Latest posts
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Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto: The Art of Selling a Scandal Without Actually Selling the Goods
When the memoir is less a reckoning and more a press release written in the font of a nervous breakdown. The collapse of a reputation in Washington usually follows a predictable physics. There is the initial transgression, followed by the frantic denial, the inevitable leak of digital receipts, the forced resignation, and finally the exile
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Zuckerberg Poaches Apple’s Alan Dye to Teach the Metaverse How to Feel (Or At Least How to Fake It)
The biggest transfer in tech isn’t about hardware. It is about Mark Zuckerberg paying top dollar for the one thing he can’t code: vibes. The announcement video looked less like a corporate hiring update and more like the trailer for a film about a brooding architect who accidentally invents a soul. There was Mark Zuckerberg,
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Operation Catahoula Crunch: The Department of Homeland Security Brings Holiday Fear to the Big Easy
When the “Big Easy” becomes the “Big Empty,” you know the circus has come to town, but this time the parade floats are unmarked vans and the beads are handcuffs. The sun rose over New Orleans this morning to a parade nobody ordered. Usually, when vehicles crawl through these streets at a walking pace, there
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Cabinet Meeting of the Living Dead: A Seventy-Two Hour Autopsy
When the President invents eighteen trillion dollars and then falls asleep, you know it’s Tuesday. The federal government has always been, at its core, a theater of the absurd, but the last seventy-two hours have transcended mere farce and entered the realm of avant-garde performance art. We just witnessed a Cabinet meeting that functioned less
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The Canary Just Coughed Up Blood: Why a “Safe” Seat in Tennessee Is the GOP’s Chernobyl
When a twenty-two point lead shrinks to single digits, you don’t pop champagne; you check the foundation for termites. In the grandiose, self-mythologizing atlas of the Republican Party, Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District is supposed to be a fortress. It is drawn with the kind of jagged, protective geometry that ensures a generic conservative can sleepwalk
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Why the Ukraine “Peace Plan” Looks Like a Distressed Asset Sale
The latest diplomatic envoy to Moscow didn’t bring a treaty. He brought a term sheet. Last Tuesday, a U.S. delegation led by Steve Witkoff—a New York real estate developer whose diplomatic credentials consist largely of owning buildings that don’t fall down—landed in Moscow for a high-stakes sit-down with Vladimir Putin. He was joined by Jared
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The Great American Tariff Refund: A farce in Three Acts (And Counting)
When the “patriotic squeeze” becomes a bureaucratic stranglehold, and the only thing getting squeezed is the American wallet. The latest episode of the great tariff soap opera has arrived, and it is a masterpiece of economic slapstick. It features a plot twist so absurd that if you put it in a screenplay, a studio executive
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The Theater of the Double Tap: When “Kill Everybody” Becomes Policy
Marketing the abyss, one authorized tragedy at a time. The water in the Caribbean is specifically blue, the kind of blue that sells rum and resort packages, but on September 2 it was merely the backdrop for a much older, darker commerce. Somewhere in that expanse, a boat stopped moving, disabled by the kind of
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The Pardon of King Bibi: How to Turn a Criminal Trial into a Coronation
The architecture of a modern democracy is usually designed with a few load-bearing walls intended to prevent the whole structure from collapsing into a authoritarian heap. One of those walls is the novel concept that the person running the country is subject to the same penal code as the person sweeping the floor. But in
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The MRI of Dorian Gray: A Medical Mystery Tour in the Age of Trump
We have reached the stage of the American presidency that can best be described as “Medical Gaslighting as Performance Art.” It is a genre of political theater where the lead actor is clearly limping, the makeup is applied with a trowel to hide the pallor, and the press office insists that the audience is hallucinating