#179. Artemis II and You

Hi everyone,

I’m on my away home from Washington DC, where I spent Sunday setting things straight in our nation’s capital. It’s all fixed now! You’re welcome! Just kidding! I did one show at the DC Improv which was a blast. The vibes in the city were truly excellent, which felt not unrelated to the president and vice president being elsewhere over the weekend. Thanks to Lafayette Wright and Jamal Russell for opening the show, and for Brittany Carney for dropping in while she was in town. What a great club!!!

My friend Emma (co-author, along with Jordan Robinson of the book Court Queens, out now!!!) recommended a sandwich place about fifteen minutes on foot from my hotel, and a thirty minute walk with a sandwich at the end of it, is my idea of a perfect road day activity. This is the Crunchy Boi from Compliments Only, and it was an ideal lunch for such a beautiful day. I walked around listening to the new Joyce Manor album (but mostly just "Falling Into It" on repeat) and felt terrific.

I’d spent the rest of the weekend in Kentucky but telling people I was in Cincinnati. The club (Commonwealth Comedy Club, another one of my favorites) is in Dayton, KY, which tends to confuse people who only know of the more famous Dayton an hour or so away in Ohio. The shows were SO good, even the late ones with smaller crowds. Garrett Titlebaum (the excellent host for the weekend’s shows) and I were talking about how sometimes shows feel like you have to work, and sometimes the shows are so good you get to work. The difference being whether you have to toil to bring the audience along with you, or whether they trust you already and you can do more creative exploration. This was such a great “doing the work” weekend.

Commonwealth has a drummer onstage as part of every show, which is so fun and unique, and it adds a little extra texture to the venue, which is in a renovated church. Garrett was extremely funny and warm. Cody Hughes, the other opener, straight up murdered every show holy shit. And I got to hang out with my old friend Reid Faylor, whom I coaxed into telling a story on my late Friday show. Reid also gave me a copy of his book, which I’m hyped to dig into.

My other favorite part of the weekend was finding a cool little bookstore and coffee shop in Newport, KY just a short walk from my hotel. Both days I was in town, I grabbed an iced coffee and sat outside enjoying the spring weather and general friendly ambiance. Roebling Books and Coffee has a sign on the door that says: “Immigrants are welcome here. ICE is not.” It’s the kind of sign that I see all over my neighborhood in Brooklyn but not quite as often in smallish towns in red states. The sign, and the friendly queer (I’m making some assumptions here, but not many) staff of the cafe reminded me of the obvious truth that cool, righteous people exist all over, and that people across our big, diverse country have always found ways to look out for each other. 

I’m so excited to get home this afternoon and get back on top of my day-to-day life! I was home for like five days, and I was scrambling to get things done before I left for the road again. I was largely but not entirely successful. I am very sorry to Maris for leaving a big-ass pile of unopened mail on the kitchen table, bigger than the usual pile of unopened mail by my seat at the table even. I’ve got the last few informational meetings about the new Writers Guild contract over the next week and a half, and then I’m kind of back in my usual groove. 

PLUS: I talked with my friend Claire Lower about the roast beef sandwiches of Massachusetts for Milk Street Radio. We had a great time!

PEP TALK FOR THE ARTEMIS II

Hey, good work, astronauts and astronaut...accomplices! The crew of the Artemis II traveled farther into space than any humans had before. Their voyage totaled over 690,000 miles, which with all the new rules, is just about enough to get you Silver Medallion Status on most major airlines. It's a stunning group accomplishment comprised of several spectacular individual accomplishments.

Christina Hammond Koch became the first woman to travel outside of low Earth orbit and past the moon. Victor Glover became the first Black person to accomplish this feat. The mission also carried the first toilet to travel around the moon. I put those three things in different sentences out of respect for the human beings who accomplished something. They should not be lumped in with the toilet, which does not deserve specific credit. It could have been any object. The first Ouija board to travel around the moon. The first Jell-o mold to travel around the moon. The toilet didn't train for this!!!

In fact, when the astronauts left earth, the toilet didn't work and required several hours to repair. If I had been one of those astronauts, I would have turned the ship around so fast. If you tell me there's a working toilet and there's no working toilet, I'm going home before the freeze dried ice cream makes it to my small intestine. So additional congratulations to the intrepid space travelers who made it through this terrifying equipment mishap.

Amidst the post-space travel afterglow, my only complaint is the name of the mission. Artemis was the ancient Greek goddess of the hunt, which is an inappropriate name for a space exploration unless we're bringing home a dead Martian. Also, Artemis II? Why are we doing sequel names? Why is everything a reboot these days? And even if we're using existing IP, there's been so much mythology since ancient Greece. We could have called it the Frodo Baggins. Lord of the Rings is equally as not real as the Greek gods. And we don't even have to pretend it's real to make people feel better. "Actually, the First Amendment says you can worship ancient Greek deities." Well, nobody does, because they'd get made fun of until they moved to a new town.

Despite that minor quibble, it's nice to see our government doing something both ambitious and competent. Now if we could only bring that good governance down to Earth, we'd really be cooking!

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I didn't edit this request very much (except for the nickname, which I added). People keep asking questions like this, and it's been a while since I addressed one, even though I am also obsessed with this topic. So! Here we are!

How does the average person navigate the constant onslaught of “we’re embracing A.I.!” at work with “A.I. is terrible!” from everywhere else. Knowing that there is no escape, and that earning money lies with the former, while being able to look oneself in the mirror lies with the latter?
- AI, AI...Uh Ohhhhh

A lot of smart and cool people have written about being AI haters recently. These pieces are behind various level of paywall, but I wanted to share them all.

Hamilton Nolan: "Go Ahead And Use AI. It Will Only Help Me Dominate You."

Rax King: "if this is what I'm getting left behind from, just leave me behind"

Albert Burneko: "Why Would You Ask AI To Tell The Story Of Your Own Life"

Caitie Delaney: "help, i'm at jury duty thinking about AI again"

These pieces are largely, but not entirely, about working in creative fields, where people have started to believe that having an idea is the same thing as making art. It is thrilling to have an idea. But typing "show me the i drink your milkshake scene from there will be blood but starring peter griffin from family guy" and having a software program spit out a glitchy, uncanny version of that is not making art. It is, in the truest sense of the word, "content." A thing that fills space and time with no craft or meaning behind it. And also, you didn't even make that by typing in the prompt. The computer did, by stealing. The whole thing makes me feel very: "If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook." If you didn't make the thing, you don't get to take credit for saying what if this thing was a thing? even if a computer shows you what that might look like.

Outside of creative industries, there are plenty of reasons not to allow Generative AI models into your life. There's the environmental impact, which can't be discounted. As cool as it is that it takes more energy for Google to be wrong way more often, it seems inefficient. Plus it reduces your cognitive capacity, as Hamilton points out in the piece above. Finally! A way for an office job to have the same impact on your brain that playing professional football does! We should call the damage you do to your brain by using AI at your desk job "Seat T.E."

I don't know exactly what the solution is to having this kind of thing foisted upon you at a job though. The best protection I can picture is a union with contractual protection from having to train the software that your boss eventually uses to put a bullet in your professional brain. I don't think that throwing a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house is a scalable solution to this problem. Continuing to fight it knuckle and kneecap (the slightly more sporting version of tooth and nail) seems worthwhile and potentially even effective, given that you're not up against anything actually helpful in most cases.

As I've said before, I'm not smart enough to know whether there are any handy and ethical uses of this technology. My hunch is that yeah, machine learning is useful, and there will probably be some spell check-level applications of this software. But I certainly don't think that it's as revolutionary as the people who are selling it have suggested. Otherwise they wouldn't be cramming it into all of our orifices over coast to coast vociferous protests. It's like how every cereal commercial says that their product is "part of a balanced breakfast." Only if you eat it. If you don't, then you can balance your breakfast any way you choose.

Maybe there's a big enough market to keep these companies afloat selling their technology to the government, who will use it to create a veneer of plausible deniability when they commit war crimes. It doesn't seem like people are signing up in droves to pay for for a service you can ask: "Tell my wife I forgot to pick up groceries on my way home from work, but in a way that she won't want to divorce me after."

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Cake - "Let Me Go"

Last week, someone reminded me of an old tweet of mine where I joked about having a panic attack trying to explain the band Cake to someone under 30. Cake is one of those bands where their big songs (“The Distance,” their cover of “I Will Survive”) all sound a little like goofs. Their singer emotes a little more than a Rex Harrison talk-sing, but not too much more. Their tunes are equally likely to feature a trumpet solo as a guitar lick. The bass lines hold the whole thing together. I guess, if I had to nutshell them, I’d say that Cake is like They Might Be Giants if they were trying harder to get laid and didn’t care about teaching kids about science. Cake’s big albums came out in the late 90s and early 00s, but they’re still at it, and I think they give away a tree to an audience member at every show or something? NOT going to look it up.

“Let Me Go” presents Cake at their least tonally ironic, despite the internal irony of the song’s chorus “Let me go, and I will want you more.” The rippling guitar and syncopated vocals give the song a nice warm groove. It’s a cousin to “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” (“when she talks, she moves her mouth/instead of her lips”) but with more awareness that the woman the song is about has wants and needs as well. 

(I may have included this song in a previous newsletter, but I’ve done a lot of these, and I do NOT have a thorough accounting of things I’ve said/thought before. Note to self: Hire someone to make me a spreadsheet!)

UPCOMING SHOWS

My 2026 road schedule is shaping up, plus I've got lots of stuff in New York too! I'd love to see you at a show!

4/16: Facebook Marketplace Live the Game Show at Caveat (NYC)

4/17: Reading at P&T Knitwear (NYC)

4/19: Three Day Champion at Caveat; Good God at Union Hall (Brooklyn)

4/20: Hosting the Authors Guild Foundation Gala (New York City)

4/23: Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Live Recording (Chicago)

4/24: Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Presents: Comedy Grab Bag at the Bell House (Brooklyn)

4/25: Greenpoint Comedy Club (Brooklyn)

4/26: J.D. Amato's Book Launch at Books of Wonder (NYC)

5/1: Fall of Freedom w/ Hari Kondabolu at Union Hall (Brooklyn)

5/5: Wild Card at Alphaville (Brooklyn)

5/29-5/30: Blue Ridge Comedy Club (Bristol, TN)

6/3: Private Gig (Burlington, VT)

6/11: Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Live Recording (Chicago)

7/23: Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Live Recording (Chicago)

10/21: Dallas, TX (DETAILS COMING SOON)

10/22: Houston, TX (DETAILS COMING SOON)