Latest posts

  • Bruce Willis, Dementia, and America’s Fear of Aging Out of the Script

    Bruce Willis, Dementia, and America’s Fear of Aging Out of the Script

    Two years after the world learned of Bruce Willis’s frontotemporal dementia (FTD) diagnosis, his wife Emma Heming Willis sat across from Diane Sawyer in a primetime special titled “Emma & Bruce Willis: The Unexpected Journey.” The title was reverent, hushed, softened by violins. And there it was: Emma saying plainly, “His brain is failing him.”

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  • When Xi Jinping Plays Musical Generals — And the Tune Sounds Like Alarm Bells

    When Xi Jinping Plays Musical Generals — And the Tune Sounds Like Alarm Bells

    In mid-2025, Beijing’s military brass found themselves in the political equivalent of a high-stakes game of musical chairs. On August 27, it emerged that President Xi Jinping—he of the teleprompter-stare and tightly rolled sleeve branding—has carried out the most sweeping purge of military leadership since Mao’s Cultural Revolution-era showdowns. Call it “Operation Guillotine General.” Up

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  • The Devil Wears Bulletproof: America’s Sacred Tradition of Gunfire at School

    The Devil Wears Bulletproof: America’s Sacred Tradition of Gunfire at School

    Ah, Minneapolis. The city of lakes, the birthplace of Prince, and now—because we clearly didn’t have enough entries in the “Things Europeans Think Are Fake But Actually Happen in America” catalog—the latest setting for that quintessentially American ritual: a school shooting. This time, we leveled up. It wasn’t a hallway. It wasn’t a cafeteria. No,

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  • Trump’s Chicago Dream: Send in the Troops, Forget the Math

    Trump’s Chicago Dream: Send in the Troops, Forget the Math

    The problem with promising to “crack down on crime” is that crime refuses to follow your campaign calendar. It does not politely spike in the zip codes you need for next week’s rally. It rarely consults your polling numbers before deciding whether to trend upward or downward. Yet here comes Donald Trump, fresh off his

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  • Deportation Roulette: Spin the Globe, Land on Uganda

    Deportation Roulette: Spin the Globe, Land on Uganda

    America has always had a gift for rebranding cruelty as administrative efficiency. On August 23, 2025, CNN reported the latest episode in our long-running tragicomedy of immigration enforcement: Kilmar Ábrego García—a Salvadoran man who’s lived in Maryland since 2011, married an American citizen, raised children here, and already survived one wrongful deportation—may now be deported

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  • Rodeo, Run-ins & Rehab: Lil Nas X’s 6 a.m. “Midnight Remix” in Studio City

    Rodeo, Run-ins & Rehab: Lil Nas X’s 6 a.m. “Midnight Remix” in Studio City

    Picture it: early morning on Ventura Boulevard, Studio City. The sky is still a bruise. Streetlights flicker like judging eyebrows. A nude man strides down the sidewalk, shoulders thrown back like he just emerged from a Private Jet and Seminoles matchup—and charges at police when they arrive. He’s escorted off in cuffs, hospitalized for suspected

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  • Cracker Barrel’s $94 Million Makeover: Uncle Herschel, Dumped by Wall Street

    Cracker Barrel’s $94 Million Makeover: Uncle Herschel, Dumped by Wall Street

    There are breakups that shake families. There are divorces that fracture communities. And then there’s Cracker Barrel firing Uncle Herschel from its logo, which—according to Wall Street—destroyed nearly $200 million in value before the breakfast crowd even finished their biscuits. On August 21, Cracker Barrel’s stock tanked 7.2%, closing at $54.80 and wiping out about

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  • Deportation by Stopwatch: Trump’s TPS Hunger Games

    Deportation by Stopwatch: Trump’s TPS Hunger Games

    The Trump administration has rediscovered its favorite pastime: deportation as sport. On August 20, 2025, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted the White House an emergency stay that lets officials move forward with ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for roughly 60,000 migrants from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal. Nothing says “America First” like telling the

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  • English-Only Nation: The Trump-Era War on Multilingualism, Now With Federal Endorsement

    English-Only Nation: The Trump-Era War on Multilingualism, Now With Federal Endorsement

    The Department of Education, in what can only be described as a masterclass in quiet cruelty, has decided that five million English learners across the country are now just a line item too expensive to justify. On August 20, 2025, the department formally rescinded the 2015 “Dear Colleague” guidance—the one that spelled out, in plain

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  • How to Politely Erase History Without Mussing Your Hair: The Smithsonian vs. The Woke Exterminators

    How to Politely Erase History Without Mussing Your Hair: The Smithsonian vs. The Woke Exterminators

    There’s a special kind of American irony in watching a White House that can’t stop talking about “cancel culture” spend its waning days trying to cancel the Smithsonian. Canceling a comedian’s Netflix special is authoritarianism, we’re told. But rewriting a museum plaque about Benjamin Franklin’s enslaved servants? That’s patriotism, baby. On August 20, 2025, Donald

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