It was a gentle and then aggressive transition from fall to winter in Minneapolis this year. One day I was wearing shorts and raking a final batch of leaves; a few days later, weather had plummeted into single-digit temperatures with a biting wind. Combined with daylight saving time, it's a jarring change to the end of days: walking the dogs in brutal cold, hopefully before early sunsets force that walk into darkness, to boot. It's not my favorite seasonal shift, but I'm combatting it with a focus on more evening reading and an earlier start to my days (those 6 a.m. workouts haven't gotten any easier in freezing darkness, but I'm mostly staying on top of it).

One Year at NJ OOI

I celebrated my one year anniversary working at New Jersey's Office Of Innovation at the start of November. After working for a federal contractor for 6+ years, staying within civic tech but moving both within government and to a non-federal level was a very intentional decision. Coincidentally, my first day at NJOOI was the day before the general election; the ensuing chaos initiated by DOGE a few months later only validated my decision even more.

One year in, I have few qualms. I've got great colleagues, I've gotten to dabble with some generative AI applications (with still-mixed feelings about it all), I feel like I'm still learning plenty of new things, and the work usually feels meaningful, which is about all I desire out of a job right now. Here's hoping the next year is just as satisfying.

Listening

It's been a really great year of new music for me. I've yet to reflect on the year as a whole, but in the meantime, here's a few recent releases I've really enjoyed:

Aaron Parks - By All Means.

I immersed myself in straight-ahead jazz from high school up through my first few years out of college. There's a lot of of different reasons why that's no longer the case, but at least some of it is some boredom with a sound that no longer feels fresh and exciting to me. Since then, there's been occasional musicians that have still drawn me in (Immanuel Wilkins is probably the most relevant example), but on the whole, it's a genre (sub-genre?) that's felt limiting to me. I think that's why I found this quote from Aaron's brief essay about the album really clarifying (bolding mine):

I’ve been thinking about what this record is actually asserting, if anything. And maybe it’s this: that there’s something worthwhile in allowing music to be emotionally direct and rhythmically grounded—straight-ahead!— even when thorny abstraction is what critics tend to celebrate more readily. That beauty and clarity have their own integrity and can speak for themselves, without apology.

It reorients this specific flavor of improvised music within the context of sincerity and feel, two things that I always take away from Aaron's playing. It's been nice to enjoy these sounds after feeling burnt out on them for so long.

SML - How You Been

SML is an all-star lineup of some of my favorite musicians in the LA improvised music scene. To my ears, they feel like an evolution of Makaya McCraven's approach, recording fully improvised live performances and then augmenting them in production with edits and various overdubs. Whereas Makaya's resulting albums sound looser and more like the product of jam sessions, the SML outputs feel more compositional and self-contained, utilizing electronic sampling and glitchy sounds more overtly. The result is a kaleidoscope of grooves and sonic textures that keeps revealing something with each listen. If it's not my album of the year, it's certainly close.

Watching

Warfare

Alex Garland's follow-up to Civil War is a war film from a very different angle. Civil War was a depiction of a fictitious near-future that seemed to be more focused on the role journalists play in war, as well as speculation on how America might devolve into such a conflict in the modern age. By contrast, Warfare is concerned with a very real war that happened, Iraq, and is based on the events of an actual Navy SEAL mission that went awry. While I'm old enough to have 9/11 as a core memory, I was young enough to not fully understand the ensuing war beyond some sort of "we have to respond to these attacks" rationale. Warfare's real-time narrative doesn't really make space for any kind of musings on the war from afar. What it implicitly shows is an occupation lacking any real nuance or purpose. The majority of the soldiers barely look like adults, lacking any real understanding of what they're doing. The injuries and destruction depicted feel senseless and entirely avoidable. The end-credits seem to try to reframe this in a more patriotic lens, but if you were paying attention, the message has already been made clear.

Bugonia

I continue to really vibe with Yorgos Lanthimos' work, and this was no different. Structurally, the main stretch of this felt a lot like a play, which I really liked. It placed the effectiveness of the story on the performances of the 3 main characters, all of whom are brilliant acted by Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and Aidan Delbis. The set design also really deepened your sense for the world inhabited by these characters and the lives they've lived up to when the story introduces you.

Plurabis

Vince Gilligan's first project since Breaking Bad to exist outside of that universe is an interesting premise that feels like it harkens back to his earlier work with The X-Files. Saying almost anything about the plot feels like a spoiler, so for now, I'll just make a few comments:

  1. It's been really satisfying to watch new iterations of a style I associate strongly with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul: clinical edits of different processes, sparsely worded and with attention to the little details, forcing you to pay attention as a narrative slowly progresses.
  2. Rhea Seehorn is phenomenal. Her performance has made a good show great so far.

Reading

Creation Lake - Rachel Kushner

A recent Substack discovery I've been enjoying is Celine Nguyen's personal canon, so it was a fun coincidence to find a mini-review of Creation Lake while browsing its archive. There's a lot of good observations here, including its slow pace (it finally picks up a little bit in the final third or so, which I got through much more quickly), whether the story was served or hurt by its narrator's amorality, and the ending being a little anti-climactic, depending on your expectations of the story's premise. I was less keen on the epistolary format, which develops the character of Bruno mostly through his emails. It felt very fragmented, and the shifts between Bruno's emails and Sadie's narrative in the first half of the book were the main reason I had such a hard time getting into it at first. I'm drawn to contrast this with Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You, whose plot is entirely emails between two characters. That exclusive dedication to format, though, is what I think is the crucial difference. It immerses you more in that flow, the format lending the story a momentum in a way that Creation Lake lacked.

The Goon Squad - Daniel Kolitz (Harper's)

I came to this via a recent episode of Search Engine, consistently one of my favorite podcasts. It prompted the same question I often have when learning about niche subcultures, which is: "how prevalent is this?". Beyond listing the member sizes of various Discord servers, the article doesn't give a clear answer to that. My biggest personal takeaway is more evidence to my belief of how harmful the timing of Covid was to high-school and college-age males. When some of the most formative years of building a worldview coincide with a collective global retreat into isolation, with an even greater concentration of time spent online and on phones, it's unfortunately not surprising that this was a habit formed by some of that population.

A New Year Approaching

I'm not one for New Year's Resolutions, per se, but I do appreciate a new year as a natural moment for reflection, be it personal or external (e.g. yes I'm thinking more intentionally again about a year-end favorite albums list). I'm starting to marinate on that a little more in hopes to get something up around the start of 2026. I get why news outlets want to publish year-end things before then, but I want to include December, so that's my justification to procrastinate a little longer.