Latest posts

  • Watergate’s Dismal Sequel: Indicting Comey in Broad Daylight

    Watergate’s Dismal Sequel: Indicting Comey in Broad Daylight

    There was a time when “indicting a former FBI Director” would have been the kind of storyline you read in paperback thrillers at the airport newsstand, usually involving shadowy double agents, a safe house in Prague, and a protagonist who knows too much. Now it’s just Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia. A federal grand jury has

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  • Apple Blinks at the Screen: When a $3 Trillion Company Gets Spooked by a TV Show

    Apple Blinks at the Screen: When a $3 Trillion Company Gets Spooked by a TV Show

    Apple has spent the last decade branding itself as the patron saint of courage.Courage to remove the headphone jack. Courage to sell you the same laptop three years running with one extra port. Courage to charge $19 for a cloth. But courage to air a scripted drama about violent online networks in the weeks after

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  • United We Scroll: 100 Things We All Secretly Agree On That Democrats Actually Campaign On While Republicans Pretend Don’t Exist

    United We Scroll: 100 Things We All Secretly Agree On That Democrats Actually Campaign On While Republicans Pretend Don’t Exist

    Every morning, cable news assures us that America is a house divided, a republic hanging by a thread, two tribes locked in a forever war where a neighbor’s yard sign is the moral equivalent of Pearl Harbor. Turn on Fox News and you’ll learn Democrats are Satan’s personal interns. Flip over to MSNBC and Republicans

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  • Epstein and Trump: Best Friends Forever on the Mall

    If Washington, D.C. is America’s front lawn, then the National Mall is the part where we put out our most awkward lawn ornaments. Statues to presidents, monuments to wars, the occasional scaffolding around the Capitol—these are the ornaments meant to convey gravitas. So when a 12-foot bronze-finished sculpture depicting Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein holding

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  • Trump Cancels Talks, Shutdown Clock Ticks Louder

    Trump Cancels Talks, Shutdown Clock Ticks Louder

    There are rituals in Washington that feel less like governance and more like reruns of a bad reality show. One of the longest-running is the shutdown dance: leaders promise to meet, promise to negotiate, promise to avert disaster—and then someone flips the table, storms out, and insists the other side ruined dinner. This week, the

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  • Trump at the U.N.: When the General Assembly Became a General Farce

    Trump at the U.N.: When the General Assembly Became a General Farce

    There are speeches you remember because they alter the course of history. There are speeches you remember because they contained a moral appeal so clear that even enemies nodded. And then there are speeches you remember because the escalator broke, the teleprompter glitched, and the President of the United States called climate change “the greatest

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  • Democracy with a Matchbook: How America Learned to Love Political Violence, Tribalism, and Excel Spreadsheets

    Democracy with a Matchbook: How America Learned to Love Political Violence, Tribalism, and Excel Spreadsheets

    Pod Save America did what it does best: deliver the bad news with a podcast ad break for magnesium powder and underwear that “feels like on-body AC.” The guest of honor was Dr. Liliana Mason, Johns Hopkins political scientist and unwilling Cassandra of our collapsing republic. Her subject? The roots of political violence in America

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  • Jimmy Kimmel Live, Dead, and Resurrected: Disney, the FCC, and America’s New Speech Test

    Jimmy Kimmel Live, Dead, and Resurrected: Disney, the FCC, and America’s New Speech Test

    Disney can reanimate cartoon deer and resurrect billion-dollar franchises, but even they didn’t think they’d have to stage a primetime Lazarus trick for Jimmy Kimmel. Yet here we are. After an extraordinary two-week suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live!—a late-night show that once got canceled only for recycling too many “Matt Damon” bits—Disney announced the show

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  • Everyone Knows Trump Administration Are Crooks. Trump Just Posted Watergate Online—Then Deleted It

    Everyone Knows Trump Administration Are Crooks. Trump Just Posted Watergate Online—Then Deleted It

    Donald Trump has always been good at one thing: saying the quiet part out loud. In another era, a president who leaned on his attorney general to prosecute political enemies would’ve done it in smoke-filled rooms, tucked between Nixonian “deep six the tapes” orders and plausible deniability. But Trump, bless his broken filter, skipped the

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  • How Trump Invented the Two-Tiered System of Human Decency

    How Trump Invented the Two-Tiered System of Human Decency

    The Scene at Glendale The memorial for Charlie Kirk was never going to be quiet. A man whose career thrived on microphones and grievance could hardly be remembered in whispers. So when President Donald Trump stood at the podium in Glendale and declared that this was a time for “respect” and “civility,” it was almost

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