live and act in the world authentically, not explaining every step of the way but instead just showing us what crude space living is. The tension is there— can they get back on time, will they get back with their bounty, and what will it take out of them— but so is plenty of time to appreciate the beauty of this world. The contrast of our Earthly, almost fairy-like forrest with the gas giant that dominates an open vista above, we get the best of first contact/colonist/new world space exploration alongside the Ridley Scott-like set design for all things industrial, including extensive use of simple machines with clean lines, dirty nylons, small single-purpose screens, ruggedized parts, and a foreign glyph for writing.

What can I say? I love Westerns and I love this kind of low budget sci-fi about a dirty, industrial, hard space. Prospect was a movie that was made for me.

It feels strange to watch Call Me By Your Name post the revelations about Armie Hammer. I know why this movie was so acclaimed. The cinematography is magnificent. The setting, idyllic. I spent much of my time while watching this movie fantasizing about a world where you summer in a gorgeous Italian countryside home within a fruit orchard, swimming, riding your bike into town, reading, and playing music, without, of course, the internet.

I was drawn to a few scenes in particular. In our opening, as Oliver (Hammer) pulls up to the villa, he’s exhausted from jet lag and travel and collapses into bed in the late afternoon only to emerge the following morning. I found myself wistful for international travel, knowing that loopy feeling of a long flight with little sleep, walking out into a time that feels all wrong, in a brand new place that feels as foreign as it is. There’s something special about that tired first 24 hours in a new country. It’s a feeling I’ve missed in this long pandemic year.

When Elio (Timothée Chalamet) reveals his feelings to Oliver around a World War I memorial, the camera work is perfect. Looking up and down just like an unsure teenager’s head would bob around as they fearfully reveal a deep truth. Elio and Oliver are set across from each other, far apart as confessions are made, with the camera following their circling of the monument, allowing the monument to obscure them both just as they are out of sight with each other.

Overall, this movie is just too long. It’s well-paced, but it’s beauty cannot overcome the fact that I don’t feel the fear, or the heartbreak, or even the elation of the young love. I saw it, but I didn’t feel it, and so Call Me By Your Name was beautiful, but flat.

I wish there were more movies like this one, but I didn’t like this one very much.

Look, testing this year is likely to be a disaster. The option to wait until the fall is an especially good one. But anyone who doubts there’s value in any testing happening should look to everyone who says that schools will be “overfunded” with the latest round of ESSER/ARP money.

They will be “overfunded” only in the sense that they have an actual increase in money to spend. A generation of students whose schooling has been interrupted and/or disrupted are going to need extra supports to get back on track, and that is going to take extra resources. Without the achievement data that shows this, the (largely right wing) commentariat are out in force to say that schools have too much money that they will surely waste.

Forget about extra expenses related to COVID-19 that have already occurred. There are new needed supports that require resources to make sure a generation of students get the education they deserve. Frankly, we weren’t doing that great on that measure before the pandemic.

News of the end of Indie.vc didn’t really surprise me. I thought, “Yes, this is a great example of trying to have all the advantages of the VC label and the Indie label and it’s going to match no one’s pattern and may not even make sense.” But this week, with more of the results and challenges revealed, I have swapped to the same disappointment others have expressed.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned working at a start up, it’s that our capital markets are an irrational mess, and successful more by chance than strategy.

As I shared this frustration with a friend and LP, they replied “you’re playing a value hand in a growth game”. They were absolutely right. The way the startup game is played, even compelling fundamentals take a distant back seat to how much money companies are raising, at what valuation they are raising it, and which top-tier firm is leading the raise. This is not a knock; rather, an acknowledgment that those are the rules. I tried to play by a different set of rules and got burned.

I’m sorry– this is should be a knock. We’d have a better, richer world ¹ if we could get the capital markets to play a value hand rather than the illusory growth hand every single time. The growth hand only works for a small number of investors with a small number of companies focused narrowly on a particular type of problem and solution.

If you’re using the Bigfoot plug-in on Micro.blog, I recommend reinstalling. I added two options last night.

First, you can now choose if your footnotes are numbered or just get ….

Second, I added the ability to specify what CSS selector your posts are separated by. This allows you to have numbering reset by post on index pages and anywhere multiple posts are seen. Before, if you had two posts with footnotes on the front page, your second post might start with footnote 5 (if the first post had four footnotes).

We sure do have a lot of crumbling infrastructure in the US. But I can’t help but to think a lot of the infrastructure gap comes from past policies subsidizing unsustainable development of rural areas and the suburbs. Imagine if instead of building highways to empty land to develop single-family suburban detached homes, we built trains to new village centers that were mixed use, mixed income, and mixed form housing.

America fetishizes community, until that community because pluralist and mixed-race. Then we began to fetishize individualism instead, just in time to lock up centuries of advantage. We glorify the frontier. We exalt the family homestead. We command dominion over all lands. And so, America has large suburban pastures stretched well beyond the municipal limits with sewers, roads, bridges, power lines, copper, and fiber. We borrowed long term debt for systems that would last decades and road population growth driven by immigration (but not those immigrants, and no longer) and cheap energy that borrowed from the future’s climate to pay down these huge initial investments. Through government subsidies and programs, we created a new homeowner class, handing wealth to whites in the form of a tangible asset. Those assets depreciate, but slowly, so slowly that it would take more than a lifetime to notice.

Once established in our new homes and new suburbs and new cars, segregated and building familial wealth, it was easy to ignore the maintenance. New stuff rarely breaks. America builds best. It’s easy enough to fix things once they need to be fixed. Maintenance investment is not sexy. On the other side of those projects, things work as expected. There’s nothing new to show off. No accomplishments to put your name on. Our predecessors built this, what have I got to show for my time? And so, we ignore the slow rot that stretches across our infrastructure. We built unsustainably, and every social, political, and cultural incentive line up to add more, even less sustainable infrastructure.

It doesn’t help that America built itself up during the Cold War. Communism, our mortal enemy, sought to plan. America’s muscular capitalism would never make that mistake.

And then came the greed. The America of the 80s inherited the investments of the first half of the 20th century and everything “worked” splendidly, if you were the kind of person who had resources already. Government spending and investment was not seen as the supporting platform on top of which our wealth was generated, but instead was stealing from the deserving winners in our so-called meritocracy. The spiral of disinvestment was solidified right as the ratio of benefits to current costs on our infrastructure hit its peak.

It is no wonder why so many parts of America crumbles, forgotten. Rot is everywhere, often unseen. It’s fueled by white flight. It’s fueled by individualism. It’s fueled by neo-frontierism, and Manifest Destiny. It’s fueled by power and privilege.

The solutions will take decades, if not centuries. Some places do not work in America. Truthfully, they never have, not in any long term way. More and more cities and towns will die, as they often have throughout history on the far reaches of human occupation. Illusory wealth created will fade, and individuals and their families will be hurt by no fault of their own. We will have to build new forms, make a different set of investments that slowly reshapes our country. We will have to do so with an eye toward sustainability, for the planet and for future inhabitants of our communities.

Or we won’t, and the problems will continue, and we will decline, fighting instead to slow the fall and avoid collapse, giving up on a great future because it requires change.

Cherry was almost certainly a better book than a movie. It’s told in parts, including an epilogue, and it feels rushed in film. Do all the essential notes of a complex story of young love, war, poverty and PTSD, self-destruction, and reemergence get hit? Yes. But it ends up feeling like many movies I’ve seen before put together in one place, each executed well, but with the whole just coming up feeling a bit dull.

There’s nothing dull about Tom Holland or Ciara Bravo, who are electrifying together and apart. At the start of the movie, I felt like their love and the point of view of Cherry (Tom Holland) was too obsessed with the male gaze and a fucked up version of masculinity that I’m just over with. But I came to really enjoy their relationship, for all its toxicity, and was wrapped up in their life and their struggle. It was a bit hard for me to believe everything about them, adorable as it was, prior to Cherry going off to war, but once he returns, their relationship becomes the most real thing in the film.

I’m glad to see Tom Holland in a different light, but I already liked him. Ciara Bravo is new to me, and I hope I will see her for a long time. She seamlessly transitioned from an adept, if tired, manic pixie dream girl to trying to be supportive wife to full on heroin addict. Each transition is only one scene, and if it weren’t executed with her considerable skill, it would have broken the film.

An undeniable cast. The best use of fan service and callbacks of just about any “late sequel” I’ve seen. Does Coming 2 America capture the magic of the original? This is no classic. But did I enjoy it all throughout? Yes.

Each time the movie felt like it dragged a bit, it provided a moment that rewarded those of us who have seen the original a hundred times.

Perhaps the greatest flaw in Coming 2 America is it focus on Lavelle Junson (Jermain Fowler) over the more interesting daughters of Akeem (Eddie Murphy). Princess Meeka (KiKi Layne) was a far richer and more interesting character than her half-brother; so was Mirembe (Nomzamo Mbatha). And in spite of the inspired casting of Leslie Jones as Mary Junson, the talented women who stole every one of their scenes are under utilized.

Nearly all notable members of the original cast returns, which I found more delightful than tired. A quiet scene in McDowell’s of Zumunda with Cleo (John Amos) is one of the film’s best, and a surprise cameo by Fresh Peaches and Sugar Cube (the beat boxing twins from the club in the original’s dating montage) is a highlight.

Will I watch this again? Probably not. But was I glad to spend a Friday night with these characters? Absolutely.

As an elder millenial, I am now in that perfect age to see:

1. How much the world has changed in just the last 15 years;
2. How much I have changed in the last 15 years;
3. How little all the areas I have chosen to engage in any form of activism have changed in the last 15 years.

I now am forced to wonder if we’ll make any progress on the problems I care about, or if instead, my only real hope is new problems eclipse them in importance.

It’s not like nothing gets better by any stretch, but there’s so much stagnation. So many battles are fought on an inter-generational timescale.

It’s easy to see how more committed activists burn out, and even easier to see why some despair so hugely at a single loss. Sometimes losing a single battle ends any hope that they will live to see the change they fight for in this world.

A good friend of mine for decades has long identified as conservative. In a recent conversation, we discussed his support for single-payer health insurance, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants (in part to get national ID laws that are fair and free), and more.

When they expressed their support for lower taxes and limited government, I asked “what does lower mean?”

He answered, “as low as possible.”

I said, “As low as possible to support what the government needs to be run successfully, yes?"

“Yes.”

“Ok, so then when you say limited government, you mean limited to what? What’s something the government does today that you don’t think it should be doing?”

They admitted, “That’s a good question.” They had no specific examples, and when we dug into a couple of ideas (transit was one), it was relatively easy to convince him that it’s very possible the government should be doing this work.

In the end, their conservatism largely came down to a statement I let go by, unready and unwilling to engage with it at the moment. They off-handedly said, “Well I’ll never be a democrat, because I don’t believe an 8 year old should be able to declare their gender.”

Honestly, I wasn’t ready to address the casual transphobia that I know was informed by beliefs they were taught in their church. The conversation was primarily focused on the mess that is the current GOP around voting.

But it’s bothered me for days since that I didn’t confront them about their casual transphobia. In fact, the whole conversation was about how liberals shut down conservatives by having clear moral lines when, in fact, they could and should convince more conservatives that their policies are good. And within that context, it felt like a really tough thing to dig into their beliefs on social issues.

Yet, causal transphobia being left unchallenged will spread.

What I wish I had said, even if it was just briefly at the end was this. “Before you dismiss the experience of trans people entirely, I think you should have a conversation with someone who is trans. Learn about their experiences. I wonder if after that, you could find it in your heart to have a lot more kindness and compassion to accept them as people.”

Go into In and Of Itself cold. Watch it with the lights out. That’s all I want to say about it.

A good overview on important work in school finance. The flat-to-regressive financing of schools nationwide represents a failure of state finance systems to overcome the inequities introduced by having local-based funding and control of schools.

The core purpose of state funding (and federal funding) is to take advantage of better funded, larger jurisdictions to do redistributive policy that counteracts the unequal opportunity caused by local funding. Our national failure to drive enough dollars through states through sufficiently progressive mechanisms results in a failure to equalize opportunity.

This is the real reason why zip codes define the destiny of children. It is not about district effectiveness or efficiency, but instead about district starvation of resources to meet the challenges they face, while others are awash in the money they need.

When we say we favor local control of education, we are advocating for maintaining a tiered system of access to resources and school quality. We are saying the rent or mortgage parents can afford and/or the distance they can travel for work defines the opportunity for their children.

Layering on our history of housing segregation and the drawing of school district and municipal boundaries to explicitly create white and not white, have and have not schools and communities, school finance fairness serves as a quantified keyhole through which we observe a state-supported caste system in the US.

Chef is a movie for anyone who loves food and loves cooking. No surprises there. But if you like watching competent people in the kitchen make food that looks incredible, I’m not sure any other movie competes.

The cast is fantastic. Favreau and Leguizamo are great, but every role, big or small received the same careful attention. Oliver Platt, Amy Sedaris, and Bobby Cannavale are stand outs.

Despite the call outs to Vine, the idea that Twitter is novel and hard to understand, or the skepticism of food trucks that firmly place Chef in its time, the movie hardly feels dated. It’s a classic story— middle-aged man who has lost his way and neglected his family rediscovering himself and rebuilding his relationship with his son along the way.

But here’s the thing— if you make a movie that has beautiful cooking and shows off Cubanos, beignets, and brisket from Franklin’s? I’m going to show up. And in this year, when I haven’t been able to travel to these places that I went every year to eat the food that makes those places special… damn that hits.