Latest posts
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Fear and Long Guns on Michigan Avenue
Chicago has always thrived on theater. Jazz clubs, improv stages, opera houses, the permanent farce of city politics—this is a town that knows spectacle. But nothing quite prepared the Magnificent Mile for the latest federal roadshow: dozens of Border Patrol agents in tactical helmets, body armor, and long guns parading up Michigan Avenue like they’d
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From Hypertext Dreams to Data Nightmares: Tim Berners-Lee’s Reminder That We Broke His Toy
The man who sketched the web on paper napkins at CERN now has to watch it shuffle around in stained sweatpants, working shifts for monopolies that surveil your cousin’s cat pictures and weaponize your grandmother’s political rants. Tim Berners-Lee, knighted not just for giving us hyperlinks but for unleashing the entire World Wide Web on
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Dominion and Giuliani’s $1.3 Billion Secret Settlement: When Lies Pay and Democracy Gets the Bill
There’s a peculiar magic trick the powerful love: make a noise so loud it draws attention, then vanish the outcome so no one can reverse-engineer the fraud. Yesterday, a mammoth defamation case—one purporting to demand $1.3 billion from a man who spent years amplifying election falsehoods—ended not in a verdict or a sensation, but in
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Comey Indictment: The Court Is Now in Session and the Defendant Is Judicial Independence
Some weeks in Washington feel like episodes of prestige television: you think you’ve reached the cliffhanger, only to discover the writers had two more shocking twists lined up for the same hour. This was one of those weeks. First, the Justice Department indicted former FBI Director James Comey, accusing him of lying to Congress and
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Abilene LGBT Threat: When “Lock and Load” Becomes the Pride Parade Invitation
They say a threat is just a first draft of violence. Sometimes scribbled on social media, sometimes delivered with clicks and tags—but the message is the same: you are watched, you are vulnerable. In Abilene, Texas, one man apparently decided to turn that sentence into performance art, threatening LGBTQ+ parade participants only days before the
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Trump Declares War on Portland (Again): Because Nothing Says Public Safety Like Martial Law for Coffee Shops
The president has dusted off his 2020 scrapbook and decided Portland, Oregon, looks best under military occupation. Once more, the word “domestic terrorist” has been stretched to cover anyone carrying a megaphone near an ICE building. Once more, federal power has been dressed up as patriotism and pointed at a blue city that never asked
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World at War: While Trump Tweets, Armageddon Does Its Thing
They say history doesn’t repeat—but lately, it’s doing sequels. The globe is reawakening to a chaos so thick it’s becoming the new normal: Russia muscling NATO’s borders, fighters popping into sovereign airspaces, Beijing and Moscow cozied up in strategic waltz over Taiwan, Iran’s missile tattooing the skies, and Israel and Gaza locked in their endless
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When the Supreme Court Pressed Snooze on $5 Billion: Democracy Aid Goes on Hiatus
On September 26, 2025, in a terse one-sentence emergency order, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to keep nearly $5 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign aid frozen—overturning a lower-court injunction and giving institutional blessing to what amounts to a year-end “pocket rescission” strategy. The effect: delay the money’s disbursement until it expires on
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Disney’s Kimmel Imbroglio: Shareholders Su for Truth While Politics Invade the Boardroom
There are many ways for an entertainment empire to humiliate itself. Some settle for the small stuff: a blockbuster flop, a malfunctioning roller coaster, a streaming password crackdown that feels like a mugging. But every so often, a corporation aims higher—producing an operatic self-own so baroque it deserves its own tragic score. Thus we arrive
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Government Shutdown or Trump’s Hostage Crisis? Why a Blank Check Is Signing Off on Fascism
Shutdowns are the cheapest trick in Washington’s self-destructive playbook. When the lights dim and federal workers line up for IOUs instead of paychecks, when parks shutter and inspectors vanish, it’s not governance—it’s hostage theater. And here we are again, staring down another government shutdown, a ritual that has grown so common it has its own