A couple of winters ago, I flew home to Boston after a long business trip, sometime after the holidays. It was past midnight, and buses were no longer going to New Hampshire, so I got an Uber to a nearby hotel. The driver was playing a genre of music I haven’t heard since I darkened the doors of evangelical churches when I was younger. It was Contemporary Christian Music, the kind that escapes genre classification, somewhere between a defanged version of U2 pop rock and the saccharine tunes an insurance company might play over an employee training video.
But this recording felt different. It had a crackle to it, like someone ruffling cellophane in the microphone. The voices were breathless and drenched in reverb. Each consonant in the lyrics felt clipped and eroded like a sandblasted cliffside. The vibe was metallic and otherworldly. It felt inhuman.
It took me a chorus, but I figured out this was AI-generated worship music. I said nothing to the driver, since we’d said nothing to each other up until that point. It was none of my business what he listened to in his car. But the music felt profane to me, even as an agnostic.
I don’t sing worship songs anymore, but I know many people who do. There’s supposed to be something sacred to worship songs, even in evangelical churches, where the values and aesthetics of American consumerism tend to water down their potency. Still, when I was a churchgoing kid, I had reasonable certainty that, whether I was singing an old hymn or a CCM hit, a person with a soul devoted to their God had crafted it for me, hoping I could use it to convey the same divine rapture they felt as they wrote it.
No more of that, I guess. In this car, there was no divine connection being offered, just the numbing tones and milquetoast lyrics of a predictive language model. Maybe these computer outputs were bringing the driver closer to God. The computer, however, didn’t give a damn.
This week, my friend and Twitch mod Harukio recommended this video by Adam Neely, exploring Suno AI, the foreboding reincarnation of Italian futurism, and the potential death of recorded music as a medium. I think it’s required watching for anyone who wants to weigh the price of AI-generated music to our brains, our social circles, and our politics. It brought that Uber ride to mind. Thinking of a song as just a unit of consumption drains the blood from it. And we are in the age of digital vampires.
If you’re tired of being drafted into America’s culture wars, too bad. Now you’ve got to pick sides between two default fonts in Microsoft Word.
I’m sorry it’s not Comic Sans and Wingdings. A war between those two would have been a lot more fun to watch, like a birthday clown fighting the aliens from Arrival.
No, we’re talking about the most boring fonts on the planet, Times New Roman and Calibri. You may recognize Times New Roman from the recurring nightmares you have about writing your college essays. Calibri is the one you see in the living nightmare of your current nine-to-five job. Two different fonts, same existential malaise.
But the United States government seems to think one is better than the other, and for the dumbest possible reason.
Rubio cited budget concerns, saying that switching to Calibri cost taxpayers $145,000. Although, does he think switching back to Times New Roman will reverse the cost? It’s not a light switch. That’s not how money works, lil’ guy.
No, the real bogeyman for Rubio is three letters having to do with accessibility. He attributes Blinken’s shift to Calibri as a misguided attempt at (say with me now) diversity, equity, and inclusion.
That’s right, liberals. Fonts are DEI now. Calibri is woke.
Now, you might be thinking to yourself: what the fuck is anyone even talking about anymore? Why are we fighting over fonts? How bad has partisanship gotten in America that a dropdown menu in a word processor is as divisive as the Mason-Dixon line? Are we about to draft Clippy into a civil war? We told him to fuck off so many times, let him retire already.
Yes, debating between Calibri and Times New Roman would be very stupid. Kind of.
So, this all boils down to how easy fonts are to read. The legibility of fonts has been a debate for decades, and much of that debate centers on serif fonts versus sans-serif fonts. Serifs are the little strokes you find at the end of the big strokes, like little feathers at the end of letters. Sans-serif just means no serifs; the feathers have been plucked.
For a long time, the conventional wisdom was that serif fonts were better for reading. Bottom serifs usually corresponded with the baseline of the font, and in theory, this helps your eyes keep track of the current line you’re reading, especially with large bodies of text. It’s sort of like bowling with the bumpers up, if that were acceptable for a fully grown adult.
But the digital era brought the dominance of serif fonts into question, as many programs and websites made sans-serif fonts more prevalent. In fact, the preference for serif fonts may have just been a long-standing cultural bias. A study of elementary school kids in 2002 found no significant difference between serif and sans-serif fonts when it came to reading speed. However, the students did express a strong preference for Comic Sans. Bookmark that, we may come back to it later.
Other studies have shown that it’s more than just serifs that determine legibility. One recent study in 2022 suggests that it has more to do with stroke contrast – in other words, how much difference there is between the thickest and thinnest parts of the letter. (There’s a joke to be made here about being able to see curves from across the room. Somebody else can make it on my behalf.) All that to say, there are likely more characteristics than just serifs that make a font easier to read.
Why do I mention all this? Because to me, the debate between Calibri and Times New Roman isn’t one about what font is more legible than the other. If it were about legibility, politicians would leave the matter to scientists, and given the current body of research, the answer might not be as conclusive as one might prefer.
No, the reason this debate sent me down a rabbit hole is because it feels reflective of so many debates between self-described conservatives and liberals, the neverending battle between bad faith and good intentions.
I have no doubt that when the State Department changed its font to Calibri, somebody in Secretary Blinken’s employ did some precursory research into the usability of fonts. Is it substantiated by the data? Someone with more than a Bachelor’s degree in English and a 3.2 GPA on their college transcripts will have to let me know.
But responding to that change by evoking the spectre of DEI is completely disingenuous. It would be okay for Secretary Rubio to simply say, “I don’t like Calibri, I like Times New Roman.” It would make him the dullest person on the planet, but at least he’d be honest. Blaming the switch on DEI is cynical pandering to a shrinking base of zealots. It’s farting into the wind for a dwindling crowd of people who love the smell of farts. (Not that I’m kink shaming.)
Now, in this case, the appeal to DEI fears is borderline innocuous, but not entirely. If you’re lucky, you will have to deal with legibility issues eventually, because all of us want to live long enough for our vision to go to crap. As a comedian with cerebral palsy Josh Blue says, people with disabilities are “not only the largest minority group, but we’re also the only minority group that you can join at any time.”
My point is, decisions like these could affect you directly, either now or in the future. I’m not advocating for Calibri. I would rather print 50 Shades of Grey on sandpaper and have to read every word aloud as I ate the pages, than go to bat for a font that’s just Helvetica in a bad toupee. But I am saying that if the administration can be this cavalier about a range of conditions that can affect anyone, imagine what they’re doing to disadvantage the most vulnerable among us.
Even as I was writing this essay, the Department of Health and Human Services cancelled millions of dollars of research grants to the American Academy of Pediatrics, a frequent critic of Secretary RFK, Jr. These grants were meant to fund research into things like SIDS, fetal alcohol disorders, and early autism detection. When the department sent them a letter to cancel those grants, guess what they evoked as their justification? DEI, their evergreen scapegoat.
Look, changing the font of government letterhead does not matter in the grand scheme. But the reason for changing it does. It reveals the heart of certain bureaucrats who do not see government as a service to its people, and are instead obsessed with nothing more than image maintenance. Accessibility may not matter to you now, but one day, it will. And when that day comes, you better hope that your elected officials have your back, instead of brushing you aside because you no longer fit the narrative.
Anyway, it would feel unsatisfying if we left the war between Calibri and Times New Roman in a stalemate. So, if we absolutely have to choose between them, I propose we change the official font of all governmental agencies to…
Comic Sans.
Oh, you thought I was kidding about that bookmark? I’m serious, all government correspondence should be in Comic Sans. Let me list the reasons.
First off, hilarious.
Second, in terms of usability, there is at least anecdotal evidence that Comic Sans is helpful for people with dyslexia. The actual research is less conclusive, but again, we’re talking about delivering a subpeona and it’s same font as the hangtag for Beanie Babies. Shut up, nerds, we’re having fun.
Third, can you imagine how terrifying we would be to our enemies if we were typing up sanctions, treaties, declarations of war in Comic Sans? Those are some unhinged psyops right there. Sure, we’d look like a country full of whimsical PTA moms printing flyers for a bake sale – but you know those moms can turn on a dime.
This will be my one and only agenda if I’m ever elected to office. And that doesn’t make America a better place, there’s always Wingdings.
Recently Pantone announced its 2026 Color of the Year. It’s Cloud Dancer, a cold, bland, hueless TCX color, and it’s bad, and I hate it. So I roasted it 25 times (because I thought it was the color for 2025, and it’s possible that I can’t read).
You look like if Taylor Swift was a CMYK value.
You look like a discontinued brand of urinal.
You look like a wine mom’s porcelain veneers.
You look like Casper the Friendly Ghost Kitchen.
You look like Millennial Beige if it could finally afford a mortgage.
You look like a dingleberry on the butt of the AI slop version of the Coca-Cola polar bear.
You look like the liminal space inside the head of a protagonist in an A24 film.
You look like you should be taking vitamin D pills.
You look like the walls of an asylum after it was bought by private equity.
You look like the inside of a gym sock after a young man growing up in the 90’s discovers the Sears lingerie catalog.
You look like Jim Gaffigan’s elbows.
You look like the White Album if the Beatles were from Scottsdale, Arizona.
You look like I wish I had actual snow blindness.
You look like you smell like rubbing alcohol.
You look like that chalky powder that tech bros drink because they’re no longer capable of feeling hunger or love.
You look like you hate those filthy hobbitses.
You look like the twins in the Matrix sequels.
You look like the kind of person who uses the phrase “circle back” in an email.
You look like you ate crayons as a kid but only because you didn’t want any of the other kids to use them.
You look like what a Milk Dud should actually refer to instead of a beloved chocolate candy.
You look like if I painted you on a canvas and displayed you in the MoMA, I would be rightfully hunted for sport.
You look like the favorite color of the guy who changed HBO to HBO Now to HBO Go to HBO Max to Max and then back to HBO Max again.
You look like male lactation.
You look like a hedge fund manager spent hours deliberating between you and several other shades of eggshell white before doing a line of cocaine and screaming at his contractor to paint the BDSM room of his Manhattan condo.
Finally, you look like you were invented by a company that puts a velvet rope around simple color management with its overpriced color books and manipulative SaaS model–wait, that’s not a roast, that’s just a true thing.
Anyway, this sucks, nothing is genuine, everything is rage bait, and the internet is a dead medium. Happy New Year!
Since the dawn of video games, one question has plagued both critics and philosophers alike: what if big ape like banana and punch good? Only one game has ventured to answer it.
There’s a primal appeal to Donkey Kong Bananza. One is the simple motivation of its protagonist: one day, ape find shiny banana in cave, so ape punch holes in ground until ape find all shiny bananas.
The other is the raw catharsis of its control scheme. Press X? Ape punch up. Press B? Ape punch down. Press Y? Ape punch walls and faces.
Press A? Ape jump. Ah, see? Ape not just punch. Ape have layers.
And what layers there are. What’s surprising about the game is the weird depth it achieves—narratively, sure, but mostly literally. DK meets Pauline, a young girl with a magical voice but paralyzing stage fright. After a catastrophic cave-in perpetrated by a trio of simian miners known as Void Co., DK and Pauline’s only hope of reaching the surface again is tunneling to the center of the planet. There, a mythical MacGuffin called the Banandium Root will grant Pauline her wish to go home—and DK his wish to decimate the Chiquita supply chain.
The world-building here is whimsical but rich. DK and Pauline encounter myriad subterranean cultures, from arctic-dwelling zebras to light-carving serpents. Present in every layer are the Fractones, a race of sentient, regenerating crystals. In what feels like a nod to Journey to the Center of the Earth, you can read the history of these cavernous worlds along the way in journals chiseled by the intrepid Exploritone. A chip off the old Jules Verne block.
It’s easy to compare this game to Super Mario Odyssey, since it’s by the same dev team and has a similar aesthetic and collect-a-thon mission style. But whereas Odyssey leans heavily into platforming, Bananza goes all-in on the smash-and-grab dopamine rush of combat and terrain destruction. In the early stages of the game, I worried this meant any fight or puzzle could be circumvented by punching your way through it. Fortunately the fights and puzzles ramp up in difficulty. Yes, you’re still punching your way through them. But you’re punching thoughtfully.
All this culminates in a lengthy finale that’s too good to spoil (if YouTube hasn’t done that for you already). But what I loved most were the simple character arcs that pluck the heart strings as DK and Pauline forge their friendship. Pauline transforming DK through song grows her confidence in her innate gifts, the kind of journey we all wish for the young people in our lives. And DK learns that maybe, just maybe, there is more to ape than just banana.
North Church on Congress Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Oct. 18, 2026
Listen, I’m bad at protesting. It’s not that I lack conviction. In fact, I’m prone to one-on-one rants, as most of my friends can attest. But I’m bad at going to organized protests. I feel awkward in large gatherings, and I don’t plan far enough ahead to craft any clever signage. But last Saturday I determined to go to the nearest No Kings rally—not because I was eager to be part of the crowd, but because man, I love not having a king.
Seriously, not having a monarchy is one of the few things I get absurdly patriotic about. I like teasing my Canadian friends about still having the queen on their money. I like telling my English friends that yes, Meghan Markle was an American conspiracy to dismantle the Royal Family. Sure, they can quip back about how they enjoy literally every social service the United States can’t seem to muster, from universal healthcare to The Mighty Boosh. Does that stop me from wanting to throw a handful of tea bags into the closest harbor when I hear Jonathan Groff sing “You’ll Be Back” in Hamilton? No, it does not.
If you’re an American, it’s your right and privilege to regard monarchies with irreverence, loathing, and outright nausea. There are no divine coronations or inherited rights to rule here. We’re a slapdash, rough-and-tumble democratic republic, electing people from among us to represent us. Albeit, it’s a laughably imperfect system, like a third-grade playground bully trying to paint the Mona Lisa from memory. But it’s a democratic republic nonetheless. And for the sake of its continued perfection, sometimes even introverts have to leave their sanctuaries to put up a stink in the streets.
Before the No Kings rally, I put on the only star-spangled attire I have: a 2023 Major League Rugby grey championship hoodie for the New England Free Jacks. The logo, appropriately, is the lantern from Paul Revere’s midnight ride. To spice up the ensemble, I went to Walmart to buy a big-ass American flag but unfortunately failed to find one among the mounds of Halloween candy and plastic jack-o-lanterns. A brief traffic jam brought me to a parking spot just outside downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I squeezed through the crowd, which occupied the whole of Congress Street, until I reached Market Square and planted myself across from North Church, empty handed but full of heart.
The gathering was similar to the others across the country: a lively mixture of protest and street party. Like the emblematic frogs of Portland, Oregon, there were a few jesters in bright inflatable costumes, in this case lobsters and (to my delight as a deep sea fanatic) angler fish to give it some maritime New England flare. There was a tidal wave of signs, declarations of civic pride and pictures depicting the would-be king in every unflattering caricature you could imagine. There was a man hawking free copies of the U.S. Constitution like beer at a baseball game. And the couple of detractors—monarchists, I can only assume—driving down Congress in their oversized trucks and hastily scribbled, bigoted poster boards were mostly ignored by the crowd.
But what stood out most to me were the people who didn’t stand out at all. People without signs or costumes, maybe clapping or cheering sometimes, but mostly just soaking in the camaraderie with quiet smiles. Maybe they were like me, treading the 9-to-5 waters at work, sick and fucking tired of watching technocrats, oligarchs, and ideologues spending those same waking hours tearing our country apart for scraps. Just regular people who have this silly notion that government for the people, by the people shouldn’t perish from the earth.
Look, I didn’t go to the protest because I think we’re actually living in a monarchy. But when enough power is concentrated in the hands of one person, it might as well be. Right now, the ruling party of Congress has all but abdicated its responsibility to legislate or even represent their state constituencies. Instead, they’ve blithely relinquished the power of the purse like someone being knowingly pickpocketed. The White House has opened a floodgate of executive orders, no more law than a doodle on the back of a bar napkin, but treated by some as royal proclamation. Meanwhile the Supreme Court, three members of which are the President’s own appointees, are rubber stamping his agenda, at a time when both the judicial and legislative branches should be stalwart checks on executive power.
As of this writing, the East Wing of the White House is being demolished to make way for a lavish $250 million ballroom, a steady creep of gilded opulence—the curse of Midas’s touch on what was once the People’s House. It might not be the home of a monarch yet. But as the President teases a third and very illegal term, things are certainly monarch-flavored.
Chances are, we’ll all have more opportunities to become better protesters. As for me, I might buy one of those angler fish costumes for next time.
At least the angler fish is a queen I can respect.
