Cutaway Car Blog

Pack Racing for Dummies: How to Watch the Daytona 500

February 13th, 2026

I’m a huge fan of NASCAR, which is a sport that almost none of my friends care about. Over the past few years I’ve tried my best to be a stock car racing evangelist, but to this point my efforts have borne little fruit. One of the biggest problems I’ve faced is that most people think that watching a bunch of cars drive around in circles sounds really boring. This argument can be hard to counter because on the surface it’s kind of true. In many cases races are only interesting if you’re able to key in on minutia related to pit strategy and tire fall-off, which creates a high barrier to enjoyment. With this said, there are quite a few races where this isn’t the case, races that are on their surface just a joy to watch. One of these races is this weekend, the 68th running of the Daytona 500. I think you should give it a try.

The Daytona 500 is NASCAR’s biggest event. It marks the beginning of a new season for the Cup Series—the sport’s top flight—and is sometimes referred to as the “Superbowl of Stock Car Racing”. This adds a lot of grandeur to the affair, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with why I think it’s such a great and accessible race. The reason that I think the Daytona 500 is so fun to watch, even for newcomers to the sport, is its reliance on pack racing, a high speed strategy that’s much easier to explain and observe than things like tire compounds and aero packages. What I’m going to do in the rest of this piece is give you an incredibly high level view of pack racing and how it works. My hope is that if you read this and then give the Daytona 500 a chance on Sunday, you might find that your new knowledge actually has you enjoying things. If not, at least you’ll know something that’s kind of esoteric. Anyway, let’s get started.

The Daytona 500 is run at Daytona International Speedway, one of three “superspeedways” on the NASCAR Cup Series circuit. Superspeedways are longer and wider than other NASCAR tracks, which means that the cars can travel much faster than they do anywhere else. This increased speed also leads to increased wind resistance, which brings us to a technique that’s integral to pack racing: drafting. Simply put, drafting in NASCAR is when a driver follows very closely behind the car in front of them, using that car as a shield against the wind to reduce drag, which, among other things, allows them to drive much faster. Drafting is a must at superspeedways, and because everybody wants to do it you end up getting incredibly long lines of cars driving super close together; these are our aforementioned packs.

Now that we know what packs are and why they form, we can talk about how they work in practice. When the racing begins on Sunday the Cup Series field will be lined up two by two in long lines, basically creating two trains. Early on the race between these two trains will be more compelling to watch than anything going on with the individual cars. You’ll want to look out for how the cars in each line are pushing each other, trying to increase their group’s speed without letting things get out of control.

For the first ten laps or so these trains will stay fairly well formed, but once one is shown to be faster than the other you’ll start to see some shifting, which is where the real fun begins. As you might guess, you want to be on the faster train. At a certain point you’ll start seeing people jump back and forth between the lines, trying their best to gauge which of the two is more advantageous to be a part of. The most interesting of these shifts will happen at the front of the pack, where the race leader will need to do their best to make sure they’re in front of the fast train. If they guess right, they can move over and block a challenger who was about to pass them, but if they guess wrong, they might end up giving up the lead to the guy who used to be behind them. There’s also a third outcome, where they guess right but mistime the block, that can lead to a big wreck (note: you’re pretty much guaranteed to get at least one massive race changing crash at Daytona, which is why you’ll hear the broadcasters speculating throughout the race about the potential timing of “the big one”).

As the race progresses you’re going to want to watch out for the creation of a third line/train. Being a good soldier and staying with the group is advantageous to a point, but if you want to get to the front and win the race you’re going to have to branch out at some point. Here is another place you’ll see a variety of timing and outcomes. If you drop to create a third train and others join you you’ll get a dual benefit; your new train will speed up with a strong draft while the decrease of drafters will slow down your old train, which means you could find yourself in the lead. On the flipside, if you jump out and nobody joins you’re all but guaranteed to fall to the back of the pack. There’s again also the chance that people mistime their transition and cause a huge wreck.

There are two more things I’d say to look out for. The first is pushing. This is what it sounds like, where a car actually puts its nose to the bumper of the car in front of it to give it a boost. This can lead to even more speed gains than the aero advantage gained by drafting, but if a push is unexpected or mistimed it can cause the car in front to spin out. It’s often worth doing, but it definitely has its risks. Finally, you’ll want to keep an eye on the different manufacturers. The Cup Series features cars made by Ford, Chevy, and Toyota. In general you’ll see cars of the same make help each other out. For example if a Ford driver tries to create a new line you’re more likely to see another Ford jump out to help him than a Toyota; you also aren’t likely to see a Chevy push a Ford if it would be disadvantageous to one of their Chevy teammates. The manufacturers try their best to stick together, which is just another factor impacting the packs and their movements.

So, there you have it, a crash course in pack racing. Definitely not an exhaustive review, but it should be enough to get you started. If you’ve read this far, I’d really recommend that you give watching the Daytona 500 a try on Sunday; my hope is you’ll now catch things you might have missed previously, making the competition more legible and enjoyable to watch. If nothing else, you’ll see fast cars and big wrecks, not a bad way to spend a Sunday. Happy racing.
Another Plea For a Ceasefire

June 3rd, 2025
Before getting started here I want to be clear: I know this isn’t anything that hasn’t been said before. I’m not writing this because I think that I’m the foremost expert on Israel-Palestine or because I think that other’s activism around the issue has failed to hit on salient points. I’m doing it for two reasons:
1. I know many people whose thoughts around what’s happening in Gaza don’t at all square with the values that I understand them to hold. At this point it’s likely that I’m just wrong about most of these people and what guides their worldview, but it’s tough for me to believe that’s the case for everyone. For some I think a combination of long held beliefs and media consumption habits are preventing the reality of Israel’s actions in Gaza from truly breaking through. I’m hoping that those I know in this group who might turn away from the info I’m about to share when it comes from an unfamiliar source might take the time to stop and hear it if it’s coming from me. This is admittedly a small target audience, but I think it’s worth a try, and I hope if there are people in your life whose feelings around what’s going on are similarly confounding that what’s written here might speak to them as well.
1. I think about what’s going on in Gaza constantly, and I often feel like I’m losing my mind. One of the only things that keeps me grounded is hearing from others who are seeing the things that I’m seeing and are also horrified about what’s happening. I want to offer my voice into this chorus of folks who are crying out for this to stop, adding to the record so that people can’t claim someday that “nobody really knew what was going on”.
For the last year and a half or so I’ve been very vocal about my belief that there needs to be a ceasefire in Gaza. To take this a step further I think what Israel is doing constitutes genocide, an opinion that’s also held by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International. In the time that I’ve been expressing this I’ve been approached by quite a few people in my life who are “concerned” about the stances I’m taking. In almost every case the arguments of the concerned parties hit on these points:
1. What’s happening in Gaza is horrible, but it’s necessary to save the hostages and destroy Hamas
2. Aren’t you Jewish? As a Jew does what happened on October 7th not bother you?
The first of these is the most common argument that I hear. Generally when this sentiment is expressed it’s done with some level of pitying condescension: the person saying it sympathizes with the fact I’m coming at this issue with a sense of morality, but in the real world things can’t always be perfectly moral. It’s a pretty boilerplate attitude taken by older generations in their disagreements with the young, indicative of a belief that the bleeding hearts of the youth prevent them from seeing the whole picture in situations like this. One thing that really bothers me about this argument is that it hinges on the idea that the cost—in this case the death of thousands of children—is a necessary price to pay for a benefit—in this case the release of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas—while ignoring the fact that we’re in a reality where only that cost is actually being realized.

The IDF have only saved eight hostages through their military operations in Gaza. In that time they have killed over 50,000 Palestinians, around 15,000 of whom were children. The only times we’ve seen large numbers of hostages returned have been during temporary ceasefires, most notably in November of 2023 and April of 2025. The desire for military operations to cease is not at all incompatible with a desire for the return of hostages, it’s actually a position that’s more closely aligned with that outcome. This is further supported by testimony from hostages who report their greatest fear while captive was dying in an IDF airstrike, along with recent reporting from Haaretz that showed the return of hostages was ranked as the lowest priority item on a list of Israeli war goals. This operation does not save hostages because it’s not about saving hostages.

This is why the recurring refrain of “if Hamas released the hostages this all would end” is so frustrating; it just isn’t true. The return of hostages has been offered and turned down time and time again. The hostages have been abandoned by a government that tried to kill them almost as soon as they were taken. This is something that their families understand, and it’s something you need to understand too.

This brings us to the second stated goal/benefit: the destruction of Hamas. Here too we have something that the current military offensive is not accomplishing, a goal that many in the IDF knew was impossible almost a year ago. Before leaving his post as US Secretary of State back in January Anthony Blinken stated that Hamas have essentially replenished their ranks since the fighting in Gaza began. Though destructive the current campaign is failing its purpose, with high civilian death counts being the only real result.

One factor—besides the impossibility of the goal—that’s leading to failure here is Israel’s routine use of junk intelligence. For an example of this we can look at Al-Shifa Hospital, which the IDF claimed was “the main headquarters for Hamas’ terrorist activity” in this video which includes a 3D rendering of a supposed terrorist base. After a siege the IDF took control of Al-Shifa, and in reality what they found bore little resemblance to the Bond villainesque they had shown. Even if Israel are to be taken at their word that the issues with their presentation of evidence as covered in this video from the BBC aren’t the result of manipulation it’s clear that what was found was not what was promised, an outcome indicative of either bad intelligence or outright fabrication.

Al-Shifa does not stand alone as an example of Israeli intelligence gone wrong. In another incident the IDF claimed they found a calendar adorned with the names of terrorists written in Arabic. Upon closer scrutiny it was revealed that what was actually written on the calendar were the names of the days of the week, making one wonder once again if this is a case of Israeli ignorance or intentional deceit. More recently the intelligence behind an Israeli attack on Gaza’s European Hospital was thoroughly debunked by a Sky News investigation. Time and time again Israeli intelligence is proven to be incomplete or just flat wrong. These are not people who are prosecuting a targeted and effective war, these are people who in many ways appear to have no clue what they’re doing.

One huge reason that this intelligence is proven to be wrong so often is Israel’s reliance on torture as an interrogation method, a practice which has been long documented. Debates around torture are generally centered on the inhumanity of the act—which is fair, it’s absolutely inhumane—but what sometimes gets lost in this is how ineffective torture is as a method for interrogation. If you show somebody a school, ask them if it’s actually a Hamas base, and then break their fingers one by one until they tell you “yes”, you’ll eventually get a yes whether that’s the truth or not. If you base your military campaign on information gathered this way it’s bound to fail.

The idea that I should be supporting this inhumane and failing campaign because I’m Jewish makes me incredibly angry. In the last paragraph I mentioned that the Israeli military’s mission is bound to fail because of their torture derived intelligence; I suppose this isn’t 100% true. Torture derived intelligence won’t help in the mission to “destroy Hamas”, but it doesn’t hinder the actual (and now explicitly stated) mission of Israel, which is to raze and annex Gaza. That’s a mission only served by destruction, so anything that lets them tell their negligently credulous allies “We had a reason to blow up that school” is, I suppose, actually helpful.

Let’s talk on the level here, if I’m supposed to tie Jewish identity to all of this. This is a campaign of burning down libraries. This is a campaign of killing medical workers, whether they’re driving ambulances or working in hospitals (where some were buried in mass graves next to the bodies of their patients with IVs still attached). This is a campaign being prosecuted in part by bulldozer driving soldiers that have crushed so many people in their path that they can no longer stomach the sight of meat. Israel clears aid workers to travel certain routes only to kill them as they follow every instruction. They purposefully attack targets when they’re at home with their families, a move that’s only justification is to maximize civilian casualties. Look at everything that’s happened, not even for some larger purpose of saving hostages or weakening Hamas, but in service of a land grab. We’re well beyond the point of this being even sort of justifiable as a response to what happened on October 7th. Experiencing a tragedy does not give you the all clear to kill as many children as you want. To oppose this is not to oppose Jewish values. To tie Jewish values to this is perverse. That is how and why I oppose this as a Jew.

When people try to use Judaism to obfuscate the reality here it’s pathetic. One of the more eye opening cases of this came back in October when Isaac Chotiner interviewed Jewish author Howard Jacobson in The New Yorker. I’d recommend that you read the whole thing, but what stuck out me most when I read it was this quote from Jacobson after he was asked to further clarify his issues with the way that child deaths in Gaza were being covered by organizations like the BBC:

You couldn’t look at a child, pictures of a child being killed every single night without thinking this is making my people, my kin, out to be child murderers. I’ve got two options for you. I can believe it’s true. O.K., it’s true. It’s true. That’s what we do. That’s what the Israelis, not us, but the Israelis, do. But we feel a kinship with the Israelis. That’s what they do. And so maybe there we are again. Maybe everything that they said about us in 1200 and 1300 was true. This is what the Jews do—kill children. I’m not going to buy it. I’m not going to buy it.

The response of “I don’t believe it because I can’t bring myself to believe it” when faced with evidence that thousands upon thousands of children are being slaughtered is pathetic; implying that others may be antisemitic because they’re not willing to stick their head in the sand like you are in response to the information (going as far as to call it “blood libel”) is doubly so.

Jacobson’s point of view here, and his use of the term “blood libel”, is not totally unique, though it is a line of argument that I find totally baffling. It’s not disputed that Israel drops bombs on sites like refugee camps and schools. Organizations like the UN and Oxfam have stated over and over that the number of children being killed in this conflict well exceeds any other conflict in recent memory. The New York Times has published a piece with reports from doctors, nurses, and paramedics on the ground in Gaza with evidence that beyond the possible “collateral” child deaths we’ve seen there are also some Israeli soldiers killing children intentionally. All of this is in line with behavior we’ve seen from the IDF for years, including things like soldiers wearing shirts showing a pregnant woman in a rifle’s crosshairs along with the words “1 Shot 2 Kills”. Particularly striking is this recent statement from a Greek doctor who volunteered in Gaza named Christos Georgalas, who upon returning said:

This is a war mainly against children, which cannot be explained with the well-known argument “there is a large percentage of children in Gaza, so statistically there will be many child victims”. I think that to a large extent it has to do with a targeted attack, an Israeli MP has said that “children are their future, so it is doubly important to hit them compared to adults”. However, I did not imagine that I would be able to see this policy so strongly.

Can you call something “blood libel” when it’s been so well documented? Even if you want to take issue with the NYT report or exact numbers being put out by organizations like the UN, how are you bombing refugee camps—something which is undisputedly happening—without killing a ton of children? It’s not possible. You can’t do that and then also claim to be minimizing civilian casualties. You can’t move people to “safe zones”, bomb the safe zones, and then try to hide behind charges of antisemitism when you’re called out. To see so many who should know better play along with the charade is maddening.

So, with all of this said I ask you this: if you still oppose a ceasefire, what do you want here? Why are you arguing for the continuation of a military operation that is killing thousands of innocents while not freeing hostages or taking down Hamas? Why do so many people who claim “well I DO support a two state solution” balk at the idea that we shouldn’t be unconditionally providing weapons to a government that doesn’t support one? How can you rage at the people of Palestine for not doing more to overthrow Hamas when the only alternative you’re offering them is death?

To be explicit here once again: this is a genocide. At this point the explicit goal of Israel’s operation is to ethnically cleanse Gaza. To support their operation—or to try and take a “neutral stance” and suggest others need to hold back in their opposition to it—is to support that goal at the expense of every man, woman and child in Gaza, hostages included. This is why I call for a ceasefire, not because I’m someone who is uninformed or naive but because I’m someone who has carefully considered everything in front of me and come to the conclusion that this needs to end. I call for a ceasefire because I’m someone who refuses to close my eyes and pretend it’s not happening. I call for a ceasefire because it’s the only path forward. I call for one because you need to call for one too.

Please consider donating to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, an organization that provides vital medical care and humanitarian relief to the children of Palestine. Donations can be made here.
Pat McAfee Pathetic Once Again

March 4th, 2025

Pat McAfee on an episode of the The Pat McAfee Show back in the FanDuel days

It’s become just about impossible for sports fans to avoid Pat McAfee, which means that I find myself seeing and thinking about him way more often than I’d like. A few years back ESPN backed the Brinks truck up for McAfee (after freeing up cash by letting go of some long time analysts), and since then he’s been near omnipresent on the network, slotting in as its most prolific voice outside of Stephen A. Smith. For most of the time that I’ve been aware of him my feelings towards McAfee have broadly been “He’s sort of annoying, but I get why people like him.” His style of humor doesn’t hit for me, but he has an undeniable charisma, and I’ve always recognized the value brought by his player-centric approach to covering sports in a world where insiders too often act as team owner mouthpieces.

Recently though, I’ve found myself shifting more towards a sentiment of “This guy is very annoying and he sucks.” Despite now being the second biggest voice on the biggest network in sports McAfee can’t help but act like he’s still the insurgent in a way that’s incredibly grating. It’s like he can’t accept the fact that he’s won. His player focused approach that I once found so promising has proven to be just as flawed as that of the old school media he rallied against during his come up, providing a place for people like Aaron Rodgers to spew whatever they want with little to no pushback.

I’m thinking/writing about this now because of a recent segment from McAfee’s ESPN show where he was discussing the NFL Combine with Adam Schefter. When Ole Miss QB Jaxson Dart comes up in their conversation one of Pat’s co-hosts throws out that Dart’s Ole Miss affiliation might make it necessary for them to check up on his father, a reference to a story that had gone viral in zynternet circles around a random student at Ole Miss who supposedly slept with her boyfriend’s dad. Schefter, who has not been keeping up with reports from accounts like @SEC_GloryHole_King, doesn’t quite pick up on what’s being put down, so Pat jumps in to try and help, informing him that there’s reason to believe Ole Miss fathers writ large may be “snooping around”. This still isn’t enough, so Pat and his crew—who seem to sort of be realizing this was a weird thing to bring up—are forced to just straight up tell him the story, prompting Schefter to ask “So where does Jaxson Dart fit into all of this?”

As I acknowledge above Pat is not the one who brings things up initially, but he does run with it and he’s ultimately the one who fully explains the story to Schefter and his incredibly large ESPN audience (many of whom were certainly familiar with the story already but a chunk of whom were certainly not). It was a McAfee special, where it’s very apparent he knows that he really shouldn’t really be talking about the thing he’s talking about so he peppers in “allegedly” a ton. He even tries to frame it like he’s coming from a sympathetic angle, bringing up how unfortunate it is that everyone’s talking about the rumors (like he is on his TV show) and how these young people may never trust again. If you are taking all of this in and think something like, “yeah he shouldn’t have talked about it but he had to deal with the fact that someone else brought it up, he did the best he could do” you are a very charitable person—and I might even be able to kind of see where you’re coming from—but rather than letting the bit die on the live TV vine McAfee and team decided to clip the exchange and post it to their socials, blasting their recounting of the story out to even more people. I guess the engagement you can get by speculating about the sex lives of two absolutely random college students was just too good to pass up.

This annoys me first and foremost because the proliferation of this story as interesting/newsworthy in any way is incredibly stupid. It is embarrassing that anyone is latching onto it, let alone a grown man with a popular TV show. It is more likely than not that the story is false, and even if it is true it shouldn’t be fodder for anything outside of maybe discussions in the group chats of people who actually know those involved. The way that anonymous accounts piloted by the dumbest college football fans alive have run with it as a vehicle to harass a college freshman is so pathetic, and the fact that McAfee saw that, rubbed his little hands together, and said “Let me get in on this” is by itself definitive proof that he is an absolute loser. Again, I want to emphasize here that he didn’t just engage in this by talking about the story on his show; afterwards he and his team found the whole thing so cool/funny that they clipped it and put it in front of more people, all the while this girl—who, I can’t stress this enough, is just some random college freshman—is facing life ruining harassment. Keep in mind that this is the same Pat McAfee who once called a reporter “a rat” for accurately reporting on a financial arrangement between he and Aaron Rodgers in a way that he didn’t like. If that was “rat” shit then I don’t even know what to call what McAfee did here. Total scumbag.

McAfee has been confronted about this sort of thing in the past, and generally he responds by clarifying that he is an idiot; in fact after incidents like being sued by Brett Favre for comments he and team made around Favre’s involvement in a Mississippi welfare fraud scandal this message has become part of their branding. Before their show starts rolling on ESPN each day you’re hit with a wall of text letting you know in advance that they are just kidding and are stooges who don’t know anything, so if they mess up please don’t sue; a similar message runs across the bottom of the screen throughout the show.

The problem though, with all of this, is that alongside these “we are moronic jokesters, be warned” messages we often find a McAfee who can’t help but act like that what he is doing is actually very important, like he’s someone who is legitimately fighting the system, a guy who tells it like it is. He’ll talk about how he was cancelled by both major US political parties, he’ll bristle when the journalistic integrity of his program is questioned, he’ll claim higher ups at ESPN are so against what he brings to the table that they’re out to sabotage him. He does all of this, acting like a righteous truth teller, while a message flashes below him that essentially amounts to: “but also please don’t be mad”. It’s the lame and lazy approach of a coward, and it’s not surprising that its end result is a 37-year-old man repeating salacious rumors sourced from SEC burner Twitter accounts to a TV audience with the glee of a three year old who just learned his first bad word. I guess at this point it’s all just part of the progrum, but man, when you look at what McAfee could have been and what he’s actually turned into, a guy who does clown shit like this, it’s tough to think of him as anything other than pathetic.
The Lesson Isn’t “Throw More People Under the Bus”

November 11th, 2024

I’m not surprised that many are asking the left to shoulder the blame for Kamala Harris’ defeat last Tuesday. That’s pretty standard stuff. What I am surprised by is the way that this blame is being expressed. I expected that if Harris lost the left would be chastised for not turning out to vote or voting third party like we saw in 2016; before the election it seemed that any criticism of Harris’ campaign would draw retorts of “Just say you’re voting for Trump” or “And you think Trump would be better?”, so it made sense to me that if Harris lost this would carry over into “You didn’t show up this is your fault.”

Though we are certainly seeing some of this, one thing I’m also catching a lot of, particularly from politicians and those in the consulting class, is people laying the blame for Harris’ loss at the feet of the left and their policy preferences. This has been confusing for me. Though I disagree with the “You criticized Kamala so you wanted Trump” people (many who criticized Harris ended up voting for her anyway or lived in non-swing states like New York or California where their vote didn’t matter) I’m able to connect the dots that lead them to their stance. When I started seeing people like Ritchie Torres blame “the far left” for Kamala’s loss I couldn’t figure out how he got there. Kamala didn’t run a far left campaign. She ran around the country with Liz Cheney and pledged to put a Republican in her cabinet. She backtracked on past left leaning stances on the environment and immigration. She said she’d turn the US military into the world’s most lethal fighting force and was praised by Adam Kinzinger for her hawkish foreign policy stance. It was a campaign catered to and run for the center.

So what are people talking about? Why use this avenue to blame the left when the 2016 path of “we needed your votes this is your fault” is there and more credible? Was the margin of defeat too large to go back to their favorite argument? Part of this perhaps can be attributed to people trying to still use the canned takes they constructed when they thought Harris was headed for a centrist victory that would empower them to jettison leftist voices from the Democratic Party. They decided the results would be an indictment of the left and couldn’t pivot when the actual outcome differed from what they expected. Still, this can’t explain everything.

When I read the comments Democratic congressman Tom Suozzi made to the New York Times later in the week things started to click into place. “The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left,” Suozzi said, continuing: “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.” Congressman Seth Moulton would go on to make similar comments. Both Moulton and Suozzi framed what they were saying as hard truths delivered against the wishes of the Democratic party, as though the opinion was something many wanted to say but weren’t allowed to. This ignores the fact that some Democrats like Colin Allred said exactly what Moulton and Suozzi are framing as forbidden and faced little to no pushback from the party.

As I’ve continued to dig I’ve found more issues being thrown around as the source of the party’s leftist poison, things like the use of “Latinx” or the slogan “Defund the Police”, neither of which can actually be attributed to the Harris campaign or at this point most leftist organizations. I think all of this is dumb and ignores many of the actual things that lead to Harris’ defeat. But as I look at the whole picture of how people are blaming the left, it’s comments like the ones made by Suozzi and Moulton that stick with me. To them a campaign that had already reneged on past Democratic promises to immigrants and families in the Middle East didn’t throw enough marginalized groups under the bus.

There is nothing to be gained from these considerations of transphobia’s electoral viability. When it comes to civil rights the United States has only suffered from people viewing things through this lens. Every political act that has brought people more rights has come later than it should have because of nervous calculations and liberal waffling. We’re seeing it again here. While Moulton and Souzzi act like their views would have them ostracized what we can actually see when looking at the Harris campaign is an operation where, at least from a messaging standpoint, their views were centered. This year the DNC didn’t feature a trans speaker for the first time in over a decade. When asked in an NBC interview whether trans Americans should have access to gender affirming care Harris answered that she would “follow the law”, as though her tacit support for trans rights was something current legislation has cornered her into. As a campaign they already gave so little. And now it’s time to give even less? All while insisting that you be respected as the party that embraces diversity?

Ultimately as Trump put out ads demonizing trans people Harris decided to try and distance herself from the issue rather than fight back, a move that I’m sure was calculated to appeal to some group of voters. Whether those people were reached by the tactic (it appears they weren’t) is to me irrelevant. It was a spineless move. It allowed Trump to control the conversation and made the regressive voice the only voice. It moved the conversation backwards. To follow that up by hypothesizing that further capitulation on these issues is the path to victory next time is absurd, and further clarifies who many in the Democratic party see as worth protecting. As 2025 rolls in and Trump takes office the Democrats need to double down on their support for trans liberation, stop treating it like it’s some bonus pet issue of the left, and understand that for so many it is literally a life or death fight.

One reason that the Democrats were unsuccessful in this election is that many Americans see them as a party without true convictions. To have any hope of coming back from this they need to actually be courageous. On this issue more than maybe any other they need to show that there is something in their tool box outside of condescension and capitulation. They need to meet this fight where it is. It’s the only path forward. Anything else is a betrayal of what they claim to stand for, and will further erode their standing as any type of force for progress.
Five Songs That Influenced “In My Head”

February 28th, 2024

On March 1st I’m going to be putting out a new song called “In My Head”, which will be my third release as Cutaway Car. In advance of this I’ve been thinking a lot about the songs that influenced me while I was recording/mixing the new track.

My goal when writing “In My Head” was to create a straightforward short power poppy song with fuzzy guitar, which is a different sound than my previous releases. Guitar tone is something that I’ve really struggled with in my production, particularly when there’s any type of fuzz or distortion, which is tough because the music I like the most and want to make often features that type of guitar sound. Working through this with “In My Head” I used many of the songs below for direction and inspiration, and though I still don’t have things exactly where I want them I think I’m headed in the right direction.

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Cloud Nothings – Now Hear In

This is a song that I always associate with my first time on the road doing stand-up. My friend Max and I had a run of shows in Minneapolis, and during the trip we stayed with a very funny comedian named Turner Barrowman. When we weren’t doing shows we mostly hung out at Turner’s apartment playing a card game called “Smash Up” and listening to Cloud Nothings on a little bluetooth speaker. The trip is something I have really fond memories of (it’s where I got my first real clip), and because of that Cloud Nothings, who I hadn’t heard of before meeting Turner, hold a special place in my heart.

When I first started messing around with amp plugins for “In My Head” the intro of “Now Hear In” was one of the things I listened to a ton for reference. That intro was one of the things that I remember making me perk up when we were listening to Cloud Nothings in Minneapolis; at the time I’d mostly been listening to indie pop, but that distorted guitar just did it for me and honestly played a big part in me getting back into punk/alternative music in general. The tone I ultimately was aiming for with “In My Head” is a bit less distorted than “Now Hear In”, but I feel like I wouldn’t have gotten there if I hadn’t been using Cloud Nothings as a kind of guide point..

Ratboys – Morning Zoo

The Window was one of my favorite albums of last year, and “Morning Zoo” is my favorite song on it. I listened to “Morning Zoo” a lot both during the mixing of “In My Head” and in the mixing of my last release “With You”. The song is a masterclass in fitting together different guitar parts (and fiddle) in a way that everything comes through without becoming muddled or distracting. Cutaway Car is the first project I’ve done where I do all of the production/mixing work, and stereo imaging has been one of the toughest things to fully get a grip on. “Morning Zoo” is the song I listen to when I want to reorient myself and hear it done right.

Not really related to “In My Head” but I also wanted to give a shout out to Ratboy’s live show. Go see them if they’re in your city. I didn’t doubt that Ratboys would be good live before I saw them, but because the production and mixing of The Window was one of the things I loved most about it I wasn’t sure how it would fully stand-up to the record. Ended up being even better. They’re a band with a real reverence for rock and it shines through especially live.

Liquid Mike – RAV4

Tough to think of a hotter band right now than Liquid Mike. Though they’re newer to me than most of the artists on this list they’re a band I feel a special connection to because I found out about them right as I was getting started with writing and recording the first Cutaway Car song “Aux Cord”.

I listened to “RAV4” a lot while mixing “In My Head” because I think it’s mixing done right in a way that differs from “Morning Zoo”. Where “Morning Zoo” excels at bringing each part of the mix through in a way that sounds spacious “RAV4”, and much of the rest of S/T, allows things to shine through in what amounts to a much more compact mix. Once I had everything tracked and had been mixing for a bit I realized that especially with the fuzziness/distortion of what I was working with this was more the approach I wanted to take, and I had “RAV4” on repeat. I still have it on repeat because it’s a great song. I listened to it like 14 times in a row today while walking my dog.

Bully – All I Do

Lucky for You is another favorite of mine from last year. For whatever reason I had overlooked it when it was first released in June, but a few months later I saw it while browsing cassettes at Reckless Records on Belmont and decided to pick it up. The second I popped the cassette in and heard “All I Do” I knew I made the right choice.

“All I Do” is a song that influenced “In My Head” more from a songwriting perspective than a production perspective. The thing I thought about when listening to it for the first time was the song’s constant forward momentum. I knew sonically that I wanted to make something that made me feel the way that song did, particularly when the chorus kicks in for the first time around 56 seconds in. I hope that in at least some small way when the chorus kicks in on “In My Head” it makes people lean forward in their seats a bit the way this chorus did for me.

Arlen Gun Club – Kickflip

I first saw Arlen Gun Club back in 2021 at Golden Dagger where they played a very fun show with OK Cool, Background Character and Jungheim. Before the show one of them offered me earplugs and I declined, after which he said “Hearing damage isn’t cool dude,” before walking away. I’m not sure exactly which band member it was because they were all dressed like cowboys with bandanas over their faces (it was halloween). Afterwards they absolutely ripped their set and I never went to a concert without earplugs again.

Arlen Gun Club’s style is something that has influenced me a lot. I feel like they sit in a mid-ground between a few genres which makes them tough to classify as just pop-punk, just emo or just power-pop. Any of those genres descriptions by themselves is wrong, though there are definitely elements of each present in their music. Although I’m a fan of all of these genres there are things I find about each of them that can be kind of annoying, and I’ve found that AGC takes the parts from each I don’t find annoying and kind of mixes them together. It’s a cool sound, and though it’s not something I’m trying to exactly emulate I definitely listened to them a lot during the writing of “In My Head” and I think the influence comes through at least a little.

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There are plenty of other songs and sounds that influenced “In My Head”, but the ones listed here are the ones that were top of mind as I looked back on things. On March 1st you’ll be able to find “In My Head” as well as everything else Cutaway Car related at this link.

Also, if you’re curious about where I ended up with the guitar tone from a technical standpoint, here’s a little more info (thought this was something that is probably interesting to a smaller number of people but wanted to include it because I know I like to read about what other people are doing):

I recorded using a Squier Classic Vibe’s 70s Jaguar plugged directly into my PreSonus Audiobox USB interface. For rhythm guitar, which is where most of my guitar tone tinkering was focused, I used two different Nembrini Audio amp plug-ins. I know that you can ultimately get good sound out of Logic stock plugins but I wasn’t getting what I wanted, so I picked up a few cheap Nembrini plugins which I found to be very good for the price.

For one track panned hard right I used the Logic stock pedal plugins Happy Face Fuzz and Flange Factory. This then went into the Nembrini Mrh810 with the settings in the below screenshot:

I then doubled the rhythm guitar with a track panned hard left with no pedals using the Nembrini Bst100 plugin, which is their kind of onboard overdrive amp model. Settings used for that are shown here:

Both tracks then got some compression and EQ. Don’t think it’s a recipe for perfect guitar tone by any means, but as someone working with limited equipment and resources I was pretty happy with how it turned out. Still very much on my production journey, and I’m looking forward to learning and experimenting more. Thanks for reading.
It’s OK to Quit Sometimes

January 19th, 2024

For a good chunk of my life I was 100% convinced that I would become a semi-famous/successful stand-up comedian. I spent years doing stand-up almost every night. I thought that it was my favorite thing in the world.

Looking back now I realize that it wasn’t. That’s not to say that I didn’t have legitimate love for it. There’s something inarguably beautiful about the way crowds of very different people can come together as one to laugh at a well written and thoughtful joke. What I mean is that love for the craft itself was not my number one motivator. The fantasy of success was. Not success in mastering joke writing (though that would certainly would’ve helped), but success in the form of getting things. Getting onto prestigious shows and festivals, getting followers and recognition, getting paid good amounts of money. When I thought about the future I didn’t think about killing, I thought about the things that are promised to you when you kill.

Wanting and thinking about these things as a comedian is not wrong. But, if they’re the leading force that’s driving you you’re going to be in trouble. Because though stand-up is pretty awesome, much of being a stand-up comedian kind of sucks. You do bad shows, stay up late, you have to drive a lot and sleep on couches. You get mad at people for not booking you and have people mad at you for not booking them. If you love what you’re doing, if you’re writing material that is meaningful to you, this can all be worth it. If you’re doing it to indulge your fantasy of someday posting a clip of you doing a set on a late night show and having everyone tell you you’re awesome, it’s probably not.

As someone who was in the latter category I fell out of stand-up when my bookings plateaued for about a single month. If I cared more about the craft I might have worked harder/further evolved my act to bounce back (or waited to see if I got booked more the next month), but I didn’t. Instead I started watching basketball and baseball obsessively, something I hadn’t really done since before I started comedy. Watching these games I was happier than I’d been in years. Unfortunately, instead of taking the lesson here that I should broaden my horizon and revisit more of my past interests/hobbies I 100% convinced myself that I would become a semi-famous/successful sports writer.

Much to my surprise it turned out that though sportswriting is awesome, much of being a sportswriter kind of sucks. Starting out you often are writing fairly meaningless listicles, and most blogs are trying to pump out as many articles as possible so there isn’t much editorial oversight to help you. Oftentimes you’re paid by the pageview. The only time I ever made even a small amount of money as a sportswriter was when I wrote a listicle that Yankees fans hated so much that they shared it all over Twitter shitting on me, driving up its views.

Again, if I was truly passionate about the craft of sportswriting I might have weathered this tough early period, taking it as a time to learn more and develop my voice as a writer. But, I wasn’t. I loved watching sports and figured I could turn that love into acclaim and potentially money (tough to say now which was more unlikely). I went back to just being a sportswatcher.

Throughout these pursuits there’s always been one constant for me: music. I’ve been writing and recording music since I was in highschool, though there were definitely periods where I wasn’t super active. Even if I wasn’t writing songs seriously it was pretty rare that a month or two would go by without me at least messing around with Logic or playing some piano.

One thing about music is that it doesn’t come super naturally to me. With stand-up I was able to pick things up pretty quickly and become fairly proficient in a short time period. I wasn’t as good at sports writing as I was at stand-up but I still was able to pick up the basics of it fairly quickly. I’ve been playing guitar for ten years and I’ve not really ever improved beyond the first. Nothing I learn about recording techniques has ever really stuck with me. To write a full song is often a herculean effort. Almost all of my lyrics are bad/not well thought out. Still, I’ve stuck with it because I really enjoy it.

Over the past year I’ve started to make music more often, recording and putting out tracks in a way I haven’t in a long time. One thing that’s nice is that I’m not 100% convinced that I will become a semi-famous/successful musician. In fact I find it to be quite unlikely for a variety of reasons. It’s the one creative pursuit of mine in my adult life that’s not tied and driven to the idea that it will become my livelihood. I’d like people to listen to my music, and do what I can to share and promote it, but if they don’t I don’t care. Because of this I can make the music that I like, when I want to, with almost no outside pressure and obligations. It’s pretty awesome.

I wish that earlier in my (admittedly still early) adult life I had stopped trying to monetize everything creative that I did. It turns out that in some cases working a kind of boring but not soul crushing office job can give you the time and means to indulge in creative work you’re passionate about without the debilitating pressure of success being do or die.

With this said I also want to acknowledge that for some people a standard office type job will never be anything but soul crushing. People where their creative pursuits are truly driven by passion and who only can imagine those pursuits being where almost all of their effort in life goes towards. That’s a valid viewpoint, and I don’t want to discount it just because it’s not a viewpoint that I hold or truly ever held. What I’m getting at here is that I believed I was one of those people when I wasn’t, and I wish I took some more honest self reflection to catch this a little bit earlier. If I did, I might have spent less time hanging out at Pick Me Up cafe complaining about how Laugh Factory didn’t book me/trying to write material designed to get me booked at Laugh Factory and spent more time reading books or writing material that I actually thought was funny.

I still have a lot of life to live, and I don’t consider all the time spent on stand-up or sportswriting wasted. If those are things you’ve ever thought about trying, I’d encourage you to do it. Stand-up in particular is a really unique thing that can be super rewarding and fun. I’d just say that if you pursue something like that it’s not a bad idea to take stock of yourself and why you’re doing it every once in a while. If you love what you’re pursuing it will help you stay centered. If you find that you don’t, you can move on, stop staying out until midnight on Tuesday nights and start doing other things like learning to crochet or watching the Mets (probably better the former than the latter).