Latest posts
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When You Tell Me Restaurants Are Under Threat, I Say: “No Sh*t, They Literally Are”
Restaurants are collapsing like dominoes in a windstorm, but apparently CNN still felt the need to headline it: “Restaurants Are Under Threat as Costs Skyrocket and Consumers Cut Back.” If you read that and thought, Oh, really? Food costs are eating the industry alive, who could’ve guessed?—you’re both correct and complicit in the slowdown of
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A Capital Relocation Program: Now With Extra Federal Flair
The nation’s capital has always been a theater for spectacle—power lunches, political scandal, and monuments that double as photo ops for eighth-graders on field trips. But this week, President Trump decided the city’s most enduring monument—its unhoused population—was not photogenic enough for the coming election season. In an announcement delivered with the kind of theatrical
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Ken Paxton vs. The Great Texas Hide-and-Seek Championships
Some states have political disagreements. Others have lawsuits. Texas, however, prefers its disputes served with an extra-large glass of iced tea, a dash of high drama, and a courtroom appearance that smells faintly of barbecue smoke and contempt of decorum. The latest entry into this Lone Star political rodeo? Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit to
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Times Square: The Stage Where America Performs Its Gun Problem
The thing about Times Square is that it’s designed to make you forget the real world exists. You stand there under billboards taller than small nations, every color cranked to an unnatural vibrancy, and it’s like being trapped inside the internet with no “close tab” button. It is loud. It is crowded. It is lit
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The 7% American Dream
Mortgage rates are now brushing 7%, and the experts—those same people who didn’t see 2008 coming, who told us crypto was the future, and who still insist kale is delicious—are saying the days of historic lows are “probably over.” Translation: welcome to your forever rent. Seven percent doesn’t sound like much until you remember that
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The Smart City Illusion: Where Your Trash Can Knows More About You Than Your Therapist
Let’s begin with a simple question: when did we decide that cities needed to be “smart”? Was there a moment—perhaps around 2015—when an exhausted urban planner looked at a pothole, a packed bus, and a man peeing into a parking meter and thought, If only this place had WiFi and LED lighting, everything would be
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Fast Food, Faster Judgments, and the Full-Time Hustle of Love
There’s something mildly dystopian and wildly romantic about the fact that Matthew and I have become part-time food couriers in a town where Texas Roadhouse still considers itself haute cuisine. Uber Eats. DoorDash. Roadside therapy with a side of queso. When he got to Abilene, we knew we wanted time together. And we knew we
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I Kissed a Boy, Then Questioned Everything: A Monogamous Gay’s Guide to Reality TV, Respectability, and the Right to Be a Slut
Matthew and I started watching I Kissed A Boy the other night. That’s the sentence. That’s the scandal. The gays finally got their own dating show, and we were ready to indulge—rosé in hand, eyes narrowed, snacks half-forgotten. The premise? Twelve single gay men are paired based on “compatibility,” shipped to a sun-drenched Italian villa,
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Move Over, The Notebook—My Boyfriend Moved to a Shithole For Me
Romeo drank poison for love.Jack froze to death in the North Atlantic.Allie gave up wealth and status for Noah’s sweaty carpentry chest. And Matthew?Matthew moved to Abilene, Texas. And that, dear reader, is what we call a real-ass love story. Let’s be honest—every great romance needs a setting.Pride and Prejudice had the English countryside.When Harry
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The Baby Shower Had No Cake, But Everyone Showed Up: Elephants Remind Humanity What Community Actually Looks Like
Read more by Brandon Cloud Out on the African savanna this week, an elephant gave birth. No livestream.No gender reveal explosion.No toxic balloons released into the upper atmosphere to signal the biological inevitability of a mammal. Just a herd. Present. Unapologetically together. The newborn calf, somewhere between 200 and 260 pounds—about the weight of two