👔 You can tell a lot about a person by the intensity or complacency with which they treat the 30-minute mandatory lunch break.
💬 Nice to come across this very optimistic and well-researched essay on the importance playfulness today:
The most successful communities will embrace play-based gatherings in unexpected ways. In a society so desperately craving permission to connect, play is the forgotten art with the potential to lead to transformative experiences.
But, as someone who has been on the PLAY schtick for a long time, it’s vital that it does not get pigeon-holed into a mere trend or movement. Play is as universal a virtue as patience, justice, or even (as I argued in last week’s blog) love.
Play is the way!
✏️ New Word Learned:
Encomiast: a person who publicly praises or flatters someone else
📹🎶 Kota the Friend @ Blue Note, NYC
💬 African Proverb:
The man who is all eyes sees nothing.
✌️ Came across a wildly fun video of Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 Superbowl performance in American Sign Language from deaf interpreter Jeremy Lee Stone. It’s well worth the watch.
However, it’s his breakdown of the interpretation and explanation for his choices that is easily the most creative thing you’ll see all week. It’s a beautiful blend of artistry, language, and expression. I don’t know sign language, and I feel this gave me an even deeper appreciation for the deaf community.
✏️ New Word Learned:
Riparian: relating to wetlands adjacent to rivers and streams
Finished reading: The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin 📚
A seminal work in anarchist theory. You simply can’t fault the heart and goodwill that imbues these pages. It is striking to me how strong the bond between hopefulness and revolution (as opposed to anger and rebellion) is prominent.
Much of the book, unfortunately is very dated. Predictions and commentary on many of the countries (and socialism in general) did not pan out well. However, I found the chapter on division of labor to be one of the best and most useful things I’ve read in a long time, reminding me why I am reading this genre in the first place. I feel armed and equipped with new insights that more than repay the price of reading. It is a necessary counteractive to the capitalist and commercial-driven education I get in my MBA.
💬 Spoken Poem: We Are The Last Poets
This wind you hear is the birth of memory. When the moment hatches in time’s womb, there will be no art talk. The only poem you will hear will be the spear point pivoted Into the punctured marrow of the villain, And the timeless native son dancing like crazy to retrieved rhythms of desire faded into memory. Therefore, we are The Last Poets of the world. And the question is not whether the world is ready for change, but rather are you n——?
Artists that were on the forefront of the civil rights movements and who some consider the first hip-hop group.
📸 More film photos I haven’t posted here before. Some recent, some less so.
💐 Things that deserve their flowers today:
- Long voice notes
- Doorstoppers
- How clothes smell after leaving a coffeeshop
- Changing minds
- Tall windows
- High Ceilings
- Penicillin
- Low budget films
- Dirty jokes
✍️
Love is bringing out the play in others. Play is the mode of one who is loved. When you create conditions for another person to express themselves playfully, you have loved them. When you have been safely carried into a state of playfulness, you have been loved. Play is how we exercise the freedom that love secures for us.
Put a lot of heart into my most recent post about the relationship between play and love. Not sure how intelligible it is, but it is the type of thinking I’d like to believe is somewhat rare. Please read the full thing and let me know your thoughts: bradley-andrews.com.
💸 This article alleges that the avg. stock pay for an OpenAI employee is $1.5 million. My initial reaction is great enthusiasm for those workers—what a windfall!
At the same time, the growing inequalities are hard to ignore. I wrote this dispatch a few weeks ago in part to understand things better.
🎶 Update: Can’t sleep. Album too good. I was definitely trying to play it cool in my last post. Like I said, no skips; and there is a different genre of hip-hop for all the fans. 😮💨
🎰🕺🪩🎤🎼
🎵 Just finished the livestream of Ca$ino by Baby Keem. Always dangerous to speak too soon, especially because I’m very biased, but gonna give broad thoughts. May talk about individual tracks after the album has time to breathe.
Baby Keem is a style-bender, which is why I love him. The Andre 3K, Kanye, and dare I say, Tyler the Creator, influences are so evident. None as palpable as Kendrick though, and I imagine the most critcism will be that he is so similar to Kenny.
I think it is a phenomenal album— more melodic and catchy than his last, but still energetic and absolutely hype. He gets into his singing bag for real. It is going to please hip-hop fans and causal listeners. Above all, there are NO skips.
Lyrically it’s not the strongest (but still leagues ahead of the zeitgeist), something Keem himself acknowledges in a song called “im not a lyricist”. The West Coast joints with producers like Too Short are my favs, I think— but maybe that’s the 909er in me. I’m feeling this one STRONG 🕺
Being 25 years old, I think he understands how to make a “meme”, or moments, that feel so perfect for online culture. There are a million of them sprinkled throughout the album. That being said, Keem also digs deep into some traumas and hardships. This stuff is real art.
Lastly, I think PgLang knows they knocked it out of the park with the rollout. The livestream listening party was sick, like everything they do. I need them to expand their projects ASAP. With two great albums, Keem has successfully cemented himself as a player to be reckoned with. However, if he is going to really ascend and take over for Dot, I’m not sure that pgLang can afford to be as insular as they’ve been. I understand that they want to keep it small and family, if only to keep out the bad culture. But playing nice with others is part of the game and the album could’ve beneffited from some other great features.
Conclusion: amazing album. Happy I pre-ordered the CD. As I predicted earlier this week, it is going to be on repeat for a long while.
Oh, and Kendrick’s features are frickin’ fire, funny, and PLAYFUL. My GOAT for real.
💬 From my current read, The Conquest of Bread:
We have all been bent on studying the dramatic side of revolutions so much, and the practical work of revolutions so little, that we are apt to see only the stage effects, so to speak, of these great movements: the fight of the first days; the barricades. But this fight, this first skirmish, is soon ended, and it is only after the breakdown of the old system that the real work of revolution can be said to begin.
🗞 A friend from my MBA program recently reached out with an idea about how entertainment follows the same life cycles as empires. Together, we wrote a paper that explores this pattern in depth, and made some predictions about what happens next. You can read the dispatch here: mercurysplaybook.com
💐 I’ve mentioned this before, but I am truly rooting for guys like iShowSpeed. His tour of Africa was such a fun showcase of nations, ethnicities, and culture. Watching him do interviews out of character always reminds me how polite, intelligent, and successful he is–at only 21 years old!
I’ve heard many arguments for why writers should not use AI. Yet, I have never heard someone voice my particular reason.
My particular reason is that I care deeply about the quality of my prose and my prose is far better than anything AI has produced. Should this change, my stance might also. In the meantime, I will be unapologetically penning my own thoughts.