J Alexander Diaz

how it started how it’s going

One thing you can’t take away from the Lakers is that they got elite photographers

@billoram 😂

Does Bronny's new Nike logo also have Mount Hood in it?

Makes me so happy. Sports, man

What I love about this run is the Dodgers needed every last man. Dean made a smart play. Will Klein 18 inning game. Pages came through in the end defensively. Kershaw had his moment escaping the bases loaded jam. Every last man

This photo. Wow. #WorldSeries

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today we officially released our first brand anthem to the world. feeling tired, inspired, and insanely proud of the talented crew we got to build this with. here’s to everyone—and everything—that got us here. more to come.

Forever Iconic

@jdeez This was so phenomenally done, and you just know it made Luka know he is HOME. Great, great work!

glad I could finally put my living room gallery wall skills to use and display some of our favorite shots of 77.

I just signed my extension with the Lakers. Excited to keep working to bring championships to LA and make Laker Nation proud. Grateful to the Lakers, my teammates and all the fans who’ve shown so much love since day one. This is just the beginning. 💜💛

we're looking for some talented folks to join our team for the 2025-26 season. if you are an up-and-coming designer, photographer, or videographer, DM's are open—send portfolios my way! job posting will be up for the next couple days. APPLY: bit.ly/44bMilb

now we're talkin

wait until the internet realizes all basketballs are the same shape

looking for a talented editor ready to join the purple and gold—send portfolios, DMs are open! APPLY: bit.ly/3HgqU51

That’s a wrap on the 2024-25 Los Angeles Lakers season from El Segundo.

Airports these days are a perfect picture of American affluenza. The US upper-ish class has too much money, but never enough. Lots of suspicious “pre-boarders,” teens in designer clothes, $500 headphones muttering ‘what?’ to flight staff. There are like 50 people in “boarding group 1” now, as well. You can see the confusion on people’s faces who’ve clearly been boarding first for a while, who now wait 20 minutes standing just to have their spot in line! The lounges are overrun, and again, you can see the exasperation on the faces of people waiting for them, thinking they’d paid for a service and realizing that now it’s like Disneyworld. Prices across the board have gone up, and demand keeps up. This is one of the effects of mass affluence, I guess. Airline taxes are as high as ever, and as a result actual “budget” flights (à la Ryanair) are not allowed. At this point, a budget flight is anything under… $300? People are amazingly unforgiving. They get violent looks in their eyes when staff announce that overhead bin space will run out. For many flyers, being asked to check a bag is like being asked for one of their kidneys. So many people look at children like they’re rodents that have infiltrated the house, rather than our treasures and our future. Parents are the scapegoat of every flight. Funny enough, the TSA feels like the one thing that has gotten better. Maybe I choose my airports and flying times well, but I don’t remember the last time I waited more than 15 minutes to get through. Sometimes the CLEAR line is comically longer than the regular line next to it. And for whatever reason, people will just _not_ move over to the shorter line. It’s pretty rare to see actual brawling, but you do hear about these things. As a writer and chronicler of America, this entropy interests me. I’m almost immunized from feeling the pressure, because I’ve taught myself to laugh about it and observe. I see the story, and as a result the chaos isn’t so bad. And to me, mass affluence is the biggest story in the country. People who thought they’d “made it” are stuck in a Commons that they feel has degraded. They’re in a race to constant fly all around the country, and even the ones with quite a bit of money are feeling the squeeze. At the Santa Barbara airport recently, about to board an upsetting expensive, 38 minute flight to San Francisco, I saw this in its purest form. Everyone flying from SB to SF is “rich.” Nearly all live in multimillion-dollar houses. And there they were, watching private jets take off through the windows, about to board a full commercial flight themselves. Affluenza. Me? I try to always feel the wonder. Isn’t it amazing how quickly we can get basically anywhere? It seems so soul destroying to develop an entitlement here. The US is what it is. And it’s a machine to make services widely available at a market price. The chaos begins when a lot more people get pretty wealthy; you see this same pattern in ski resorts, housing markets, etc. Already we see lots of cultural messaging encouraging people to “exit” from all this — either by amassing enough money, or by voluntarily choosing slower things (trains, small towns, camping). I think we’ll see more of that. What do you think of my theory?

everything everywhere all at once 🪄