Enrolling in law school only made things worse. My law school and its overarching university are not on the same page about AI. UCLA has embraced the new technology. It was the first university in California to offer enterprise-level ChatGPT. The business school hosts an annual Embracing AI summit. Undergraduates are encouraged to use AI to assist with their learning.

But in the law school, AI remains controversial. For example, all first-year law students complete a year-long Legal Research and Writing (LRW) course. In the fall semester, we were instructed that any suspected use of AI to complete our final paper would result in a report of an academic violation — serious business for any student, but doubly so for law students, whose academic violations are reported to the state bar examiners.

The prohibition made sense to me. I have to learn how to write like a lawyer if I am going to become one. But a rule that seemed simple on its face became more complex the longer I worked on my paper. Like most law students and practicing attorneys, we have access to the two main legal databases, Westlaw and LexisNexis. Both platforms offer AI-assisted research.

These tools do not generate text that could go in a paper, nor do they edit previously written work. But they do greatly streamline the time-consuming process of legal research. Would the use of WestLaw’s AI Deep Research have constituted cheating? What about uploading a finished paper to a more generic AI platform like Gemini or ChatGPT purely for grammar and spelling edits?

In case anyone from UCLA or the California State Bar is reading, I never tried. I was far too scared that I would accidentally do something prohibited.

However, when we returned in the spring for the second half of LRW, we were told that not only was the use of AI no longer cheating, we were required to use AI as part of our research1. If we did not wish to use AI, we were required to submit a statement of ethical objection.

To make matters even more confusing, the school had also granted us accounts for Harvey. The platform is a more complete AI dedicated entirely to legal issues, as if ChatGPT had only read law school casebooks and the Constitution.

But the announcement of semi-mandatory use of AI was not made in a vacuum. The class of 2028 was also informed that, for the first time in the law school’s history, we would be required to complete an in-class graded writing assignment before we finished LRW. While never officially confirmed by the administration, faculty and students knew the real reason for the surprise assignment: rampant use of AI by students when writing the fall semester’s paper.

The mixed messaging is overwhelming. We cannot use AI to complete assignments, except when it is required. The school will report you to the bar for using AI when it is not allowed, but the school will also get you hooked on legal AI tools so you encourage your future law firm to purchase them. Meanwhile, the state’s flagship law school is banning AI for nearly all work beginning this fall. And if you graduate, pass the bar, and submit an AI-authored briefing to a court, you are risking your law license.

After close to four years of mainstream discourse and an academic year steeped in AI discussions, I still cannot make up my mind about how I feel about the technology. It seems clear to me that we are not on the verge of true artificial intelligence, like what is shown in the movies Her or Terminator.

And I have a lot of ethical concerns about AI that turn me off from embracing it further. Corporations are evangelizing AI to excuse job cuts, especially of entry-level roles. Each 100-word AI prompt uses the equivalent of a bottle’s worth of water, and AI is on track to require more electricity than one-fifth of the entire United States by 2028. Disinformation, which was already a major problem on social media, is now harder to detect than ever thanks to increasingly accurate deepfakes. And AI is still impossible to trust.

Each of these issues on its own would be enough to give me pause about adopting the new technology. However, my biggest hang-up with AI is its roots in piracy.

I am not a copyright aficionado. My heart does not weep for Warner Bros. or Penguin Random House. But something will never sit right with me about the world’s largest tech firms building their most valuable products on the backs of every newspaper article, book, script, and blog post ever published to the internet without paying a dime of compensation.

Meta, currently the tenth-most valuable publicly traded company in the world, ripped the entire Library Genesis dataset to train its AI model. For those who have not been a student in the last 15 years, Library Genesis, or LibGen, is the most popular site for pirating textbooks. It also contains millions of novels, nonfiction books, and scholarly articles.

When I was a sophomore, one of my dormmates torrented a season of the show Suits. He was warned the next day by the university’s IT department that, if he did so again, he would have his access to the school’s internet revoked for the remainder of his time as a student. The RIAA and MPAA spent much of the early 2000s suing teenagers and grandmothers for $100,000 per song for Napster-style piracy. But when Meta or OpenAI or Anthropic do the same thing, their share prices (or projected IPO valuations) climb higher and higher.

Meanwhile, corporate leaders want to replace creative roles with AI-generated text and imagery. The writers and artists whose jobs are being taken away created the work upon which AI models were built. In the back of my mind for my final year as a communications manager was the needling realization that the communications field may not survive long enough for me to build a career.

There is nothing more human than creation for creation’s sake. I would rather read the worst human-authored fan fiction imaginable than an AI-generated novel. A kindergartener’s finger-painting has more magic to me than an AI-generated movie.

So I resisted using AI for as long as I could. Working at a media outlet that covered environmental issues made AI avoidance easy, as it is hard to envision a more AI-opposed workplace.

But it is clear to me now that AI is here to stay. Its functions have been needlessly shoved into every facet of our lives, and it is far from the panacea for all our problems Silicon Valley wants it to be, but it is not going away. The perfect comparison is the internet.

In the late 1990s, as the internet reached the general population, Silicon Valley and Wall Street lost their minds over the new technology’s capabilities. Any company remotely connected to cyberspace could IPO and see its market cap double overnight.

Finally, in 2000, the bubble burst. Companies like Pets.com and Kozmo.com went bankrupt. Even survivors limped along for years, with Amazon’s share price not stabilizing above pre-2000 levels until 2010. But the internet as we know it never went away. And, 26 years later, it is more used than ever.

Something similar is coming for AI. I do not know how or when, but the bubble will burst. A few AI firms will survive. The technology will persist in a more limited way. Integrations that never made sense, like Carl’s Jr. foisting AI on its unsuspecting customers at the drive-thru, will become too expensive or too brand-toxic to continue.

And, like the internet, the core infrastructure of AI will continue to spread. Younger generations will laugh about the idea of there being a time before AI was available. Eventually, the iPhone of AI will debut, and the way we interact with the technology will change again.

The inevitability of AI has caused me to hold my nose and learn to use AI to a basic degree. I will forever struggle to trust open-ended models like ChatGPT and Gemini to avoid hallucinations, but I find the closed models like NotebookLM or a locally run version of Claude very helpful, as I know their outputs are only built on the inputs I have supplied.

You have my pledge as my readers that nothing I publish will ever be AI generated, but I have begun asking Gemini to scan my drafts for any grammar or spelling errors. The big benefit of an AI editor over standard spellcheck is that it explains the grammar mistakes it spots, helping me to avoid repeating them in the future.

In simpler terms, I am embracing AI as a tool — and nothing more. It is not a crutch for thinking critically nor a replacement for doing my readings or writing my papers. I will also admit to shuddering a little when I see students in lectures who have Claude or ChatGPT open and ready in case they are called on. But their choices do not affect me, and I need to let them be. I am sure there were students in generations past who rolled their eyes at the early adopters of the internet who were quick to Google a professor’s questions during lectures.

I will never feel great about using AI. But I also do not feel great about using a MacBook made in brutal factories in Shenzhen or riding in an Uber after the company spent hundreds of millions of dollars to avoid having to pay its drivers a real wage. We should improve society somewhat, and yet I participate in society. Curious!

Ending a piece of writing by hand waving at capitalism is sophomoric and lazy. But sometimes the problems we face are of such an overwhelming magnitude that I do not know what else to do. After all, this piece might be sanctimonious and meandering, but at least it was written by a human being. That has to count for something.

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Things I Recommend This Week

• Why Utah Adoption Agencies Are America’s Most Exploitative | The Cut

• Why Wikipedia Can’t Explain Math | Tastemaker Design (YouTube)

• An Oral History of Too Many Cooks, Adult Swim’s weirdest experiment ever | Inverse

• Is It Ethical To Be A Billionaire In Neopets? | Defector

• The Night 17 Million Precious Military Records Went Up in Smoke | Wired

How are you grappling with AI? Do you use the technology in your personal or professional life? I am deeply curious, so please leave a comment and let me know.

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I hope the unofficial start of summer is off to a great start!

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Not since high school had I been in a laptop-free classroom. My Arabic major involved a lot of handwriting instruction and pen-and-paper work, but all my undergraduate professors never prohibited laptops. Even my Spanish and Portuguese classes allowed devices in class, presumably seeing little value in forcing us all to remember the keyboard shortcuts for é and ç.

I have always had abysmal handwriting, but I was born in the weird mini-generation that was taught both cursive and typing in elementary school. My class bounced from workbooks guiding us between the loops of the cursive alphabet to the computer lab, where the teacher would install rubber covers on our keyboards while Mavis Beacon reminded us to keep our eyes on our monitors.

Whether it was the gamification of programs like Mavis Beacon, the warm hues of the school’s iMacs, or the excitement inherent to any new technology in the eyes of a child, I was drawn to typing. My classmates and I competed with each other to achieve the highest words per minute score, with the fastest typists commemorated on a display in the computer lab. To this day, I can touch 90 word per minute if I have proper posture.

How many WPM can you do?

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The advent of smartphones and swipe-to-text has created a strange bell curve, where people from Gen X through the Zillennial cohort are generally the quickest typers, while both older and younger people are generally slower with a keyboard. Despite Chromebooks entering the classroom as early as elementary school, younger students are now less proficient typists than they were a decade ago.

Sometime between when I finished third grade and when my youngest siblings finished four years later, Fayetteville-Manlius Central School District had determined its students no longer had to learn cursive. This would have saved me some frustration in grappling with the difference between the cursive f and the cursive b, but I doubt learning cursive had any impact on the poor state of my handwriting.

As a kid, I was always confused why teachers collecting permission slips or Target cashiers supervising the checkout process accepted my dad’s signature. It is little more than a scribble. Even my mom used to roll her eyes at my dad’s handwriting, struggling to decipher grocery lists or notes he left stuck to the fridge.

Unfortunately, the illegibility of the father is visited upon the children. Every birthday and holiday, my girlfriend graciously pretends to be able to read the card I write for her until I take the hint and read aloud my profound declarations of love and affection. It’s the thought that counts.

Once my school district started teaching me Spanish, I accepted it as a fact that I would lose points on quizzes because the teacher would be unable to decipher if I placed the accent in the proper place. The Department of Motor Vehicles recently rejected some paperwork I had to file in part because they claimed they could not read what I wrote on the form. When I ran for student government in high school, I had to recruit friends to outline the slogans on my campaign posters out of fear that no one would be able to read them otherwise.

I could go on, but you get the point. My personal script is intricate. Mysterious. Artistic, even.

Or perhaps it is sloppy and rushed. But it is uncertain that adding Arabic, which is written right-to-left and where the meaning of a word changes based on whether a letter is connected cursive-style to another or not, only further imperiled my fine motor control whenever I have a writing implement in hand.

On top of my dysfunctional penmanship, I am not an organized person in the tangible world. But digitally, I am fastidious about keeping my files in folders and my folders arranged according to ISO 8601 date formatting. The introduction of the laptop to my educational experience could not have come sooner.

But in the time between my undergraduate degree and entering law school, pedagogy shifted again. Whereas the teachers of my youth grappled with how much to emphasize handwriting versus mechanical writing, the professors of today are wrestling with how to incorporate artificial intelligence in the classroom.

The proliferation of wifi on college campuses came decades ago. Professors have long been aware that students can google the answers to in-class questions and pull up Wikipedia or SparkNotes in lieu of reading the assignments. But AI has changed the dynamic in a dramatic way.

In law school, most courses are taught using the Socratic method. Rather than standing in front of the class and lecturing for 90 minutes, professors typically engage in a dialogue with a few victims each lecture with the goal of teasing out the proper way to think about the legal doctrine of the day. The extended nature of these conversations meant that the ability to quickly pull up a cheat sheet on your laptop about the rule of perpetuities or res ipsa loquitur was no significant advantage, for you have to be able to go beyond regurgitation and apply the doctrine to a legal dilemma posed by the professor to to satisfy their line of questioning.

But with generative AI, students can simply type the questions posed by the professor into the AI portal. The AI can pull from case documents publicly available, any notes or class files the student has fed into their AI suite, and the entirety of the global internet to build a step-by-step response to the professor’s hypothetical. There are even law-specific AI tools like Harvey that are predisposed to address legal queries, although I usually see students using mainstream AI platforms like Gemini and ChatGPT.

My criminal law professor banned laptops in the classroom years before the debut of AI. Her main concern was with the quality of discussion in the classroom, which she felt had suffered since laptops became widespread and students half-listened to the conversation while simultaneously scrolling social media or shopping or checking basketball scores. However, based on her repeated comments about AI throughout the semester, it is clear that this new technology has only redoubled her opposition to devices in the classroom.

With a few days before the semester began, I was at a complete loss as to what to do. I had a great setup in my preferred digital notetaking software that I planned to carry over from the first semester. And I always opt for the digital version of my textbooks, in part because of the power of using Command+F to revisit confusing topics I half-remembered and in part because I ride the city bus to school and do not want to haul multiple five-pound casebooks back and forth to campus.

Recalling some of the best advice I received before starting law school, I decided to stick with what has worked for me in the past. I bought the same pens and spiral notebook I used for Arabic class as an undergraduate. After doing the math on my print quota for the semester, I determined I would still be able to use the e-book version of our casebook if I was willing to print out the readings before each lecture.

Returning to handwritten notes after more than half a decade of near-exclusive typing was disorienting. I missed spell check, rich-text formatting, and hyperlinks. And my handwriting remains indecipherable to others. One week, a classmate who had been sick asked if I would scan and send him my notes. He sheepishly admitted to me a few weeks later that he had to ask someone else the next day, as he could not read what I had written.

However, looking back as I edit this piece instead of studying for my criminal law exam, it is clear that my professor was correct about the quality of the discussion. Her class was by far the most engaging of the six large lecture courses I have completed so far in law school.

While I found it tedious to have to print each reading ahead of time and to have to retype my notes for studying purposes, I relished the forced two-hour break from my screens. Like most graduate students, I am consistently behind on fifteen different deadlines, and I often exacerbate this problem by catching up on emails or administrative tasks during lectures. And this semi-productive distraction comes only if I can resist the siren song of minimizing my notes and scrolling through Reddit or March Madness or whichever group chat is popping off that day. When I needed a moment to myself in my laptop-free course, I had to doodle in the margins of my notebook the old fashioned way.

One thing that surprised me was that my professor never couched her technology ban in the argument that handwriting is better for memorization than typing. I have always found this argument unpersuasive because it usually relies on the notion that the slower speed of manual notetaking forces the brain to prioritize which information is retained, an argument made famous by a 2014 study titled “The pen is mightier than the keyboard.”

Two studies conducted ten years later essentially confirmed that both sides are correct. Handwriting is slower and does allow for better retention. But typing is more comprehensive, which makes after-the-fact review easier.

I would rather retain less in the moment while typing as much information as possible to revisit later when studying the materials from a course. I also nearly ran out of print quota this semester, and I will be damned if my law school is going to extract another dime out of me beyond the absurd tuition we have to pay. So I doubt I will return to handwriting my notes after this semester.

But I am taking more away from my criminal law course than the difference between murder and manslaughter. I would like to be more intentional about my use of the computer in the classroom. If I am going to pay so much to have the incredible privilege of attaining an advanced degree, I need to make every moment in the classroom count. Like with my phone, I want to shift toward viewing my computer as a tool, not a source of entertainment.

There will still be slow moments in lecture or days where my brain is not firing at full speed and I need a semi-distraction. Maybe I can figure out how to doodle using my laptop’s trackpad.

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Things I Recommend This Week

• “English Has A Word For Everything” | 107kicks (YouTube)

• Does your boss have AI brain? | for

• 30 Days in Venezuela | Progressive International

• ‘People Say, You Sold Your Baby’ How Utah became the most exploitative state in private adoption. | The Cut

• The Rise of the Strava “Jockey” | The Running Channel

If anyone is curious, here is why this post is so delayed:

With a level of irony so eye-roll-inducing I would not believe it if it had not happened to me, my laptop died as I was initially drafting this post. Normally, I make constant backups via Time Machine, but I was on a flight when this happened and had been out of the country for a week, which meant nothing I wrote during the trip had been backed up yet and my entire draft was lost. More importantly, I also had my final paper due two days after I landed, making this the second time in my academic career that my laptop has abandoned me with a final paper due imminently.

After scrambling to finish the paper, I promptly fell very ill, sicker than I have been in years. This sickness lasted for more than two weeks. But then, just as my cough began to clear, I developed Bell’s Palsy, which is an irritating but non-threatening condition of temporary partial facial paralysis. Then final exams started.

The right side of my face is slowly regaining movement, and I will make it through finals just as I always have, but the back-to-back-to-back-to-back series of inconveniences and frustrations kept me from getting any writing done for a long time. As I stated at the beginning, all paid subscriptions have been granted two-month extensions, and I am working on a bunch of drafts I want to share when I have time to do more editing after the semester.

Thank you as always for reading and supporting my work.

A battery replacement set me back $70, which is roughly one-tenth of the cost of a new phone. I remember how in high school, when iPhones and Androids were new, phone upgrades were ubiquitous. I had classmates whose families upgraded their phones each year, and the new models always felt like a massive upgrade from the one before.

The same day as my appointment at the Google Store, my girlfriend popped into the Apple Store a few blocks over. She had owned her iPhone for more than five years. It had begun experiencing hardware problems that could no longer be attributed to the natural slowing of technology as software advances, and she had little choice but to replace her phone.

It struck me how unexcited we both were for our errands. My g…

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But I still believe the end of the year is as good a time as any to take stock of my life and figure out what is working — and what isn’t. Instead of setting concrete goals, each January I create intentions for the year ahead.

I also publish these intentions publicly. Not that I believe any of you track my progress. IBT blowing up enough that I have readers with parasocial relationships would be a good problem to have. Rather I share my intentions on my blog as a form of self-discipline. Even knowing no o…

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Nice N Easy was a ten-minute walk down the road from Eagle Hill Middle School. During the last few weeks of the school year and throughout the summer, it was a favorite haunt of a large portion of the male student body. We would saunter in, having compiled loose change dug out from the bottom of folding velcro Yankees wallets and crumpled ten dollar bills earned from mowing lawns, and wander back and forth between the warming cabinet stocked with pizza slices and the refrigerated shelves lined with sodas and beer and feel like the kings of the world.

Nice N Easy, a local chain endemic to Central and Upstate New York, was the uniquely American sort of gas station that offered fresh food in addition to the usual roadtrip fare of Slim Jims and Doritos. The sub sandwiches were well-above Subway quality, and the pizza, while greasy to a plate-damaging level, was mouthwatering. There was no …

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The best thing about being back in school is the scheduling flexibility. After this first semester, in which my classes were assigned, draws to an all-too-quickly-approaching close, I will have full control over my class schedule.

Everyone likes the power to choose your own schedule. Whether you are working part-time, responsible for childcare or school dropoffs, or simply have a time of day in which you know you work best, there are no downsides to determining how and when you are required to be on campus.

I have always been a late-night person. The most consistently exhausted I have felt was the summer I spent working on the grounds crew for my school district. My exhaustion had little to do with the physical nature of the job, as I was in much better shape at age 19 than I am…

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Beginning in February 2008, over-the-air broadcasters — stations with a W or K in front of their name — were required by the federal government to begin airing public service announcements about the transition from analog to digital television broadcasts. The FCC mandated that stations run an awareness campaign about the transition to ensure households knew that, without a digital converter for analog receivers, analog-only devices would stop receiving television broadcasts on June 12, 2009.

The transition served two purposes. Digital broadcasts are of much higher quality than analog broadcasts, meaning the transition improved both aud…

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Despite holding three roles in three different industries with three different approaches to how and where my colleagues and I were expected to perform our work, I noticed a certain rhythm inherent to the start of any new job.

The first few weeks are chaotic and confusing regardless of the quality of the onboarding program and mentorship as you struggle to ascertain what the real work hours…

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I am excited to start classes. I have long envisioned a career in law for myself. And, to be honest, I like school! I like learning and reading and debating and the sensation of having a difficult concept finally click after hours of review.

But, as I pack my final boxes, I am fighting off feelings of overwhelming sadness. These feelings have nothing to do with LA, where I will finally co-habitate with my girlfriend, be minutes from the beach, and have not just a dishwasher, but in-unit laundry too. Rather I feel this way because Oakland is the first place I have lived that truly felt like home, the type of community where I could envision myself settling down and building a life.

I became quite defensive…

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As a ten-year-old boy, the most important thing in my life at the time was Little League baseball. The year was 2008, which was also the apogee of Major League Baseball’s Steroid Era. As a pre-teen, I hardly understood what steroids were, but I knew that cheating was bad and many of my favorite baseball players were being accused of taking steroids to cheat.

Not Albert Pujols, though. Arguably the best position player of the 2000s, Pujols was in the midst of his second Most Valuable Player award-winning season when Mrs. Hanley told me to write about a male source of inspiration. He was also squeaky clean, subject to not even a whisper of impropriety at the time.1 The dots practically connected themselves in my fifth-grade brain.

Imagine my surprise when, on open house night, nearly all the other boys in my class had written about their fathers or grandfathers. My mother was aghast, chastising me when we got home for not also writing about my dad. To my recollection, Dad was unfazed, but he graciously reads all my posts and will be sure to let me know how he felt at the time — or if he even remembers this incident.

My logic at the time was simple: of course my dad was a source of inspiration. He was — and is — a pretty great father! But, I figured, writing about your dad as your male role model was too obvious, too direct. Mrs. Hanley surely wanted us to wrack our tiny, undeveloped brains for creative responses like Albert Pujols.

In retrospect, it is clear that even as a ten-year-old, I was prone to overthinking things. But in the many years since, Dad has continued to serve as a role model and source of inspiration, while I stopped watching baseball once I was old enough to play other sports because baseball is, frankly, quite boring. Take that, Pujols.

Many of the lessons I have learned from Dad are fundamental to how I view myself and my goals for myself. As my mom suffered through the many ups and eventually continuous downs of life with cancer, not once did my dad waver in his commitment to his wife and his kids. Despite growing up in an era where mental illness was stigmatized if it was acknowledged at all, my dad has made a continuous effort to understand and support me through my various struggles with anxiety and depression.

My very understanding of what manhood means stems directly from my dad. The fact that this is such a positive is something I grow more appreciative of each time the “manosphere” discourse begins anew on social media and I realize how many young men are aimless at best, wayward followers of scumbags like Andrew Tate at worst.

But Dad is also the source of numerous lighthearted principles to live by, edicts which may not rise to the level of “how to be a man” but are no less fundamental to how I live my life. In honor of Father’s Day, I am sharing three of these lessons with you all to enjoy.

If you can’t poke fun at yourself, you aren’t living life the right way

My mom always said that the first thing that attracted her to dad was how he could make her laugh. This was a role he took seriously. As in many families, we have a lot of running jokes about each other. Many of those related to Dad concern his long-standing near-baldness and his Boomer-tier names for technology and pop culture.

But while my siblings and I are liable to lash out at one another the moment we feel as though a joke at our expense has moved from funny to played out, Dad never complains. Instead, he leans into the humor, making us all laugh when he continues to refer to our family group chat as happening on “The WhatsApp” despite knowing the correct name or disarming us with bald jokes that top anything the four of us have come up with ourselves.

And Dad is also a strong proponent of prop humor, having never once turned down an opportunity to pose for a goofy photo. He is quick to don the silliest headwear available if he thinks it will make one of us smile.

This is a man who knows when it is time to be serious, and when it is time to be silly. Everyone he has ever made laugh is better for it.

Video games are a valid hobby

I cannot remember a time in my life without video games. My dad had owned Nintendo systems since his college days, and the first console I played on was his Nintendo 64.

As I grew older and developed a video game taste of my own, I branched out and used money saved from doing yard work around the neighborhood to buy my first console, the Xbox 360. By this point, it had been about 15 years since the N64 was released. Dad could have opted out of learning a new console or limited his exposure to the occasional virtual football game in Madden and no one would have second-guessed his decisions.

A few weeks after buying my Xbox 360, I was doing my homework one night and heard the sounds of Spartans dying over and over to Elites in Halo 3: ODST. I opened my bedroom door, mouth half-open in a pre-yell at who I assumed was my younger brother messing with my save file. Instead, I was greeted by my dad, who grinned at my sheepishly and told me he was having a hard time figuring out how the grenades worked.

His skills improved over time, and he went on to play through a lot of the Halo campaigns on his own, sharing updates with me as he made halting progress. Whether he played these games because he enjoyed them or because he thought it would bring him closer to me and my siblings matters far less than how he demonstrated to me from childhood that there is no age limit on your hobbies. You simply change how you engage with them as you age.

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There is always time for a baked good

My family group chat has a running thread where we share snack announcements shared in our workplaces. Emails about retirement parties, vendor showcases featuring catered lunch, and board meetings complete with pastry carts are exchanged back and forth in an effort to see who gets the best free snacks at their job.

This practice started with our dad, who makes sure to never turn down the opportunity for a baked good or three. And while I may have developed a refined donut palette, Dad’s taste in sweets is both wide and deep. He can steer you to the best places in Syracuse for cannoli, baklava, or cookies without batting an eye.

A few years ago, my dad decided he wanted to get in shape. He threw himself into exercise and eating well with aplomb, often working out twice in the same day. And while he adjusted his diet to match his newfound love of exercise, he still shares screenshots of exciting office catering opportunities with us. In my dad’s eyes, the world has so many pastries to offer us, it would be a shame not to try them all.

Love you, Dad. I hope you have a tasty pastry or two to celebrate today.

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Coogler became the first director to shoot a movie in both Ultra Panavision 70 and IMAX formats, creating a unique aspect ratio that is prohibitively expensive for most people to recreate at home. And since Sinners tells a vampire tale, there are plenty of horror moments that are heightened by the reactions of dozens of others theatergoers reacting with you in real time.

But the best reason to see Sinners in a movie theater is the audio. Without giving much of the plot away, a key component of the story is the main character’s musical talents, which means the film’s soundtrack — which incorporates a surprising variety of genres for a period piece — functions almost as a character in its own right. My dirt-cheap soundbar and…

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Earlier this week, I had the distinct pleasure of viewing Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith in a movie theater. This is my favorite Star Wars film out of the entire canon, and, considering how the movie was released in 2005, I never imagined I would have the opportunity to see it on a theater screen.

I intended to see the film over the weekend. Instead of buying my ticket ahead of time, I naively assumed only hardcore dorks like myself would be interested in paying to watch a 20-year-old Star Wars movie and pulled up to the theater just a few minutes before showtime. Instead of a grieving Padmé and traitorous Anakin, I was met by a line wrapped around the building and a besieged theater employee informing people the showing was sold …

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Of all the go-to icebreaker questions, I find “What’s your favorite food?” to be the hardest to answer. How does one compare a carne asada burrito packed as thick as your bicep to a platter of french toast crisped to perfection? Does chicken soup count as your favorite food if you only consider the specific recipe made by your grandmother to be the best?

Other icebreakers invite such difficult comparisons across styles. An animated children’s classic like Toy Story has little in common with The Social Network, but at least they are both movies. The constraints of the medium allow for some level of comparison that is not present with food. But if I was forced by a maliciously compliant genie to pick a favorite food, I would have to say donuts.1

The donut is versatile in a way other desserts, sav…

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On August 12, 2013, user Mfuzia was banned from editing Wikipedia.

His fate was sealed two months earlier when he entered into an edit war with user Nstrauss over the article for the court case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, a byzantine and momentous Supreme Court case about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

Eighteen days before the Supreme Court issued its ruling on the case, Mfuzia added a paragraph about public opinion polling on the case conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s (FDU) survey group, PublicMind1. Nstrauss promptly removed Mfuzia’s contributions, and the two went back and forth adding and deleting the snippet in an old fashioned edit war.

Mfuzia’s continued reversions of Nstrauss’ deletions must have pushed Nstrauss over the edge, as two days later, Nstraus…

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With the exception of my book benchmark, I prefer to think of my goals for each new year as intentions rather than hard metrics. Looking back at the goals for myself I published exactly a year ago, it’s easy to see why.

As anticipated, I fell well short of my aim to publish to this Substack each week. However, I am proud of the work I accomplished here. Highlights include:

• Exposing Seneca Scott’s unregistered charity, Neighbors Together Oakland (which he continues to brand as a 501(c)3 despite a cease and desist order from the state)

• Investigating…

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My Spotify account is nearly 10 years old.

I find Spotify endlessly frustrating as a platform. From its labyrinthine playlist interface to its broken shuffle mechanism to its refusal to pay artists appropriately, there is much to resent about the audio behemoth.

But it is also undeniable that Spotify and the music streaming era it helped bring about have allowed myself and millions of others to discover countless songs and artists we never would have found otherwise. My Liked Songs library will soon surpass 4,000 saved tracks, and thanks to Spotify’s discovery features my personal catalog is made up of songs of all popularity levels, from those famous the world over like Bad Bunny’s “Me Porto Bonito,” to “500 Miles” by Canadian rapper YYZ, a song included on my Discover Weekly seven years a…

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Standing in the parking lot of MetLife Stadium waiting to enter the Notre Dame – Navy game and basking in the glow of tailgate beers, nothing seemed like a better idea to me than placing a bet on college football. The entire process of downloading DraftKings, logging in, and sending money to my account through Venmo took less time and effort than paying rent each month.

I am glad sports betting is legal. Prohibition is ineffective when the banned product can easily be illegally replicated, as shown by alcohol, marijuana, and the plethora of pre-legalization sports betting scandals. By the late turn of the millennium, as the rise of internet sports betting made it clear that even the arrest of every mafioso in the country would not be enough to close the books, it was obvious that the legal framework around sports gambling needed to change.

Thanks to the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of…

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Shortly after noon, a U-2 buzzed East Oakland and baseball legends Dave Stewart and Rickey Henderson threw out simultaneous first pitches. Then the final upper-level professional sports contest in Oakland got underway.

What John Fisher, the other 29 owners, Bud Selig and Rob Manfred, and Major League Baseball as a whole have done to Oakland is unconscionable. Just five years after the Oakland Raiders decamped for Las Vegas while the Warriors1 commuted across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, the green and gold were ripped from Oakland. The teams 56-year residency came to a close against in an afternoon game against the Texas Rangers, and the A’s will supposedly join the Raiders in Las Vegas in 2028.

I have little to add to the excellent reporting that has been done on the various failures…

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