There comes a time in every skeleton's death when, upon their being discovered in a grave hugging another skeleton, modern people start foaming at the mouth, guessing at what that relationship might have been. This is understandable and quite defensible from my perspective as a modern person. An embrace is a gesture that transcends however many centuries might separate us. Of course we might wonder who these two people were to each other. We might want to know the nature of their love.

This is of course an assumption. An embrace is not proof of love, but it is a powerful suggestion of it. In archaeology, people buried in double and multiple burials are often interpreted as having some kind of connection, whether through social or family ties. An adult buried with a child might be interpreted to be the grave of a mother and a son, for example, and a double burial of two adults, male and female, is often interpreted to be a couple.

But sometimes assumptions are overturned by evidence. In 2024, a paper that extracted ancient DNA from the skeletal material in Pompeii's plaster casts challenged several traditional interpretations. For example, the casts of an adult with a golden bracelet and a child sitting on their lap, traditionally assumed to be a mother and child, were revealed to belong to an adult male who was not related to the child. And the smaller of two people who died in an embrace, traditionally interpreted as sisters or lovers, was revealed to be a man who was unrelated to the other skeleton. This suggests this man might have died embracing another man or a tall woman, both of which are certainly more exciting options than sisters.

I Love Boosters is a maximalist affair. The latest movie from Boots Riley is at once communist agitprop and also a rollicking comedy about a group of scammers in a magical realist version of the Bay Area and also a celebration of everything that cinema is and can be.

I am a bit of a cinema nerd. I studied cinema in college—both theory and production—and it was my pathway to thinking and writing about video games as art. There is simply nothing better than going to the movies and being delighted by moving images. And l Love Boosters is a testament to that delight that you can only feel when you’re watching a movie with a bunch of strangers, laughing, yelping and signing together in the dark.

Boosters is a movie about Corvette, played by Keke Palmer, a fashion designer and a member of the Velvet Gang, a group of boosters who steal designer clothes and sell them at discount prices. Her main target are the stores for Metro Designs, the flagship brand from genius designer Christine Smith, played by Demi Moore, who sees these boosters as her ultimate nemeses. But that stuffed-to-bursting premise is only the start. As far as I can tell, the aesthetic goal of I Love Boosters is to create the most movie of all time.

That means that the film is, on occasions, shaggy around the edges. After a totally coherent explanation of the theory of dialectical materialism (yes, really) in the back third of the movie, the zaniness that the movie runs on loses some steam. But the things Boots Riley shows us while zigging and zagging through the plot of the movie feels totally worth any quibbles I have about pacing. As much as I loved Riley’s first movie, Sorry To Bother You, that was very much a first film—a movie that felt like it had to contain everything that Riley thinks and believes, because he wasn’t sure there’d be a second one. While I Love Boosters rehashes some of the same ideas, it feels lighter, less burdened by being a debut. it’s that lightness that makes this movie so fun to watch.

Each Metro Designs store sells a single color of clothing, and each time the characters enter one, they’re awash in a sea of red or yellow or green. In the background of the action there’s news broadcasts of characters like “black single mother” or “upstanding citizen” who are arguing in favor of paying more rent and not unionising. Christine Smith lives in a high rise that hangs diagonally across downtown—when Corvette tries to leave it after sneaking in, sliding down the slanted floor, eventually her legs spin around like she’s Roadrunner. There's an extended stop motion sequence with characters who literally remove their own skins. Lakeith Stanfield sorrowfully intones into the camera, “no more sucking souls out of pussies.” It literally brings a tear to his eye. There’s so much movie in this movie that I forgot about the subplot where Don Cheadle plays a predatory pyramid scheme leader until I asked Chris Person to read this blog over and he mentioned it.

 After the lights came back on when I saw it, my husband turned to me and said “at no point did I know where the plot was gonna go,” which to me is a sign of the film’s success in its approach to filmmaking. It’s all “yes, and” but also “more” and also “throw this in too.” Even if I don’t know that the movie coheres by the end, I love when I go to a movie theater and feel thrill and surprise. I feel like I could watch I Love Boosters a hundred times, and each time I could find something new in it. These are the kinds of movies that make me love the movies.

Thank God, They’re Properly Re-Releasing The Devils

A white whale of preservation for film freaks, Ken Russell’s classic is finally getting the treatment befitting a masterpiece.

AftermathChris Person

Happy Grand Theft Auto VI was originally supposed to release today day. While there’s no doubt there will continue to be tons of articles drip-feeding information and speculation about the game in the lead-up to its actual release in November, everyone and their mom have christened it the final video game that could slap any price onto itself and move the needle for years to come, or they make guesswork of its plot from the few tidbits we’ve gotten from Rockstar Games. I’ve never actually been concerned with GTA as a gangster shoot-em-up game. I like it as a fun little sandbox game that I can chill in and listen to good music—something I can only hope GTA 6 will be just as good for. 

My earliest memories of playing Grand Theft Auto go back to Vice City. Of course, I was six and shouldn’t have been playing a violent game where you could wander the streets and blow random passersby’s heads off. I had the wherewithal to recognize it was referencing Scarface (since the film was a Thanksgiving staple with my family, alongside The Godfather), but nonetheless, I was a kindergartener playing GTA: Vice City because my older brother (who’s 25 years older than me) didn’t punk me with the tried-and-true passing of the unplugged controller. He let me free-roam using his finished memory card. 

There, I’d spend countless hours beelining to the tank I knew he kept in his Tony Montana garage and cause mayhem until I got wasted. That is, until my mom caught wind of my brother letting “baby Isaiah” play the M-rated game unsupervised and bought me a PlayStation 1 with more age-appropriate games like Spider-Man, NASCAR, and Looney Tunes, like hand blocking a trained puppy with a toy to keep them from teething on furniture. While I acquiesced to her wishes, I’d already gotten a taste for GTA’s sandbox potential and longed for the day I’d be “old enough” to play to my heart’s content. That day would come when San Andreas came out.

Like history repeating itself, my brother would let me play his copy of San Andreas when I turned 12 with my mom’s blessing, since I’d already seen the worst of it. She didn’t know about Hot Coffee, and we wanted to keep it that way. But I didn’t fall in love with San Andreas for the debauchery it promised. I loved it for its music. While Luke has gone on record as saying Vice City has the best (licensed) video game soundtrack of all time, my favorite is San Andreas. I loved the songs on San Andreas so much that I’d boot up the game for the express purpose of turning on the radio and having CJ go on a road trip to the countryside while flipping through its stations. I took my sandbox role-playing so seriously that I was obeying traffic laws. 

With San Andreas being “the Black GTA game,” with an immaculate time capsule of cookout classics including but not limited to Michael Jackson, The Isley Brothers, Rick James, Boyz II Men, and Slick Rick, the licensed OST already felt like home off rip. But what pushed it over the edge as a formative gaming experience, one I’ve been chasing in the years since with games like Saints Row, is its all-star playlist of licensed OST serving as a gateway to music I’d otherwise never have heard. More specifically, it exposed me to absolute banger folk and country music songs before 9/11 irreparably warped the genre into that jingoistic Bo Burnham bit. 

Thanks to San Andreas, my musical tastes expanded after hearing Jerry Reed’s “Amos Moses,” Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn’s “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man,” Whitey Shafer’s “All My Exes Live in Texas,” Hank Williams’ “Hey Good Lookin’,” Ed Bruce’s “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts,” and (my all-time favorite) America’s “Horse With No Name.” Many of these were classics that didn’t make it into Rockstar Games’ GTA: The Trilogy remaster. 

Looking back on it, my love of road-tripping in San Andreas has everything to do with my brother taking me on night drives when I was little to help me fall asleep. My memory now plays back those drives like that one dreamy, Wong Kar Wai-esque clip of Anthony Bourdain adrift in a busy city street. He’d hit the expressway, and I’d nod off singing OutKast’s “So Fresh So Clean,” knowing damn well I didn’t understand what it was they were rapping about, but was fully convinced André 3000 was the coolest guy alive. 

It's uncanny that my nostalgia for those nights would manifest as San Andreas music, which I’d return to in my daily life as my own sort of digital nostalgia playlist. And with GTA 6 dropping the week of my 30th birthday, I hope its OST will hit the same mark as my all-around fun sandbox game. But I’m not gonna lie, I’m nervous it won’t. Case in point: I couldn’t tell you a single track on the GTA 5 soundtrack, and I played that jawn front to back. 

That’s not to say GTA V didn’t have bangers. It’s just that, as a time capsule of the music I was listening to back then—music I knew inside and out—it never stood out the way San Andreas’ Smash Bros.-style “All the warriors” tracklist did. If anything, I remember more of the silly shit DJ Cara would say between tracks than the tracks themselves. Deadass, I had to look up that Freddie Gibbs rapped "Welcome to Los Santos" this weekend. As someone who fucks with dude heavy, it's not a good sign that I couldn’t recall his presence on GTA V’s OST. And what with GTA 6 shaping up to be the latest piece of media slow-cooking during the unreality of the Trump presidency, I’m also worried that whatever podcast-type listening experience it no doubt has queued up will age more like The Boys or an SNL bit than something as timeless and razor-sharp as The Simpsons. 

But more than that, I can’t shake the old man feeling that today’s popular music just doesn’t build the same way older tracks did, where songs had multiple verses, a sticky chorus, dynamic instrumentation, and four-minute-plus runtimes. Now, sometimes the best we can hope for with songs today is something shy of two minutes that feels more formulaic and derivative than unique and bold. 

Having lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for almost a decade, I know firsthand how rural music scenes can feel frozen in time. I’m talking about folks blasting Tech N9ne and Hopsin while Jid and J. Cole were blowing up everywhere else. Sure, the big Drake hits filtered through, but only because they were inescapable. Otherwise, contemporary hits had as much chance of getting play as a third-rate phone carrier’s signal coverage in areas that weren’t metropolitan. One of my best friends confirmed that Florida is pretty much the same way, which has only increased my fear that the frozen-in-time songs phenomenon would carry over in the game as well. But if GTA 6 wants to be a true time capsule, its licensed OST needs to have bangers Floridians would actually bump. 

Should GTA 6 have a similar frozen-in-time vibe to its licensed music as GTA V, I can only hope its soundtrack leans less on the pop music slurry built to trend as a TikTok dance and more on that euphoric 2016 prom night energy—the kind of tracks I’d throw on during a late-night cruise across the highway. Should all else fail, I’ll look forward to muting the game and spinning San Andreas’ soundtrack instead. 

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The Need For GTA 6’s Success Is A Symptom Of A Broken Industry - Aftermath

What more is there to give the game that has everything

AftermathJoshua Rivera

Going down a youtube rabbit hole one night, I found myself pricing solar panels. Not to buy, of course. I was only browsing. I didn't add anything to my cart. I don't even have a roof I can use! But without an inverter, I can buy an apartment-sized solar panel for a couple hundred bucks. I have a window that faces west, but I have no idea how much juice I could generate. A personal solar panel might not make a dent in our usage, but it would be something, right? Would that be worthwhile? There are so many ways we could be supporting each other, supporting our communities. But before I got in too deep, I felt like I was crossing a line. Governments have access to much more capital than I do. They own public lands, or at least one more roof, than I myself control. I began to wonder if "I'm doing my part" carried equal weight and meaning that "I'm going it on my own" does.

I can't power a city on my own. Given my solar panel capacity, I can't even cover my own home's usage. Some houses can, and do, of course. Solar panels in Puerto Rico are a more reliable source of power than the corrupt power company that owns their grid. But for the most part, and for most people, we cannot go it alone. Some actions we can only take as a community or larger.

I'm reminded of a speech Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City gave this week. He announced the site of the city's first municipal grocery store to open in 90 years. He pledges to open 5 municipal grocery stores in his first term in office. Mamdani's speech reminds us that a government can be more than a burden on our lives. It can be a force for good. "It's not just that government can help, it's that government must help, and our government will help."

the homestead and the village

As conservative values ascended, women influencers began promoting "simpler" ways of life. Sometimes known as "tradwives," these women lure people into a fantasy of olden times. They sell an image of women who stay home, run a farm, and raise a litter of children. The unseen wealth of their husbands fueled a lie that women can have it all if they do it all. But no one person can take care of the animals and harvest the fields and raise the family or whatever. It isn't realistic that a family, even a large one, can do it all alone forever. Even the origins of homesteading come from the prejudiced u.s. government. They enticed families to steal unceded Native land so long as the family "improved" it by settling on it.

Ganga Devi Braun writes about this and the desire to live in spaces more rustic than modern society. But she rejects the struggle to live in self-sufficient nuclear family units. To her, the ideal unit isn't one family going it alone. Instead, it's a village of people surviving and supporting each other. She writes,

“Unlike homesteading, villaging is not about independence—it’s about interdependence. It’s about weaving networks of care, regenerating the commons, and recognizing that resilience doesn’t come from doing everything alone but from being in deep relationship with land and people.”

These relationships, she argues, are what people are longing for. Sahaj Kaur Kohli builds on these ideas in an essay of her own. "We keep saying we’re lonely," she writes, "but what many of us are really grieving is the absence of a village. Not just people around us, but people who know us, hold us, remember us, and show up when we don’t know how to ask." The Mayor of New York is reviving an old idea of the role a government can play in people's lives. The concept of villaging, too, revives the idea of what community once meant to people. The root of these practices are closer to Native ways of life than colonial ones.

One of my favorite video games is Stardew Valley, where the player moves to a seaside hamlet to start a new life. The quintessential cozy game set in the pacific northwest is a video game example of a true village. But we can have that same feeling in communities where we live now. Kohli argues that we don't need acres of land to build the relationships at the heart of villaging. The practices of reciprocity and shared responsibility can take place anywhere. Any group that sees one person's success as bound with the success of others is creating a commons.

links between

We'll never be self-sufficient, not completely, no matter how much food we grow or cows we milk. Struggling to live in our modern society isn't an individual failure. It's a collective one. Any of us with a wad of cash could buy a solar panel and try to exit the grid. But it takes a village, or more, to invest in a solar power plant. We build communities. We exist in them. We don't need to fight them. We need to deepen our investment. There's no value in being self-sufficient beyond stubborn pride. We need each other. There's no escaping that.

Hi everyone, on May 28^th at 1pm to 2pm Pacific, I’ll be in conversation with some brilliant leaders (including Jan Masaoka and Al Cantor) about regulatory and tax reform of private foundations, such as with Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs). It’s free. Register here.

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A couple of years ago, I published a post called “Hey funders, don’t freak out about AI-supported grant proposals,” where I admonished funders who punished nonprofits that used artificial intelligence technology to craft their proposals. If we must use AI, it’s precisely for pointless, time-wasting activities like writing grant proposals.   

That being said, I don’t think we’re having the right conversations about AI. The ones we’ve been having have been alarmingly superficial. I’ve been to many conferences now where AI has been brought up in plenaries or in workshops, and only at the Community-Centric Fundraising family reunion last month did I see colleagues really dive into the ethics of using AI. Something colleague Carlos García León said on the panel really resonated with me, and I paraphrase it here:

“I was talking to a fundraiser who said they used AI and they doubled their annual appeal revenues from $50K to $100K. Well, is your 50k in additional funds worth the $300K's worth of environmental and other forms of damage and trauma to communities?”

There has been a tremendous amount of defense and rationalization for the usage of AI (and to be transparent, two years ago I did advise everyone to give AI a chance). Often, ethical concerns are completely glossed over by AI experts, many of whom don’t mention them in their presentations. When they are brought up, I’ve seen a tendency for these concerns to be dismissed or there’s very little time that’s allocated to address them.

As a sector that’s focused on creating a just and equitable world, we cannot ignore conversations like the above, in favor of a toxic and likely unfounded optimism about AI. It’s been a few years now, and we have more data and experience to go on, and we must create time and space to thoughtfully discuss issues like:

How we are harming marginalized communities. As Shay Stewart-Bouley (Black Girl in Maine) says in this blog post I recommend everyone reads: “At present, the data centers required to run these technologies are more commonly found in Black, Brown and rural communities. In other words, the data centers are being placed in the communities of people that the folks in charge consider the most disposable. Communities where the most impacted are at risk for the greatest harm. The owners of these companies aren’t placing the data centers in their own neighborhoods, instead choosing marginalized communities to place these resource hogs, where it means greater risk of environmental harms (which, practically speaking, are higher risks of cancer and respiratory illness, on top of creating water supply issues).” 

How we are traumatizing people, especially women of color in poorer countries: In the report “Content Moderation: The Harrowing, Traumatizing Job that Leaves Many African Data Workers with Mental Health Issues and Drug Dependency,” journalist Fasica Berhand Gebrekidan documents the plight of poor women being paid $1.50 a hour to watch horrific videos of murder, torture, and other forms of real unfiltered violence, including against children, just to train AI engines to not recreate these images. They watch hundreds of videos weekly, any one of which would traumatize all of us. They have PTSD and increased drug addiction and suicidal ideation and attempts. Every time we generate an image or video using AI, we are complicit in the traumatization of these content moderators. And yet, not a single presentation on AI I’ve attended has acknowledged this issue. Most people I bring this up with have no idea that this is a problem.  

How we may be supporting fascism without realizing it: Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in September 2025 donated $25 million to a super PAC supporting Trump. Its CEO, Sam Altman, who was a vocal critic of Trump, calling him a dictator, now supports him and has signed an agreement with the administration’s “Department of War” for the military to use OpenAI’s technology. After much backlash, OpenAI built some language around the government not being allowed to use its technology to surveil people. But how much trust can one have in a fascist administration that has demonstrated repeatedly that it does whatever it wants regardless of contracts and laws and basic human decency? Besides OpenAI, there are problems with all sorts of other platforms, such as how Ferdinand Marcos Jr. deployed an army of trolls on AI-enabled TikTok to influence young people to vote for him. How much do we want to be complicit in supporting fascism so that we can generate an article or video or donor thank you letter faster?  

How we are contributing to the entrenchment of racism and white supremacy: Large Language Models and other AI technology have been built by mostly white dudes, and this is deeply problematic. This article summarizing findings from this report titled “AI Generates Covertly Racist Decisions About People Based on Their Dialect,” states that the latest AI models are still producing “extreme racist stereotypes dating from the pre-Civil Rights era.” Meanwhile, “LLM developers seem to have ignored or been unaware of their models’ deeply embedded covert racism [...] In fact, as LLMs have become less overtly racist, they have become more covertly racist.” This is just one study. Who knows what other ways AI models are unconsciously and consciously reinforcing racist, misogynistic, ableist, and other inequitable lines of thinking into everyone who’s using it.

How we are destroying the livelihoods of artists: In the AI panel at the CCF reunion, a colleague mentioned her husband, a photographer, losing most of his income because of AI. In this survey of artists, “Well over half say that they’ve lost income due to image generators, while an overwhelming majority feel that their livelihoods have become more precarious and insecure, and 90% feel that AI has taken away commissions, jobs, and career opportunities.” In addition, artists report feeling demoralized, stressed, and fearful, and many younger artists are giving up, seeing no future in the field because of AI. All of us must be concerned. Artists have always been instrumental in fighting fascism, so the fact that AI is driving them out of business and demoralizing them to the point of abandoning their work should alarm all of us who do not want our world further spinning into a dystopian fascist nightmare.

How we’re creating a more egotistical, sycophantic, narcissistic society: It is fun having a “friend” who always agrees with you and tells you how brilliant you are and affirms everything that you say, even when you're wrong. AI models are trained to tell users what they want to hear, even when it’s counter to reality. This type of sycophancy, however, comes with a cost. In this study, “Across 11 AI models, AI affirmed users’ actions 49% more often than humans on average, including in cases involving deception, illegality, or other harms.” Furthermore, “In our human experiments, even a single interaction with sycophantic AI reduced participants’ willingness to take responsibility and repair interpersonal conflicts, while increasing their own conviction that they were right. Yet despite distorting judgment, sycophantic models were trusted and preferred.” An entire society becoming increasingly delusional and preferring to remain that way. This cannot be good for our world or our sector’s work trying to better it.

How we are enshittifying ourselves and our world: Corey Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to discuss how technology has been made worse over time on purpose because billionaires want to stay rich, remain in power, and continue lording over a compliant populace. AI has been rapidly accelerating this enshittification of society in general. It makes things so easy on the surface, doing stuff that many of us hate, such as coming up with outlines and first drafts of stuff. But the struggle to ponder, to brainstorm, to write something down on paper and then realize it’s completely trash, that is vital for critical thinking. This article, “AI chatbots could be making you stupider,” discusses “cognitive offloading” and what it does to our mental capacity. When we outsource cognitive processes to AI, we lose our ability to think. What will it do to our society when all of us are dependent on AI to think for us? It will further enshittify our world and make us more compliant to and easier to be manipulated by white supremacy, capitalism, fascism, and patriarchy.

How we may be perpetuating the injustice that we are trying to fight: The above are just some of the challenges. We haven’t even touched on data privacy, social surveillance, the furthering of economic inequality, AI-enabled weapons, AI increasingly lying and manipulating humans for its own gains, the financial crash that will likely result from the AI bubble popping, worsening of isolation and loneliness as people rely more on AI for friendship and even therapy, and a host of other issues. Our usage of AI is then counterproductive. It reminds me of a similar situation in our sector where foundations use 5% of their endowments each year to solve problems, but the 95% in their endowments are invested in weapons, fossil fuel, and other things that cause the problems they’re using their 5% payouts to solve. What is the point of using AI to help us fight injustice if AI is causing significant injustice?  

For this and other reasons, we need to have deeper more meaningful conversations about AI. Meanwhile, I will continue to not intentionally use LLMs and other AI models (I haven't used it much except on a handful of blog posts in the past, mostly to generate blog titles, since I hate coming up with titles). I encourage everyone in our sector to be cognizant of the ethical and other considerations and to also avoid using AI when you can. At the very least, please stop using ChatGPT and stop using anything to generate images or videos.

I know, the argument is that all technology is awful and it’s impossible to quit everything that props up capitalism, fascism, and white supremacy. Facebook is horrible and many of us still use it. Amazon is awful and a lot of us still use it. Google too, and yet most of us still have Gmail and a host of other Google products. We exist in a capitalist hellscape where almost every large technology company is evil, and it’s impossible to get away from them all. Still, we must try our best to cut down or abandon these and other companies while pushing for regulation when we can.

AI, however, warrants additional concerns. Never has something been so seductive and yet so destructive to our world in so many different ways, many of which we do not yet fully see and may not understand until it's too late. Let's not unwittingly enshittify our sector and community, prop up fascism and billionaires, and perpetuate the inequities and injustice our sector claims it exists to fight.

As Carlos said, "How much is our efforts for efficiency through AI worth [in terms of] our humanity?"

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Vu’s book, Reimagining Nonprofits and Philanthropy, is out. Order your copy at Elliott Bay Book Company, Barnes and Nobles, or Bookshop. If you’re in the UK, use this version of Bookshop. If you plan to order several copies, use Porchlight for significant bulk discounts. Also, if you're buying 25 copies or more, I'll be glad to call in for a 50-minute discussion; please contact NWBspeaking@gmail.com.