Hiiii, it’s been a while. SF’s been blanketed in fog so I’ve been doing coldest-winter-is-summer-etc nesting: bought a new coffee machine, jarvis’d some shit on the blog, put Phoebe’s new one on repeat, cracked open one of the thrillers that the Times loved (and am finding it not terribly thrilling?). But I also got out to a Valkyries game on Monday night and had a hell of a time.

Hope you’re well and are finding your way through the end of summer. Send word: what are you listening to?

-m

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Aug 18 2026

Happiest place on earth

I've been lucky enough to attend three Golden State Valkyries games this season; two from the nosebleeds (still not "cheap seats"), and last night's playoff berth-clinching game against the Dallas Wings, from some seats lower down in Chase Center.

I've seen my fair share of professional sports in my life, and we are blessed with great teams and fandoms here in the Bay Area. But the big three seem to have curdled. Since they moved from Oakland, Warriors games are now full of moneyed tech bros; 49er games carry the latent encephalopathy of the NFL (and are better on TV anyway); and Giants games now feel like a nice picnic hosted by your homophobic uncle.

On the other hand, there is nothing like a Valks game.

The Bay Area (soon to be renamed the GabbbBAY Area, after star forward Gabby Williams) may have been demographically and psychographically primed for a WNBA team, but even in their second year the team already feels like an organization in their prime. Every game sells out, the stadium (aka "Balhalla") full of people decked in violet and black, many of them sparkling. The crowd is all ages, all genders, all orientations, all colors, all family types. Everyone is smiling and friendly and happy to be there...and everyone is happy that you're there. If it's your first time, you can stop by an information desk and get a free "MY FIRST VALKYRIES GAME!" pin, which becomes a moment of celebration for the arena's hype woman if you make it on the jumbotron. I have never felt more joy in professional sports.

Here's The Athletic's Brian Hamilton in a long piece on the Valkyries from a couple of weeks ago:

When the Valkyries compete along the shore of the San Francisco Bay’s Central Basin, there is a sort of exaggerated delight that sets the mood apart. A fan brought out for pregame drum-banging is hailed as “a Founding Guard member since 2025,” which is amusing, since there’s no way to be a Founding Guard member any earlier. Upon her return to Chase Center, Los Angeles Sparks guard Kate Martin receives a pregame tribute video and a standing ovation; Martin played one season for the Valkyries before being cut in training camp this year. One guy leaves his third-row seat to dance with members of The Flock hype team during a timeout. When Kaitlyn Chen banks in a 3-pointer, it’s as if no one in the building has ever seen such a thing in their lives.

It’s funny. Maybe a little try-hard. But then some WNBA teams and fans haven’t tried enough, period.

For years, whenever I'd post a pic to Instagram or Twitter (RIP) from a San Francisco Giants game, I'd caption it "Happiest place on earth." I still love an afternoon or evening picnic at Pac Bell AT&T Oracle Park, but Balhalla now earns that title. If you can, go. This is what professional sports should be: inclusive, fun, a little silly, a little over the top, featuring a team that plays with joy, backed by an organization that gives a shit about and reflects the community it lives in.

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→→ other things

→ Mandy Brown, Reading matters deeply:

Reading isn’t about reaching empathic dead ends, or recruiting platitudes about how we must understand each other; it isn’t about the performance of social class absent a criticism of that class structure. To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully yourself. But this means that you are there when you are reading; you, the reader, with your feet on the ground, a ground on which racism, misogyny, and extreme poverty are not so easily dispatched. You must read where you are, not in some hypothetical sanitized reading room, but in the dirt. To use reading to step into someone else’s shoes is to leave yourself behind.

Emphasis mine.

→ Love seeing Spencer Tweedy making the case that you're still allowed to use computers like it's 2007. "I like being part of a worldwide ungoverned network of absolute fuckin nerds sounding off on things they think about." Celebrity drummers, they're just like us.

→ Robin Sloan coins "jarvising," which describes upwards of 99.8% of YouTube AI content. "The most common appli­ca­tion of a per­sonal Jarvis seems to be...tinkering with one’s per­sonal Jarvis. 'Gotta get my tools just right' isn’t a new phenomenon, of course, but/and it’s useful to notice its recur­rence here."

→ GenX childhood fear: nuclear holocaust. GenX adulthood fear: a coordinated attack on the US power grid. "With 20 minutes and enough rifles, a crew could potentially turn the lights out nationwide. ... A blackout caused by lost transformers, he warned, could last 18 months or longer."

→ Sam Kahn asks: Is the City Finished? "I have this suspicion that the pandemic was a collective trauma that we still haven’t processed, and a great deal of the trauma was this — that at a stroke the city became outmoded and it became clear that the real movement of wealth and culture was through the web."

→ Mitch Therieau on Phoebe Bridgers' new album in The New Yorker:

Her first two albums have distinct sonic identities, but the songs sometimes bleed into one another. She has a finely tuned ear for melody, but she is not a writer of earworms; her melodies tend to follow the lateral, associative chain of her lyrics. They take hold after repeat listens. Listening to her music again and again, in fact, is the key to seeing the larger shape of her ambition. Bridgers is not a serial self-reinventor like David Bowie or even Joni Mitchell—she is a polisher and a honer. She is the kind of artist who seems to have two or three basic musical templates for songs and is constantly creating new versions of them.

If you put Lost Weekend on while you're cooking or commuting or catching up on email you'll miss all of the ambition in the new album, whose songs are very much Phoebe Bridgers songs, but whose production is "good headphones laying on the couch" worthy. Also, you'll miss genius lyrics like this, the last line of Panorama: "If you're drinking, then I'm drinking."

→ Last Friday all the Phoebe fans (hi) were searching for "tamám shud" after reading the lyrics to Kill Me.