Latest posts
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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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Texas TikToks Its Way to a Senate Race: James Talarico vs. the Methuselah Caucus
There are few constants in Texas politics: barbecue debates, heatstroke, and Democrats losing statewide races. The streak is so reliable it might as well be sponsored by Buc-ee’s. Every two years, the party tries again, strapping on boots of optimism only to be dragged face-first across a desert of gerrymanders, megachurches, and oil money. But
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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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Tom Hanks, the Wokest Man Alive: How America Lost Its War Against Niceness
Once upon a time, the biggest threat Tom Hanks posed to national security was making every American cry in unison. Whether storming Omaha Beach or talking to a volleyball, Hanks specialized in weaponized empathy. He was our cinematic dad, our comfort-food patriot, the guy who could make a two-and-a-half-hour movie about the postal service (The
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Fox Succession: Billion-Dollar Blood Feud, Season Finale
Rupert Murdoch—still kicking at ninety-four, though now more embalmed than alive—closed the latest family cage fight over who gets to steer the Fox propaganda mothership into the next few decades. The result: a $3.3 billion settlement that removed Prudence, Elisabeth, and James Murdoch from the family trust like contestants voted off an island. Each walked
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The Man Who Shot Down Shots: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Public Health Hunger Games
The curtain was finally pulled back on the chaos at the heart of American public health. And behind it wasn’t a wizard, or even a bureaucrat in a lab coat. It was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—HHS Secretary, anti-vaccine crusader turned federal kingpin of medicine, and proof that if you complain loudly enough about mercury in
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The VMAs Tried on Broadcast TV and Accidentally Staged a Pop Census
The MTV Video Music Awards are not an award show so much as an annual group therapy session where pop culture confronts its contradictions under a disco ball. For decades, it was a cable-era ritual: eyeliner, explosions, maybe a snake or two. But on September 7, 2025, the VMAs tried on broadcast television for the
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The Machines Won’t Kill Us—But the Shareholders Might
On September 6, 2025, Geoffrey Hinton—better known as the “godfather of AI” and now the reluctant Cassandra of our algorithmic era—delivered a blunt sermon to Fortune. AI, he argued, will not simply usher in a productivity boom or a Skynet apocalypse. No, its most reliable prophecy is more familiar: a massive rise in profits for
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The Million-Dollar Letter: Austin’s “A” and the Art of Public Branding
On September 4–5, 2025, Austin unveiled its first-ever unified city logo: a wavy blue-green “A” allegedly inspired by the hills, rivers, bridges, and violet-crown skies that define the Texas capital. It is, in the words of the city, a “strategic modernization.” In the words of the internet, it’s “Dallas-adjacent,” “corporate clipart,” and “the most expensive
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The Department of Defense Is Dead. Long Live the Department of War.
On September 5, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order that rebranded the Department of Defense as the “Department of War.” It was the kind of move that sounds like a late-night Onion headline but instead became federal reality, complete with Pete Hegseth introducing himself on Fox & Friends the next morning as