Latest posts

  • Paramount Skydance Wants to Eat Warner Bros. Discovery for Breakfast

    Paramount Skydance Wants to Eat Warner Bros. Discovery for Breakfast

    Cue the Mergers and the Popcorn America loves a sequel, even when it’s corporate consolidation. This September, barely a month after Paramount Skydance finalized its $8.4 billion deal to absorb Paramount Global, the trades are abuzz with whispers: now they want Warner Bros. Discovery. Yes, the company that just finished moving its things into Paramount’s

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  • America’s New Age of Political Violence: Or, How to Lose Friends and Radicalize People

    America’s New Age of Political Violence: Or, How to Lose Friends and Radicalize People

    The Washington Post says we’ve entered “a new age of political violence.” How quaint of them to suggest there was ever an old age that ended. The difference, perhaps, is that now we livestream it, brand it with hashtags, and serve it to audiences like a Netflix series that never gets canceled. The latest episode

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  • The Week America Became Judge, Jury, and Caribbean Executioner

    The Week America Became Judge, Jury, and Caribbean Executioner

    September began with a bang—and 11 bodies floating in the southern Caribbean. President Donald Trump, in a tone that straddled triumph and reality TV cliffhanger, announced that the U.S. military had “destroyed” a Venezuelan vessel, killing alleged members of Tren de Aragua. Alleged being the operative word. Alleged as in “we’ll circle back with details

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  • Ceasefire, Interrupted: Israel Bombs the Meeting About Peace

    Ceasefire, Interrupted: Israel Bombs the Meeting About Peace

    There’s an old joke about Middle East negotiations: the closer the diplomats get to an agreement, the louder the bombs outside the hotel. On September 9, that punchline wrote itself when Israel decided the most efficient way to respond to Hamas’s leadership meeting in Doha—called to weigh a U.S.-backed ceasefire proposal—was to obliterate the venue

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  • A Single Round, A Million Excuses: A Cultural Critique of the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

    A Single Round, A Million Excuses: A Cultural Critique of the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

    Let us convene, grim-eyed, on the manicured quads of Utah Valley University, where normalcy shattered into shards of ideological glass in a single, solitary moment: the death of a political firebrand, felled supposedly by a single bullet from a nearby building. That bullet—cold, precise, unembellished by flourish or bombast—reduces weeks, perhaps years, of incendiary rhetoric

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  • Twenty-Four Years Later: What We Should Have Learned from 9/11 (But Absolutely Didn’t)

    Twenty-Four Years Later: What We Should Have Learned from 9/11 (But Absolutely Didn’t)

    The anniversary of September 11 rolls around every year like a fire alarm that no one bothers to silence anymore. We stop, we remember, we replay the grainy footage in our minds, and then—like a nation addicted to selective amnesia—we forget the one lesson we were supposed to have learned: unity. Not unity as in

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  • When the Shepherd Won’t Call the Hotline: The Gospel According to Mandatory Reporting

    When the Shepherd Won’t Call the Hotline: The Gospel According to Mandatory Reporting

    There is a special place in America’s theater of hypocrisy reserved for pastors who forget that “suffer the little children” was not meant as operational policy. This week, Gainesville’s Assemblies of God star, Pastor Mark Vega of Ignite Life Center, found himself in police custody, charged with the third-degree felony of knowingly and willfully failing

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  • The Birthday Book Blues: How Epstein’s Guest List Became Trump’s Latest Hallmark Special

    The Birthday Book Blues: How Epstein’s Guest List Became Trump’s Latest Hallmark Special

    America has always had a gift for taking the grotesque and wrapping it in party favors. We can turn a banking collapse into a Netflix documentary, a constitutional crisis into a coffee-table book, and now, Jeffrey Epstein’s rolodex into a “birthday book.” Imagine the scrapbooking aisle of Michael’s, but curated by Ghislaine Maxwell. This week,

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  • The Gospel of Countdown and Shrug: Mel Robbins’s DIY Serenity Prayer

    The Gospel of Countdown and Shrug: Mel Robbins’s DIY Serenity Prayer

    Self-help is America’s unofficial national pastime. Baseball, apple pie, and the endless hunt for a three-word mantra to finally make us tolerable to ourselves. Into this crowded bazaar of affirmations and hacks waltzed Mel Robbins, who has done the impossible: sold millions of copies of not one but two rules for living that could fit

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