Latest posts
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Being Good at Goodbye

The hardest skill I ever learned was not empathy or leadership or writing a book. It was goodbye. Goodbye is the only thing I’ve been allowed to master. It’s the only certificate hanging on the wall. Some people collect diplomas; I collect exits. I don’t mean the cinematic goodbye—the one where a person drives off
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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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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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The Iowa Superintendent and the Deportation Squad

There’s a certain theater to American immigration enforcement. You can promise the nation you’ll go after gangs, cartels, hardened criminals, people who smuggle fentanyl by the ton. And then, one ordinary morning, you stage your victory lap by cuffing a school superintendent in Des Moines. Yes, a man who manages budgets, buses, and bell schedules
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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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Tariff Tsunami: Trump’s Import Spike Crushes Farms, Homes & Health

It is not hyperbole to say that on one cheerful afternoon in late September, President Trump rolled out a tariff package that feels like a slow-motion economic apocalypse. Effective October 1, the administration slapped a 100 percent tariff on pharmaceutical drugs, 50 percent on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities, 30 percent on upholstered furniture, and


