Latest posts
-
The Great Victory Parade: When History Becomes State-Sponsored Fanfiction
There are two things authoritarian governments love more than power: parades and revisionist history. So it was no surprise that on September 1–3, 2025, Beijing gave us both in one dazzling, over-produced spectacle—an 80th-anniversary Victory Day parade so self-congratulatory it made the Oscars look humble. Xi Jinping, standing tall on his reviewing platform, hosted none
-
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,
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Prestige TV, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Firehose
By 2025, prestige television no longer means anything. It’s like calling water wet, or calling Marvel “cinema” just to rile up Scorsese. Prestige used to be rarefied air—The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men. Now it’s practically background radiation, humming behind every streaming app. Prestige has metastasized. Every show arrives pre-packaged as “prestige,” the way cereal
-
Cardi B v. The Courtroom: When Justice Goes Viral
By the summer of 2025, America had already transformed nearly every human institution into content. Elections are Twitch streams. Presidential debates are meme generators. Even funerals trend if the right celebrity posts a photo. It was only a matter of time before the courtroom—long a solemn stage for justice—was converted into a live-action reality show.
-
Big Brother, Small Man: The Rylie Jeffries Eviction Tour
When Rylie Jeffries was evicted from Big Brother Season 27, he didn’t walk out of the house so much as stumble into a reality that had been waiting to eat him alive. On the inside, he was the cowboy-hat-wearing bull rider with a showmance and a storyline. On the outside, he was suddenly the subject
-
The Soundtrack of Survival: Thirteen Artists Who Speak To Me
Growing up queer, biracial, abandoned, and too often invisible, I didn’t have a roadmap. What I had were songs—other people’s stories sung like confessions, shouted like rebellion, whispered like prayers. These artists didn’t just entertain me; they saved me. They gave me language for my own sadness, resilience for my own survival, and proof that