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  • The Emmys Crown Their New Royalty: Streamers, Sad Billionaires, and Seth Rogen

    The Emmys Crown Their New Royalty: Streamers, Sad Billionaires, and Seth Rogen

    Award shows love to pretend they’re about art, but the Emmys have always been about bragging rights. Who owns the zeitgeist? Who commands the hashtags? Who can throw the longest acceptance speech while orchestra violins nervously twitch in the pit? And this year, the 77th Primetime Emmys gave us the answer in flashing lights: streaming…

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  • Groypers, Grievances, and the Great MAGA Family Reunion

    Groypers, Grievances, and the Great MAGA Family Reunion

    Every political movement develops factions. The Bolsheviks had Mensheviks, the Catholics had Protestants, the Beatles had Yoko. But no coalition fractures quite like the MAGAverse, which has managed to stuff twelve different ideological cliques into one red hat—and none of them particularly like each other. If the Republican Party used to be a country club,…

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  • Kash Patel’s FBI: Now With 30% More Chaos and 0% More Competence

    Kash Patel’s FBI: Now With 30% More Chaos and 0% More Competence

    The Worst Week at the Bureau It only took seven days for Kash Patel to make J. Edgar Hoover look like an Excel spreadsheet. On September 11, Patel stood before cameras and wrongly announced that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was “in custody.” The killer was not, in fact, in custody. By the end of the news…

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  • The Assassination of Charlie Kirk and the GOP’s Talent for Pouring Gasoline on a Fire They Started

    The Assassination of Charlie Kirk and the GOP’s Talent for Pouring Gasoline on a Fire They Started

    The Fox & Friends Grief Circus Charlie Kirk was assassinated on September 10 while speaking at Utah Valley University. A 22-year-old, Tyler James Robinson, is charged with aggravated murder, reportedly firing a bolt-action rifle from 200 yards away. Police say his own family identified him. The shell casings were allegedly etched with inflammatory messages, because…

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  • In response to prematurely blaming liberals for Charlie Kirk: Maybe Stop Acting Like Fascists If You Don’t Want to Be Called Fascists

    In response to prematurely blaming liberals for Charlie Kirk: Maybe Stop Acting Like Fascists If You Don’t Want to Be Called Fascists

    There’s a game the American right has perfected. It goes like this: they say or do something horrifying—racist, misogynist, homophobic, authoritarian—then when people point it out, they act wounded, offended, persecuted. How dare you call us fascist? they cry, clutching their pearls with one hand while sharpening voter suppression laws with the other. It’s a…

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  • Big Little Lies Season 3: HBO’s Attempt at Resurrection Theater

    Big Little Lies Season 3: HBO’s Attempt at Resurrection Theater

    The Prestige Necromancy Business HBO just announced what Hollywood does best: recycling. Big Little Lies—the Monterey mommy noir that gave us Nicole Kidman in silk blouses whisper-screaming about trauma and Reese Witherspoon perfecting the art of weaponized brunch—is being resurrected for a third season. Francesca Sloane, fresh off Mr. & Mrs. Smith, is tasked with…

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  • 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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  • 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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  • One Day, Three Flexes: The Roberts Hold, Midway Blitz, and the Birthday Book That Wouldn’t Die

    One Day, Three Flexes: The Roberts Hold, Midway Blitz, and the Birthday Book That Wouldn’t Die

    The news cycle didn’t just turn over. It did somersaults, pirouettes, and then flopped onto the couch clutching its side. By breakfast, Chief Justice John Roberts had played human sandbag for Donald Trump’s freeze on nearly $5 billion in foreign aid. By lunch, Chicago was choking on “Operation Midway Blitz” immigration raids, a branding exercise…

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