Latest posts
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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
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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
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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.
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Meghan Trainor vs. the Judgmental Treadmill
There are few things more American than policing a woman’s body. Apple pie, baseball, and the relentless demand that every female celebrity perform an impossible balancing act for a crowd of spectators who will boo no matter where she lands. In 2025, Meghan Trainor has become the latest sacrificial lamb to the treadmill that isn’t
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Mass Shootings, Manufactured Scapegoats, and America’s Favorite Ritual
On August 27, 2025, the stained-glass windows of Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis shattered under the hail of gunfire from a 23-year-old named Robin Westman. By the time the shooting ended, two children—aged 8 and 10—were dead, and seventeen others, mostly kids and elderly parishioners, were injured. Westman barricaded exits, terrorized a congregation mid-Mass, and
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Hate Speech, Incorporated: How Social Media Turned Bigotry Into a Business Model
By 2025, it is no longer controversial to say that social media has become a sewer. What’s controversial is admitting that it was designed this way. The polite version is to call it “polarization,” “contentious discourse,” “a marketplace of ideas with some bad actors.” The honest version is that platforms like Facebook and X have
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SNL at 51: Reinventing Reinvention Until It’s Just a Costume Change
Here’s the thing about Saturday Night Live: it is always dying and always about to be reborn. That’s the premise, the pitch, the myth. Every time someone leaves, the show is declared finished; every time someone arrives, it’s hailed as reborn. By now, SNL has spent 50 years on its deathbed and 50 years being
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Katrina at 20: America Remembers, Forgets, and Repackages
Twenty years later, America still doesn’t know how to talk about Hurricane Katrina. Not because there’s nothing left to say, but because the event itself was already so saturated in meaning that everything since feels like a remix. The anniversary observances in New Orleans this August were equal parts solemnity and stagecraft—brass-band second lines echoing
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MTV VMAs 2025: Icons Clash with New Blood in a Spectacle of Reinvention and Awards Theater
Sunday, September 7, 2025—mark your calendars with the precision of a metronome set to “ARE YOU READY?” mode—UBS Arena in New York will host the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards, a night that treads the delicate line between nostalgia and brand-new glitter. The evening promises enough star power to cause gravitational anomalies—and I, emotional traces
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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.”