Latest posts

  • Silence, Thumbs-Up, and the Gospel of Conditional Love

    Silence, Thumbs-Up, and the Gospel of Conditional Love

    My family has been estranged from me for most of my life. That word—estranged—sounds tidy, like it was a clean break. It wasn’t. It was a thousand little cuts, quiet exiles, and whispered reminders that I was never going to belong. I never really fit there. Maybe it was who I was. Maybe it was

    Read more

  • From Chicago to the Crescent City: Trump’s Traveling Law-and-Order Roadshow

    From Chicago to the Crescent City: Trump’s Traveling Law-and-Order Roadshow

    On September 3, 2025, President Trump announced that New Orleans—yes, the city of brass bands, beignets, and waterlines nobody can forget—was next on his federal “law-and-order” tour. Fresh off threatening Chicago with “National Guard domination” and still basking in the glow of his unprecedented takeover of Washington, D.C.’s police force, Trump pivoted south, declaring that

    Read more

  • From a Mountain of Solitude to a Lifetime of Yes: The Love Story I Didn’t See Coming

    From a Mountain of Solitude to a Lifetime of Yes: The Love Story I Didn’t See Coming

    One year ago today, I stood on a mountain in Hawaiʻi with the wind in my face and the Pacific unrolling itself in that impossible blue. It was the kind of view that makes your chest go quiet—the kind that feels like an answer without words. I had come there alone. I was traveling alone.

    Read more

  • Cash Me Outside the Constitution: How the Presidency Became Trump’s Most Profitable Side Hustle

    The polite version says markets respond to policy. The honest version says markets respond to who writes the policy—and whether he’s already holding the bag you’re about to fill. On September 1–2, 2025, the Trump family’s crypto venture World Liberty Financial flicked its neon “OPEN” sign, listing the $WLFI token across major exchanges and conjuring

    Read more

  • Knock Knock, Who’s There? America’s Gun Obsession Killing Kids Over Doorbells

    Knock Knock, Who’s There? America’s Gun Obsession Killing Kids Over Doorbells

    On late August 30 in east Houston, 11-year-old Jullian Guzman did what children have done for generations: ring a neighbor’s doorbell and run. It was mischief, not malice. A prank so old it predates TikTok “challenges,” one of those goofy rites of childhood designed to make kids laugh and adults groan. Instead, it got him

    Read more

  • The Hypersonic Parade: Beijing’s Memory War in 4K

    The Hypersonic Parade: Beijing’s Memory War in 4K

    On September 3, 2025, Beijing decided history was too important to leave to textbooks—or perhaps too fragile. The 80th anniversary of Japan’s WWII surrender was reimagined as a Victory Day military parade so vast it made even the most overproduced Marvel finale look subtle. The setting: Tiananmen Square. The guest list: Xi Jinping, flanked like

    Read more

  • Workers Over Billionaires: Labor Day as America’s Awkward Family Reunion

    Workers Over Billionaires: Labor Day as America’s Awkward Family Reunion

    On September 1, 2025—Labor Day— America finally remembered what the holiday was supposed to be about: not barbecue sales at Home Depot, not posting an “end of summer” bikini pic, but actual workers demanding rights. Thousands marched in hundreds to 1,000+ “Workers Over Billionaires” rallies nationwide. The very phrase carried its own absurd poetry. Workers.

    Read more

  • ICE Storm: Trump, Kristi Noem, and the Great Chicago Occupation

    ICE Storm: Trump, Kristi Noem, and the Great Chicago Occupation

    The Trump administration has a way of treating cities like wayward children—Chicago most of all. For decades, conservative politicians have invoked it as shorthand for chaos, crime, and everything wrong with “blue America.” To them, Chicago is less a place where millions of people live, work, and build lives, and more a stage for proving

    Read more

  • Trump’s Executive Order to Federalize Elections: Democracy’s Paper Cut

    Trump’s Executive Order to Federalize Elections: Democracy’s Paper Cut

    The great thing about American democracy is that it’s supposed to be decentralized. States set the rules, counties run the polls, and federal courts swoop in every so often to remind Florida it cannot legally stage a coup in its public libraries. But Donald Trump, never one for details like the Constitution, has now declared

    Read more

  • The Soundtrack of Survival: Thirteen Artists Who Speak To Me

    The Soundtrack of Survival: Thirteen Artists Who Speak To Me

    Growing up queer, biracial, abandoned, and too often invisible, I didn’t have a roadmap. What I had were songs—other people’s stories sung like confessions, shouted like rebellion, whispered like prayers. These artists didn’t just entertain me; they saved me. They gave me language for my own sadness, resilience for my own survival, and proof that

    Read more