Let’s open this sojourn with a few heartfelt apologies:
I am sorry that my audio in this guest-free episode goes wonky after a few minutes. Accordingly, the ep has been edited so that you have to hear less of me.
Sound really can be the devil, even in our time of AI-assisted audio correction.
The upside is that I let my cohost Lev Anderson do his thing. If you know him from the WCS promos that pop up on IG or TikTok, you are aware that Lev’s a sage brother. (Except where the Lakers are concerned. In that realm he’s pure PNW fanatic.) Paid subscribers know that I don’t give him nearly enough space to speak.
The paywall for the episode below has been removed, to celebrate the author’s visit to Portland. Jeff partied with me and Lev on Monday and the next night addressed his public at Powell’s Books.
This episode is a dope listen. Wildly informative.
Jeff Chang’s book is about an anchor baby named Bruce who changed the world
Our latest WCS podcast guest explained to me and my cohost Lev Anderson that Bruce Lee’s most famous line in this precise moment of human history is, “Be water.”
Second sorry. In editing I realized that I have been holding Sam Darnold to a standard that I wasn’t necessarily applying to Deandre Ayton. As this post goes up I am pondering everything about that.
Finlay, I apologize if some of the talk is less that timely. There’s zero Epstein reaction in this episode. We do though offer strong takes on the diminishing value of followers in social media, and what the trend could mean. Lev revisits being in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens for Steve Jobs’s unveiling of iPhone while I fail to pull up my memory of walking the Space Jam red carpet. There’s the requisite Lakers and Trail Blazers pontificating. Borderline personal. Also worth your time, I think, are our insights into a Portland that’s temporarily receding from the national focus.
Have a look at Propublica’s blow-by-blow account of how Fox News constructed false video narratives about the city, for the consumption of America’s least literate.
Thank you for consuming the non-fiction.
Multiple times each week I try to make bespoke journalism for watchers of America’s West Coast. Aggregation, but specific AF. Please support my independent journalism and analysis by recommending the Sojourn Substack, via social media or the old-fashioned ways.
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Every year I improve at writing. It still takes hella time to make sentences worthy of your mailbox.
