Latest posts

  • When Science Meets Conspiracy: The CDC’s New Vaccine Variety Hour

    When Science Meets Conspiracy: The CDC’s New Vaccine Variety Hour

    If you ever wanted to watch the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reinvent itself as a cross between a daytime talk show and a flat-earth convention, congratulations: September 18, 2025 delivered. Picture it—a fluorescent-lit conference room in Atlanta, where a panel once devoted to quiet, data-heavy immunization schedules has been rebranded as the CDC’s

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  • Merit, Excellence, and a Half-Billion Dollar Shuffle: The Education Department’s New Hunger Games

    Merit, Excellence, and a Half-Billion Dollar Shuffle: The Education Department’s New Hunger Games

    The Department of Education has always been a strange beast—part accountant, part social engineer, part referee for our endless cultural blood sports. On September 15, it decided to moonlight as a pit boss, shuffling chips from one table to another, all while insisting this was about “merit and excellence.” Translation: somebody’s walking out of the

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  • Meta Wants to Live in Your Eyeballs Now

    Meta Wants to Live in Your Eyeballs Now

    Welcome to the Eye Economy Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at Meta Connect in Menlo Park and unveiled his latest plan to colonize the human face. Forget the metaverse graveyard; this year the pitch is three new AI glasses, because apparently the only thing keeping us from blissful techno-nirvana was strapping a HUD to our

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  • The Glitterball Hunger Games: Dancing With the Stars Season 34 Kicks Off by Breaking Its Own Math

    The Glitterball Hunger Games: Dancing With the Stars Season 34 Kicks Off by Breaking Its Own Math

    Opening Night, Chaos Optional “Dancing With the Stars” opened its 34th season like only an American reality juggernaut can: too many contestants, too much glitter, and not nearly enough functional technology. Fourteen couples poured onto the ballroom floor, the disco lights blinded half the audience, and the producers announced no eliminations this week—as if America

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  • Kash Patel’s Senate Hearing: When Oversight Becomes Cage Match

    Kash Patel’s Senate Hearing: When Oversight Becomes Cage Match

    The Director in the Hot Seat The FBI director is supposed to radiate calm authority. Buttoned-up, even boring. Kash Patel did not get the memo. At his Senate Judiciary oversight hearing, Patel delivered spectacle instead of stability—part wrestling promo, part courtroom drama, part Fox primetime audition. Patel denied politicizing the bureau, denied purging Trump critics,

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  • Trump’s Federal Reserve Circus: Cutting Rates and Ties With Reality

    Trump’s Federal Reserve Circus: Cutting Rates and Ties With Reality

    When Independence Means Whatever He Says There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and Donald Trump trying to fire someone he doesn’t like. Now he’s aiming at the Federal Reserve, the supposedly independent temple of monetary policy that has somehow become just another episode of his reality show. Markets expect a 25-basis-point cut at

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  • The Blessing and Curse of Yelp Health Scores

    The Blessing and Curse of Yelp Health Scores

    There are few things more American than combining capitalism, technology, and shame. Enter Yelp health scores: the best invention in modern dining, and also the absolute worst. It’s the digital equivalent of peeking behind the kitchen door and realizing that your artisanal avocado toast was prepared six inches away from a cockroach the size of

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  • From Widow’s Wail to War Cry: The Kirk Tragedy and America’s Talent for Turning Grief Into Ammunition

    From Widow’s Wail to War Cry: The Kirk Tragedy and America’s Talent for Turning Grief Into Ammunition

    The Grief Industry Goes Prime Time Charlie Kirk is dead, assassinated on September 10 in Utah. His young widow, Erika Frantzve Kirk, took to the microphone the next day, vowing that “the cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.” It should have been a moment of mourning. It should

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  • Kash Patel’s FBI: Now With 30% More Chaos and 0% More Competence

    Kash Patel’s FBI: Now With 30% More Chaos and 0% More Competence

    The Worst Week at the Bureau It only took seven days for Kash Patel to make J. Edgar Hoover look like an Excel spreadsheet. On September 11, Patel stood before cameras and wrongly announced that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was “in custody.” The killer was not, in fact, in custody. By the end of the news

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  • SNL Says Goodbye to Ego Nwodim and Hello to the Eternal Lorne Michaels Hunger Games

    SNL Says Goodbye to Ego Nwodim and Hello to the Eternal Lorne Michaels Hunger Games

    Seven Years, One Exit Post, and a Cast in Perpetual Revolt Ego Nwodim did what every modern celebrity does when it’s time to move on: she opened Instagram, wrote “unforgettable” in italics, and announced she was leaving Saturday Night Live after seven seasons. Seven years of wigs, cue cards, and sketches that hit about as

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