June 2025

ajay,
june edition

Photo Video of the month: This is one of my favorites. All fireworks shows should be like this guy.

🎧 stuff I've listened to

spotify/music

1. I spent a chunk of the month trying to figure out ways to believe myself when I say “I listen to everything, including country.” I got somewhere with a blend of MJ Lenderman + Waxahatchee.

   1. The new cover of “Dancing in the Club” by Lenderman has wormed its way into my Spotify daylists. I’d give it a spin. Really dig this wispy guitar work, and the mismatch between the straightforward bummer lyrics and sheer singalongability. He’s not an entirely new face to my daily mix. I listened to his album Manning Fireworks in 2024, especially enjoying his wry lyricism and the choruses in “Wristwatch” and “She’s Leaving You.”

      1. Moreover, he has to have the best publicists in all of indie music, since I’ve read at least four long-form articles about him in the past year. This GQ one is easily the best written and one of the better music journalism pieces I’ve read in 2025. These profiles can often come off as puff pieces, like this Alex G p4k feature. Here I think it doesn’t because the author surrounds the straight Q&A with vivid storytelling about the parts of MJ’s life that he finds interesting, and embeds quality prose with a couple of weirdly clever Michael Jordan references. My NC homies will enjoy the deep dive into the local arts scene. It’s a bear of a read, but I came away from it feeling like I know substantially more about him – and not just what he was trying to get the journalist to write about.

   2. Waxahatchee doesn’t even get the credit of country on the internet lol, it’s deemed ‘alt-country’. What matters to me is that the lead Katie Crutchfield has one of my favorite voices in indie – she reminds me a bit of Frances Quinlan from Hop Along. Both of the last two albums had enough country-tilt featuring songs I thought were excellent (“Fire”, “Lilacs”, “Right Back to It”), and their soundscape is so clean without sounding lifeless. Her tiny desk is simple quality, and Jeff Tweedy’s son sneaks in on the drums for a fun cameo. They seem like they’re having a great time. It must be so fun to play music with your buddies!

2. My music time at work was mostly spent looping through the Her soundtrack.

   1. I had never listened to it outright before, but I adore the movie so I finally decided to give it a spin. “Some Other Place” is one of my new core tracks for wistful debugging, displacing the first Minecraft album, and the score is a tight 40 that never imposes. Sometimes soundtracks feel like one big song to me, but there are enough licks here keeping it fresh, almost catchy. I like how it’s both dynamic but not too busy. There are plenty of pauses, isolated riffs, and the songs finish different places than they start.

   2. Will Butler keeps showing up in my media credits, but I’m not sick of seeing his name yet. Composing the music for Stereophonic, being an Arcade Fire brother, and scoring one of the top ten movies of the century so far gets you some grace. It’s fun to notice musical easter-eggs like the melodies of “Porno” and “Super-Symmetry” popping up, and I’ve gone back to rewatch scenes that feel even more resonant now. Somehow I ignored movie scores for most of my early watching days, but now they strike me just as a strong acting performance would.

3. It wouldn’t be a monthly without some sheer poptimism cope.

   1. The new Addison Rae album is actually good, I’m sorry I was too quick to judge you. “Money is Everything” with another 45 seconds would have ended on my top ten singles of the year, which is currently being absolutely dominated by the Ethel Cain track “Fuck Me Eyes.” There are so many moments that make me guilty for not giving her a fair shake before – the breathy hook in “Summer Forever”, the staccato delivery in “Fame is a Gun”, and the outrageous dance whore line on “New York.” Thanks to the pop stans in my life for sending me a never-ending onslaught of music, keeps me joyous.

   2. The Indigo De Souza album isn’t as special as her previous stuff. However, “Crying Over Nothing” bops (it’s giving Shins tribute), and “Crush” hits all the notes of a sugar-pop anthem with yet another delicious chorus. Musicians have gotten so proficient at this. I could listen to a lifetime of music and not understand how to write hooks as captivating as the ones I hear every month, on even mediocre albums.

   3. One downside I’ve noticed as my music taste has gotten poppier since early college is that I feel a little bit less awe. What I would give to relive some of the highlights from my youth: the first time I watched the MPS funeral video, 2:40 of “Hannah Hunt”, the Hey, baby in “Nobody Else Will Be There.” It’s crazy how important some of those songs felt to me when I was in high school + early college, versus music feeling like more of a backdrop for life this summer.

📚 stuff I've read

Stuff about other stuff

1. The NYT keeps making lists for me to read and get mad at. I’ve gotta hand it to them, they are masters of the form - stretching out a top 100 movie ranking for five days should be a crime, and yet I gave them five days’ worth of ad revenue anyways. There were a lot of these that came out in June and I wanted to see how I’m batting, so I bullied (gently nudged, ty E*) Claude Code into aggregating them all and then marked ‘em up. Here’s how it went.

   1. I have seen 51/100 of the NYT top 100 list and 39/100 of the Rolling Stone list, which I liked more. Admittedly, my scoring function for these lists := minimizing the L(Yi-Yi) norm, and Rolling Stone scores a commendable 8. My personal top ten movies of the century are in the Sandbox tab if anyone wants to see or add their own. Revealed preference looks to be: dreamy, sadboi, grindset.

   2. I took a look at the NYT top 100 books of the 21st century list and scored a truly embarrassing 8, and so I bumped up some books to the top of the stack, including The Sympathizer, Austerlitz, and 2666. Finally caving to tote-bag gang has been huge for my weekly reading output on the commute, so I’m hoping I can make some headway and get to at least double digits. Why and how am I so behind on modern lit?

2. I geek out over political statistics, so I spent a bunch of time poring through the results of the NYC Democratic Primary. I find this exercise illuminating because the focus is on characterizing what happened. There are so many ways to cut how a city votes, and the resulting cross-sectional analyses by geographic, income, etc. are of such a higher quality than I’m used to seeing from newspapers. There’s also generally a very editorial focus to how media talks about elections, so it’s refreshing to think about the world as it realizes, contextualizing observed outcomes as a function of mostly reliable data. I will NOT be discussing actual politics here (although I did chat up Brad Lander on the street a few weeks ago for my NYC micro-celebrity encounter). But a quick pointer to some threads showcasing what I think is cool.

   1. The vote share sorted by income level is interesting. This is one of the best stats tools if you can find good x‘s, nothing like a .sort(x).plot(y) curve. You can see another example with precinct vote share and turnout (the left hook).

   2. Age patterns are super important in politics. And of course, a false graph can spread around the world before the real one can put its pants on, or something. The initial histogram you saw about turnout was probably wrong, and you likely didn’t see the correction a day later. The RCV aspects lead to interesting mechanics that are fun to visualize.

   3. The existence of betting markets makes it so being on top of this means you can have a stressless night compared to your peers. Smart(ish) money had it as a Mamdani lock like three hours before it was officially called. I remember in 2020 staying up until 3am poring over Arizona drops (this was definitely not healthy), but coming away from it a couple of hours ahead of major broadcast news. It’s so cool that you can ~just pay more attention~ to a fragmented set of information and get to truth faster.

Fiction

1. This is probably cheating since I read it in July, but I was a fan of Revolutionary Road (ty A* for the rec). The depiction of an uncomfortable Americana appeals to me across large swath of media, from Boxer to Blue Velvet. Rev Road makes you think about how the characters handle and embody the progression of moral sickness. The story showcases so many facets of it though, both how inertia facilitates it and how different people can bring out the worst in each other, and the unique pairings keep the plot dynamic. The novel ended up being quite a page-turner for me, buoyed by clear writing with a simplicity to it. Stoner/Our Town vibes.

🎥 stuff I've watched

1. The good. High and Low is great. I’ve been through a solid chunk of Kurosawa, but idk if it’s possible to get through all of them in reasonable time. The only director I’ve cleaned out is Yang with ten movies, and this guy has over 30! But I was stupendously impressed by this. The first half spins a compelling and tense web, and the setup is so fresh and original. I’ve never liked detectives more. The second half pacing is exceptional. The pink smoke payoff scene is visually arresting against the backdrop of the city, and there are so many evident influences on the noir genre, from the villain’s characterization to the banger train scene. The totality of his ambition remains the most impressive facet to me about Kurosawa - this is a completely different style of movie to everything I’ve seen from him before, and he pulls it off? He tries to do everything!

2. The bad. I went to go see 8 1/2 at Film Forum to finally cross off some Fellini. At the start of the movie, there was a disclaimer: “due to the unique nature of this limited edition film print, the captions are white on a frequently white background. 15% of the words will be very difficult to read.” The crowd chuckled a bit, only to gasp in horror as the first two sentences of the movie were completely obscured by a dazzling white. I failed to predict what 15% would feel like, given it’s not a uniform sample, and so I would get 100% of some filler dialogue but then whiff on every other exchange in another important scene.

   1. I can’t believe this is the world we live in. This has to be a solved problem! We know how to overcome the one-inch tall barrier, and it’s not by making it probabilistically painful to watch this movie. The movie itself was also quite confusing and fever-dreamy, so guessing at the Italian dialogue did not help. It was an incorrect assumption that rudimentary Spanish would save me. I probably need to rewatch this. At least the vanilla egg cream at FF is great?

3. The ugly. I did not like Materialists :(. I didn’t hate it like some other people I know (rip E*), but I simply don’t think Celine Song has the juice. I was mid on Past Lives as well, despite a stellar score from Bear and Rossen from Grizzly Bear. She films interesting shots (with a bit of re-use) and obviously has a lot she wants to say, but her stories don’t resonate for me. I ascribe most of this to stereotyped characters and situations, a bit too on-the-nose. I also dislike the way she films New York. Something about it is too blurry, glitzy, and stylized. I don’t hate those adjectives in the right place (love me a hazy book), but here specifically it leaves me with a deeply unsatisfied taste in my mouth. Not enough bite here for me, and that’s forgiving the passive cynicism embedded in the film.

🍣 stuff I've literally consumed

1. V* gets major brownie points for showing me Zhang Liang! I have a huge soft-spot for malatang and so many childhood memories of pigging out on those wooden bowls in New World Mall. I distinctly remember being unable to move for an hour after splitting five pounds with a buddy in high school. But the Mala Project experience in the city is pretty mediocre imo, which dampened my enthusiasm for it post-grad. Zhang Liang fixes this problem for me - the set of options is so vast and complete control over sizing gives you so much flexibility to perfect the bowl. The pricing is reasonable, and the combination of no line ever and the assortment of unique fish ball types has put this place in the summer rotation. Green fish balls filled with roe, enoki mushrooms, youtiao, jam the fish fillet. What a life to live!

2. I’ve had a very Greenpoint summer. This month I’m only going to mention Taqueria Ramirez, which I thought was awesome. The accoutrements are only fine – onions, cilantro, two sauce choices, the spicier is better. And I do prefer the laid-back interior and eclectic plating (such bright colors!) to a place like Los Tacos. The campechano was solid enough, and the pastor wasn’t special. But the tripa is mind-bogglingly good. It’s worth noting I went twice and the quality diff was very large, so they are inconsistent. But the first one I had…man. So tender, juicy, and rich. I don’t even know what to say, just one of the best tacos I’ve ever had. Literally appeared to me in a dream a few weeks later.

🙃 potpourri

1. E* sent me this nifty robotics lecture about manipulation and simulation. The robots are way better at this than I realized, which made me think of how little I know about any number of fields that I’m not intimately connected to. Grad student homies, please send me your favorite recent lectures or talks! I will consume them.

2. Didn’t feel like putting this in the read section, but I really enjoyed this long-ish article on tips for task completion. I independently do a bunch of these tricks myself which was fun to see in the wild, so would recommend for my maximizooor friends. Great technical blog from the posts I’ve read so far.

Meme of the month: this one cracked me up for its specificity when I saw it on Twitter (can’t find the original source). I’m not entirely sure what makes Clairo such a genre staple, and I’ve been seeing so much In the Mood for Love meme content recently. I will never get used to how quickly the internet can reflect experiences back at me.