I would never presume to tell anyone what makes for a successful marriage, but for me, it most definitely involves stealing your partner's best lines. So when my wife once came up with the headline "How do you solve a problem like O'Mara?" about the difficulty actor Jason O'Mara was having finding a TV show that didn't wind up on the chopping block, I filed that little gem away, knowing that one day I would be appropriating it for my own purposes. And now that day has come.

For better or for worse, dear. The quips are community property.

The original version of this newsletter misspelled Jason Momoa’s name, an error that has me gnashing my teeth and rending my garments. As penance, I promise to watch both Aquaman movies back to back.

The wife and I recently took in Supergirl, perhaps due to residual good feelings about last year's Superman reboot, perhaps because we were antsy to see a movie at the cineplex and The Odyssey had not yet arrived in cinemas. Whatever the reason, it brings me no joy to report that Supergirl is not very good.

This is not the fault of Milly Alcock, the eponymous heroine of the flick and easily the best thing about the picture. Rather, Supergirl suffers from a plot that goes in a dozen different directions simultaneously without actually arriving anywhere, plus some questionable directorial decisions by Craig Gillespie. I'm not a member of the directors' guild but I am confident that the best way to film a fight sequence is not "in as many shadows as possible."  And there's a lot more sex trafficking than I like to see in my summer popcorn flicks.

Also present for larger portions of Supergirl is Jason Momoa, pivoting from the role of Aquaman to play Lobo, the intergalactic mercenary who is usually the worst thing about any DC Comics storyline he's involved in. Both the Mark Kermode review of Supergirl and subsequent listener comments note that Jason Momoa seems to be enjoying himself. At least someone is.

Not long after watching Supergirl, we turned our attention to The Wrecking Crew, yet another Jason Momoa project in which he and Dave Bautista play a pair of Hawaiian half-brothers out to learn who murdered their father. The Wrecking Crew is big and dumb and loud, none of which are dealbreakers, but it overstays its welcome by making each of its set pieces more violent and nihilistic than the last. 

I lost patience with the movie when Momoa and Bautista are being chased down a crowded Hawaiian highway by a helicopter and a vehicle full of ninjas — no, I am not exaggerating any of this — and there are multiple car wrecks, serial explosions and dozens of ninjas losing limbs in particularly grisly fashion. This is the sort of thing that would make the news. And yet, The Wrecking Crew treats it with a "Well, what are you gonna do about morning rush hour?" shrug.

Supergirl and The Wrecking Crew share something in common, and it's not just the fact that neither film is very good. Rather, both projects feature Jason Momoa playing a vulgar slob that audience members are expected to warm to. For this audience member, though, the opposite happened. Why couldn't the ninjas dismember him, I found myself wondering, as Jason Momoa grunted his way through more unwelcome screen time.

It shouldn't be this way. Jason Mamoa has, on other occasions, proven to be a winning and charismatic presence. 

One of my favorite shows of 2025 was Chief of War, an Apple TV streamer that Jason Momoa not only starred in, but created and co-wrote. Chief of War tells the rooted-in-fact but expanded-for-narrative-purposes story of how the disparate kingdoms of the Hawaiian Islands were brought under united rule. (Spoiler alert: Very violently.) It's clearly a passion project for Momoa, and his emotional investment in the story pays off in spades.

As Ka'iana in Chief of War, Momoa cuts his usual imposing presence. But he also turns in a soulful, emotional performance — something he's not often allowed to do in the other roles, where he is a lumbering galoot and punchline machine. 

Watch Chief of War, and you realize it doesn't have to be that way — Momoa may look like a circus strongman, but he's got a range that a lot of productions don't have the insight or skill to use to the audience's benefit.

I have a theory called the Curse of the Handsome Man where actors with tremendous comedic chops — think Jon Hamm or the Chrises Pine and Hemsworth — get pigeon-holed into leading man roles because of their tremendous good looks, when all they really yearn to show us is how funny they are. While that's great news for us funnyman uggos, it does deprive the audience of seeing the full range of the Handsome Man's talents. Because of Jason Momoa, I think I'm going to add the Strongman Corollary, in which talented actors of unusual size find themselves in a muscle-bound prison of their own making.

I hope that Jason Momoa is able to break out of the typecasting he increasingly finds himself a victim of. He certainly has the upper body strength to break out of just about anything.

When the iPhone first landed in our palms some 20 years ago, I was running Macworld's websit. It became clear that mobile apps were going to be the differentiating factor for Apple's smartphone, and thus it fell to me to manage a lot of the app write-ups and reviews. As a result, I would conservatively estimate that I reviewed a billion iOS apps, and the app reviews I didn't write, I probably edited.

I find myself back on the app beat, though this time, the brief has expanded to Mac apps, too. 

The background is that my friend Jason Snell wrote a column for his Six Colors website noting the rise of vibe coding and a bunch of other factors has meant a steady stream of new apps clamoring for his attention — perhaps more apps than one man alone can take a look at. So Jason's tasked me with doing some of the looking, and my first app spotlight column emerged last week. It's already getting rave reviews.

Expect plenty more app columns where that came from, as my inbox is now bursting with potential candidates. That said, I'm never too busy to take on more work, so why not send an assignment or two your old friend Phil's way? It's easy enough to reach me.

It's not exactly a state secret that Donald Trump and I aren't the least bit simpatico on any issue of import. You might think that would be a problem in my line of work, and I suppose it would be if I didn't regard journalistic objectivity as a myth.

To expect reporters to be completely neutral on any and everything is to live in a fantasy world. You want people who are reasonably well-informed on the topics they cover, who can recognize which data points are valuable and which are not. Otherwise, you're going to get reportage from someone who's easily duped and unable to suss out a strong argument from one offered in bad faith. 

If anything, you want a reporter who's completely upfront about their point of view. It helps the writer be aware of their own potential biases and blind spots, plus it gives readers context for where the writer is coming from and to hold that writer accountable for what they produce. And I do think reporters in this country need to be committed to the values of democracy, something I don't see the current occupant of the Oval Office exhibiting.

All of this is a big wind-up so that I can talk about Donald Trump and his stupid smartphone.

Back in my regular tech reporting days, if anyone ever brought up my obvious disdain for the president, I could hand-wave away concerns by claiming that I worked an entirely different side of the street. "I write about smartphones," I'd say. "When he starts releasing smartphones, well, then we might have a problem with bias."

So of course, the son of a bitch goes and releases a smartphone. Or more accurately, his failsons did. As announced, the Trump phone was supposed to be made in America (it is not) and allow you to proclaim your loyalty to the president with a gold-painted cellphone bearing his name, all for an inflated price of $499 plus a monthly data plan marked up from the usual rates offered by other wireless carriers.

At the risk of patting myself on the back, I think I did a pretty good job at the old gig delivering news of the Trump phone's existence while also exercising my expertise in the field to warn people of some potential warning signs, whether that was in the initial news story about the phone or a subsequent analysis piece that had more bite. 

Without repeating myself, the problems I flagged included the fact that you could get more capable phones with a $499 asking price, find better unlimited plans that didn't charge you $47.45/month and avoid paying a deposit on a phone that hadn't actually shipped yet. 

(As for that last point, the Trump phone was originally supposed to arrive in August 2025; it only recently started landing in the hands of people who pre-ordered it, most of whom seem to be my fellow tech reporters.)

Sadly, the Trump phone's delayed release means it arrived long after I was cashiered out of my job, so I didn't get a chance to give it a more thorough going-over. Others have, though, and from the sounds of those reviews — I think The Verge has the best one — it sounds like my initial misgivings were on the mark. Score one for category expertise over performative objectivity.

Negative Trump phone reviews aren't the only thing I've been reading lately. Here's other reportage that caught my eye.

No sooner had last week's newsletter landed in inboxes than the aforementioned Jason Snell was texting me about my "Total Eclipse of the Heart" video obsession. Turns out there is a literal version of the video in which Jim Steinman's lyrics have been altered to describe what is happening in the video. And as much as a hoot as that was, it finishes second in the Best Older Video I Stumbled Upon Last Week Sweepstakes, thanks to this mash-up of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Big Bird and OutKast's "Bombs Over Baghdad".

/While I'm emptying out the tech reporter notebook, I've been thinking about Meta Glasses this week, largely because the ads seem to play constantly whenever I try to watch a YouTube video. There's something to be said for blank advertising, I suppose.

But just because Meta has successfully made me aware of its glasses doesn't mean I want to own a pair. I'm of the firm belief that smartglasses need to offer something other than just another screen to stare at — and this one’s always in your eyeline. And no ad has convinced me to revise that point of view.

Certainly, no ad featuring Kylie Jenner, one of the dead-eyed Kardashian Klan that seem to have a deathgrip on our pop culture consciousness despite having no worthwhile claim to it. The Meta glass ads featuring Kylie Jenner her using the glasses to take pictures and perform other tasks that a smartphone pulls off just as easily without making you look like a voyeuristic creep. Jenner does all this unsmilingly and with a flat vocal affect that seems to say, "These glasses add nothing meaningful to my existence, but the check from Meta cleared so here we are."

Lest you think this is some Kardashian-inspired animosity toward Meta's latest attempt to fend off irrelevancy, I submit to you this Kylie-free advertisement in which assorted young people try on the Meta Glasses and, for the most part, look absolutely miserable doing so. I realize no one should turn to a 54-year-old man for a ruling on what's cool and hip, but shouldn't an ad for a discretionary product make it look like people enjoy wearing it? If I were to look closely at the Meta Glasses lens, I'd expect to see the gleam of the bayonet being pointed at the people forced to don that eyewear.

Advertising has always had some degree of legerdemain to it, convincing you to buy stuff that you don't really need. But at least that required some effort and skill on the part of the advertisers — the folks trying to sell you Meta Glasses can't even be arsed to try. We're living in an age where the emperor's never been more naked, and yet people keep saying "Well, at least he looks cool."

And that's your Phil for this week — thanks for reading. Unless you're reading this on a Trump phone or through a pair of Meta Glasses, in which case it's been nice having you around.