565: Sayulita tips, Judith Butler on identity politics, and Hanukkah dance remixes
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Happy 2025, readers and friends. Do you have any NYE rituals you endorse?
I look back through my monthly journals and pull out the people, places, ideas, media, and so forth that stuck out to me for an annual review.
Looks like this executive coach does as well, and then ‘writes the movie of the year’ to see how they got to where they went. Maybe I’ll write a letter to my 2026 self this time too.
I spent the week in Sayulita Mexico so here’s some tips:
Embers, Yambak, Latitude, GOAT, and bar Don Pato will all be firing nightlife spots any day of the week.
Alto Alto and Sur38 are bougie nice dinner spots with live music.
Walk 5 min to Playa de Los Muertos for a calmer beach than the main one, and walk up Villa Amore’s driveway along the way to see the enchanted treehouses.
Golf kart or walk 30 min through the jungle to Playa Carricitos for less people and a prettier beach.
Definitely visit the next town over San Pancho for a calmer, hippier, more nomad friendly hotspot than the chaotic touristy Sayulita. Yasminas and Habibis are highly rated restuarants, while El Gallo (Sumsum), Arigato, and Serpiente for bars.
I also enjoyed a daytrip to the mega resort city of Puerto Vallarta, which is one of the most densely packed beaches I’ve seen outside Waikiki. Walking the Malecon and Zona Romantica to watch all the gay tourists and cute eateries is a trip. We also enjoyed the Cocos Cabaret nightly drag show, and speedran the lowbrow clubs on the Malecon before attempting to the higher rated Strana, which sadly was closed that night.
Technology
Anthony Castrio was a Reciprocity customer at his last community, and now he’s building one of my favorite job seeking tools at ApplyAll. His December update is a wonderful behind the scenes look at bootstrapping that co, and any co.
Ideologies
Freddie DeBoer is the reader Susbtack reccommended to me that I probably read the most. I resonate with his description of Millennial angst on aging here.
We’ve gotten to a place where the celebration of youth and disdain for the old has not just intensified but essentially left behind any residual intellectualized misgivings; a lot of people don’t even pretend to believe that there’s any value at all in aging or any superior virtues in the aged. Just as we’ve completely given way to worship of celebrity without any qualifications at all, at this point, we now don’t even bother to pretend that we think that there’s benefits to aging. We worship youth directly and shamelessly. And now the Millennials are arriving at middle age en masse and, surprise surprise!, we’re not taking it well. We’re really not taking it well, at all. We’re scratching and clawing to hold onto our self-identification as young people.
And his commentary of Judith’s Butlers take on identity politics here.
As the headline here alludes, I actually quite like Butler’s response as a simple and direct criticism of identity politics: you can’t build a political coalition through emphasizing difference, you can’t staple together certain minority identities while rejecting majority identities and win elections. The only thing the left has is people power, and while there’s certainly idealized forms of identity politics that don’t get in the way of building people power, in reality they inevitably amount to telling big groups of people that their problems aren’t problems and they don’t deserve help. (See “white tears.”) Butler’s response defends the importance of identity but also underlines the fact that true mass politics simply aren’t possible when waged through a purely identity lens. As Gitlin once wrote, “If there is no people, only peoples, there is no left.”
Memes
Via reader Kuan (NOT Brian!), these ‘52 things I learned’ posts are fun and statistically highlight certain causations you can imagine (like fluoride and dentists)
I attended a local Chabad Hannukah celebration with a Jewish friend on the final night, and was entertained with how they packaged their faith for a mass audience (which is what the Chabad movement is designed for, AFAIK).
Not unlike this NYC performance, which ends with a dance remix of Adam Sandler’s 1994 SNL ‘Hannukah Song’ which rhymes yarmulke and marijuan-naka as well as current celebrities. :D
Kind of a bummer that they opened the family friendly proceedings with a Zionist anti-Gaza opening statement (ooo boy those kids have eye opening to do when they start thinking for themselves!), but I guess that’s to be expected.
Hanukah itself has been adopted by the Zionists since the movement began in the 1800s but celebrates a retaking of Jerusalem in the 2nd century BC, so could go either way I suppose.