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  • iPhone 17: The Awe-Dropping Slab We’ll All Pretend Not to Need, Then Buy Anyway

    iPhone 17: The Awe-Dropping Slab We’ll All Pretend Not to Need, Then Buy Anyway

    On September 9, 2025 at 10 a.m. PT, Apple will once again transform its glass spaceship into a megachurch of consumer longing, inviting the faithful to witness what it calls the “Awe-dropping” keynote. The name alone is a corporate sleight of hand: awe as in wonder, drop as in your rent money, and keynote as…

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  • SNL at 50: The Joke That Outlived the Punchline

    SNL at 50: The Joke That Outlived the Punchline

    When Saturday Night Live premiered in 1975, the country had just watched Nixon resign, Vietnam collapse, and disco rise. The show was a weekly release valve, part sketch comedy, part cultural exorcism. It wasn’t supposed to last—it was literally called “Saturday Night” because NBC needed to plug a hole in the schedule. Five decades later,…

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  • ICE Storm: Trump, Kristi Noem, and the Great Chicago Occupation

    ICE Storm: Trump, Kristi Noem, and the Great Chicago Occupation

    The Trump administration has a way of treating cities like wayward children—Chicago most of all. For decades, conservative politicians have invoked it as shorthand for chaos, crime, and everything wrong with “blue America.” To them, Chicago is less a place where millions of people live, work, and build lives, and more a stage for proving…

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  • Rudy Giuliani and the Post-Motorcade Fragility of Heroes

    Rudy Giuliani and the Post-Motorcade Fragility of Heroes

    On August 30–31, 2025, Rudy Giuliani once again managed to headline America’s surrealist carnival, though this time not with a press conference at a landscaping company or a leaked deposition. Instead, at 81 years old, the former mayor of New York City found himself in a New Hampshire trauma center, nursing a fractured thoracic vertebra…

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  • Trump’s Executive Order to Federalize Elections: Democracy’s Paper Cut

    Trump’s Executive Order to Federalize Elections: Democracy’s Paper Cut

    The great thing about American democracy is that it’s supposed to be decentralized. States set the rules, counties run the polls, and federal courts swoop in every so often to remind Florida it cannot legally stage a coup in its public libraries. But Donald Trump, never one for details like the Constitution, has now declared…

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  • The Chains That Bind Us: A Love Letter to America’s Most Hated On Restaurants

    The Chains That Bind Us: A Love Letter to America’s Most Hated On Restaurants

    It’s fashionable in 2025 to sneer at the chain restaurant. The discourse demands that we all pretend our palates are calibrated exclusively for chef-driven farm-to-table concepts where someone in a denim apron insists the kale was “foraged.” To admit you still eat at Olive Garden is like confessing you still burn CDs or own a…

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