Latest posts

  • SNL at 50: The Joke That Outlived the Punchline

    SNL at 50: The Joke That Outlived the Punchline

    When Saturday Night Live premiered in 1975, the country had just watched Nixon resign, Vietnam collapse, and disco rise. The show was a weekly release valve, part sketch comedy, part cultural exorcism. It wasn’t supposed to last—it was literally called “Saturday Night” because NBC needed to plug a hole in the schedule. Five decades later,

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  • 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

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  • Rudy Giuliani and the Post-Motorcade Fragility of Heroes

    Rudy Giuliani and the Post-Motorcade Fragility of Heroes

    On August 30–31, 2025, Rudy Giuliani once again managed to headline America’s surrealist carnival, though this time not with a press conference at a landscaping company or a leaked deposition. Instead, at 81 years old, the former mayor of New York City found himself in a New Hampshire trauma center, nursing a fractured thoracic vertebra

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  • 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

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  • Prestige TV, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Firehose

    Prestige TV, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Firehose

    By 2025, prestige television no longer means anything. It’s like calling water wet, or calling Marvel “cinema” just to rile up Scorsese. Prestige used to be rarefied air—The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men. Now it’s practically background radiation, humming behind every streaming app. Prestige has metastasized. Every show arrives pre-packaged as “prestige,” the way cereal

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  • The Ten Commandments of Horror TV: A Bloody, Bingeable Bible

    The Ten Commandments of Horror TV: A Bloody, Bingeable Bible

    The history of horror television is a cemetery of failed pilots and half-rotted seasons, a graveyard where shows are buried alive by executives only to claw their way out later as streaming “discoveries.” For every cult resurrection, there are dozens of forgotten corpses—remember Harper’s Island? Exactly. Yet from this restless afterlife, ten shows have not

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  • Mass Shootings, Manufactured Scapegoats, and America’s Favorite Ritual

    Mass Shootings, Manufactured Scapegoats, and America’s Favorite Ritual

    On August 27, 2025, the stained-glass windows of Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis shattered under the hail of gunfire from a 23-year-old named Robin Westman. By the time the shooting ended, two children—aged 8 and 10—were dead, and seventeen others, mostly kids and elderly parishioners, were injured. Westman barricaded exits, terrorized a congregation mid-Mass, and

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  • Florida vs. Chalk: The State’s Ongoing War on Rainbows

    Florida vs. Chalk: The State’s Ongoing War on Rainbows

    On August 29, 2025, the Florida Department of Transportation rolled out new signage in Orlando, stern warnings planted like weeds beside the Pulse nightclub memorial crosswalk. The rainbow-painted asphalt, created to honor the 49 people murdered in the 2016 massacre, now comes with its own government-issued disclaimers: “Defacing Roadway Prohibited” and “No Impeding Traffic.” The

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  • Tariffs, Treason, and the Long Con of Executive Power

    Tariffs, Treason, and the Long Con of Executive Power

    On August 29, 2025, the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 7–4 ruling, finally tapped the brakes on what has essentially been a seven-year joyride through the Constitution conducted by Donald J. Trump in the name of “economic nationalism.” The court declared that most of his so-called “reciprocal” and “trafficking” tariffs exceeded his

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  • 107 Days Without Protection: Kamala Harris and the Trump Doctrine of Spite

    107 Days Without Protection: Kamala Harris and the Trump Doctrine of Spite

    On August 29, 2025, President Donald J. Trump did something both petty and perilous, which, to be fair, is his governing style. He revoked the Secret Service protection of former Vice President Kamala Harris—effective September 1—just as she prepares to launch her 107 Days book tour. The timing is not coincidence. It is choreography. Harris

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