Month: May 2025

(Hella spoilers for Thunderbolts* below)

So now, in roughly 2027, weeks finally have someone trading under the name of the Avengers, presumably with a modicum of government endorsement (although”Selina Meyer, Director of SHIELD” doesn’t seem to be working out that well). And presumably Sam Wilson, aka Captain America, is not on board with this and is putting together his own team. But…who? If you go with strict definition – aka people who were involved in the Time Heist and are still alive and not retired on Earth – you’ve got…Rhodes (who is definitely getting too old for this shit, having already been War Machine for 16 years in this timeline), Ant-Man (and thus Wasp) and *maybe* the Hulk, who could just as easily be off-world along with Carol Danvers, Thor, Nebula, Rocket…

Okay, old Avengers are thin on the ground. So who does that leave on Earth who is active and known to the Avengers in an official capacity? Well, you have the Wakandans (including Shuri, the Dora Milaje, and possibly Riri Williams) but are they more likely to side with the White Wolf or with Official Captain America? Or either? Then you have the Magicians – Doctor Strange, Wong, America Chavez and company – maybe? There are SHIELD/SWORD/SABER operatives and allies past and present – the Pyms? Monica Rambeau? Kamala Khan? What the Hell ever happened with the Super-Skrull anyway? Shang-Chi is still out there somewhere and known to Wong, Carol and Bruce, who seem to be the closest thing to an Avengers leadership at the moment. And then there’s She-Hulk, who probably needs work. (This doesn’t even include people they have no reason to know about like Moon Knight or Silver Scarab or Echo, and you have to think Daredevil and his sort aren’t really on their radar). And of course, the whole world has forgotten Spider-Man.

So in terms of who is around to be an official team of Captain America’s Avengers, the practical lineup is Sam, Scott and Hope, Rhodey, maybe Monica, maybe Bruce, and if things were really bad maybe you get help from Wakanda or Kamar-Taj, with the likes of Kamala and Kate Bishop and Cassie Lang as the junior varsity AA team. You need the maybes just to fill out a roster of six.

The biggest takeaway from this Keltner List is that Phased 4 and 5 of the MCU, now technically complete, have shotgunned a lot out there without ever really building a through-line. We know there is a multiverse, but it’s been kind of orthogonal to the plot, and we don’t really have the kind of obvious destination as Infinity War was – in part because Jonathan Majors is a dick and screwed up the Kang angle, but to a large part because we have completely reset who’s in the MCU with a minimum of exposure. No one has gotten multiple movies, there’s been precious little team-building, so we’re in for a lot of hotshot work in Phase Six starting in July, for better or worse.

The challenge of the Infinity Saga was “can they stick the landing in a satisfying fashion” and they nailed the assignment. At this point, the challenge of the Multiverse Saga is “can they make anyone care.”

It was 2012, I think, the first time I saw a self-driving Lexus in Mountain View. It said “Google self-driving car” and my reaction was “I beg your pardon?” And then, as the years went by, you couldn’t move in Mountain View without seeing one of the little two-seater self-driving pod cars. Then they rebranded the self-driving business as Waymo, moved to Chrysler Pacifica vans, then to Jaguars, and then last year, finally launched service in San Francisco.

Thirteen years on, I have finally ridden in one. In three or four, actually, having gone to the city for the express purpose of taking Waymo to bars I wouldn’t be able to get to on the MUNI Metro. The goal is to speed the day when I get access to the service area closer to home, because honestly, I am a lot more comfortable with the idea of self-driving cars on suburban back roads limited to 25 miles an hour or so.

The thing is…it was effortless. It was simple. The car rolled up, I got in, buckled my seatbelt and tapped the “Start Ride” on screen, And then the car drove itself a couple of miles, wheel turning as if a sullen ghost were at the helm, ambient chill music automatically playing (which seems like the most appropriate music for a self-driving EV). And then I got out and walked into Ireland’s 32, easy peasy.

And honestly, it’s a bit of a dream. Living in a place with no transit to speak of, the idea that you could set a dozen of these down feels transformative. I never felt unsafe, I never saw the car do anything untoward, and you can see on the monitor what the sensors see – in some cases, which blinker is flashing on the car three ahead and which way the pedestrian with his arm up is facing. I wouldn’t take it on a freeway, for sure, but at low speeds in an urban or suburban environment, it’s just about perfect for what I need to get home from the pub.

And then comes the obvious question: what does this mean for Uber, for Lyft, for everyone for whom gig driving has become a necessary side hustle or an actual lifeline?

I don’t really have a good answer for this. Well, I do, but it’s never going to happen in my lifetime in America – and that is “this is exactly what we were promised sixty years ago, so we should have the other things that were supposed to come with it – leisure time, short to nonexistent work weeks, and a way to make a living that doesn’t involve being a cheap replacement for a machine.” Confiscatory taxation of billionaires coupled with universal basic income would torpedo the human-pack-mule business. We were made to do the things machines can’t, and we should pay accordingly. Every dollar of productivity improvement for decades has been siphoned up by the 1% at the expense of people who actually do the work, and it’s past time for some of that cash to flow the other way.

Because this is a way to get something approximating transit into places that are never going to have trains, never going to run bus routes, never going to be walkable. This would work just fine in my home town in Alabama, something that could have taken my grandfather from his rural house to Jack’s and back. It’s the sort of thing that could have let me get home from the other side of Nashville during grad school without having to stop drinking three hours earlier. It’s the replacement for the interurban that was thoughtlessly yanked out of what is now Foothill Expressway decades ago. It is an ever so thin but nevertheless satisfying slice of the world we were promised, the world we were supposed to have.

And I want to enjoy it for however little time we have. Of which.

Back from a brief sojourn in the Big Smoke for the third time in four years. It’s not even a joke when I say this has become our Disneyland – it is a place we get away to, in order to ride the rides (underground, black cabs, double-decker bus, premium air travel), visit the attractions (Dishoom, Fortnum & Mason, pubs, Mr Fogg’s cocktail bars, the British Boot Company, SkyGarden, Pret), meet the characters (our friends, any cabdriver at all), and bring back the branded merch (shortbread, “spicy Advil”, occasional jelly babies, new bovver boots). It’s a refuge from the real world, from the miasma that is America 2025, from work (or the lack thereof), from everything. It is, in short, the long-desired escape. Except that you have to come back from it.

It was in the breakfast room at the St Pancras hotel in 2022 that I realized how much it felt like something Disney would spend tens of millions of dollars to capture the feel of. And I took note of this as we visited Disneyland, and Disney World, and other places in Europe, and other places in America. And I came to the realization that I can get a high percentage of what I wanted from London without having to get on a plane. It comes down to: gray skies, cool temperatures, brick buildings of roughly three stories, and the ability to have a cold pint of local ale at 10 AM in a cozy setting. And after a fashion, I have been able to piece this together a bit at a time everywhere from San Francisco to Cupertino to Seattle to Santa Cruz to Denver to Nashville.

The missus and I have long said “there’s no point in going back to London unless we are moving there” but then gone back again over and over anyway. But this was the first time she said about London what she says about New York: “I want to be there, but I think I want to be there and 30 years old.” And I absolutely get that. I mean, I could be in London at 55 a lot easier than NYC or even SF at 55, but I’m also thinking that I’d rather be someplace at a more human scale. Like Sacramento. Or Portland. I want a new city that has new things, big enough to have health care but small enough to be comprehensible, big enough for transit but small enough for minor league sports, big enough to be safely blue but small enough to be affordable.

But at some level, the urge is just to be somewhere else, to have a couple days off from reality, to have a brief respite from the bleak mundane. To retire and have enough in the bank to stay retired somewhere (or at least working something more enjoyable). And if the same caliber of retreat can be obtained closer than GMT, then it’s past time to explore it at every opportunity.