Latest posts

  • 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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  • Tea With a Tyrant: Windsor’s Strange Embrace of Trump

    Tea With a Tyrant: Windsor’s Strange Embrace of Trump

    There’s a certain absurdity in watching Windsor Castle—the jewel of British tradition, the fortress of continuity, the ceremonial stage for centuries of kings and queens—open its gates to Donald J. Trump. The guards stand crisp in scarlet, the horses gleam, the trumpets blare, and the red carpet stretches out like a nation’s sigh of approval.

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  • The Return of Red Scares: Trump and Vance Turn Grief Into Witch Hunt

    The Return of Red Scares: Trump and Vance Turn Grief Into Witch Hunt

    From Mourning to McCarthyism The assassination of Charlie Kirk should have been a tragedy contained by grief, accountability, and legal process. Instead, it became fuel. Within days, the White House pivoted from mourning to manufacturing a new Red Scare. President Donald Trump, flanked by Vice President JD Vance and professional apocalypse salesman Stephen Miller, decided

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  • The Sundance Kid Rides Off: Robert Redford and the Indie Dream We Pretend Is Still Alive

    The Sundance Kid Rides Off: Robert Redford and the Indie Dream We Pretend Is Still Alive

    The Perfect Death for a Perfect Myth Robert Redford died in his sleep at 89. Publicist Cindi Berger said it happened at his home at Sundance, tucked in the Utah mountains near Provo Canyon. No cause given, no final scandal, no messy revelation about a burner phone and a crypto scam. Just a clean exit,

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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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  • The Death of Charlie Kirk and the Politics of Selective Grief

    The Death of Charlie Kirk and the Politics of Selective Grief

    Violence Is Not the Answer Let’s start with the obvious: I condemn political violence. All of it. Every bullet, every act dressed up as “justice,” every attempt to turn disagreement into bloodshed. No cause, no grievance, no ideology makes murder acceptable. And yet here we are, talking about another assassination carried out on a public

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  • The Party of Free Speech Wants a Muzzle—As Long as It’s for You

    The Party of Free Speech Wants a Muzzle—As Long as It’s for You

    Ah, yes. The brave defenders of free speech. The warriors against cancel culture. The self-styled martyrs of the “say what you want, snowflake” movement. They’ve spent years assuring us that America needs to be a safe space—for their offensive jokes, for their racist uncle’s Facebook rants, for their senator’s homophobic tweets typed at 3 a.m.

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  • Trump’s War on the Calendar: Why Four Quarters Are Just Too Many for Capitalism to Handle

    Trump’s War on the Calendar: Why Four Quarters Are Just Too Many for Capitalism to Handle

    Once again Donald J. Trump has logged on to Truth Social, thumb trembling with the divine power of an unpaid intern, to announce that America no longer needs quarterly earnings reports. Semiannual will do just fine, thank you. If this feels familiar, that’s because it is. Trump tried the same thing in 2018, after a

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  • Hispanic Heritage Month Cancelled Due to Immigration Enforcement: Culture Meets Checkpoint

    Hispanic Heritage Month Cancelled Due to Immigration Enforcement: Culture Meets Checkpoint

    The Month That Wasn’t September 15 used to mark the start of Hispanic Heritage Month—a time for parades, mariachi, food festivals, and school assemblies pretending arroz con pollo is “cultural immersion.” This year, it marked something else entirely: postponements and cancellations. Chicago’s El Grito festival? Cancelled. Sacramento’s celebrations? Postponed. Charlotte’s events? Scrapped. CBS, AP, and

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