Latest posts

  • Blood, Synergy, and Severance: How Paramount Skydance Turned Layoffs Into a Business Model

    Blood, Synergy, and Severance: How Paramount Skydance Turned Layoffs Into a Business Model

    There’s a certain elegance to corporate cruelty when it’s delivered in PowerPoint. The font is soothing, the charts are blue, and the word “transformation” is used at least three times before anyone says “job cuts.” Paramount Skydance, the newly merged media hydra now helmed by David Ellison, has decided that the best way to impress

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  • Ceasefire on Tap: How Gaza’s “Pause” Turned Into a Sistema of Suspended Violence

    Ceasefire on Tap: How Gaza’s “Pause” Turned Into a Sistema of Suspended Violence

    There’s a baffling rhythm to modern war: the violence pauses, the cameras blink once, and the scoreboard resets—but nothing actually changes. On October 17, after Israeli officials claimed Hamas fighters killed two Israeli soldiers near Rafah and breached the U.S.–brokered truce, Israel launched what it called its heaviest wave of post-ceasefire airstrikes—targeting tunnels, weapons sites,

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  • Trump the Wannabe King and the Sludge: A Royal Flush from the Sky of Delusion

    Trump the Wannabe King and the Sludge: A Royal Flush from the Sky of Delusion

    Some men crave legacy. Others crave power. And then there are those who crave the cinematic experience of dumping digital sewage on protesters while “Danger Zone” blares in the background. Donald J. Trump, patron saint of grievance and green screen, has once again redefined leadership—not as the art of governance, but as a content genre.

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  • Soap Operas, Talk Show Thrones, and the Gospel According to Drew Barrymore

    Soap Operas, Talk Show Thrones, and the Gospel According to Drew Barrymore

    There’s a special kind of American optimism in handing out golden statues while the world burns. On October 17, the 52nd Daytime Emmy Awards beamed from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, where a theater full of people in sequins and spray tans cheered for the institutions that have taught us to cry at noon, gossip at

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  • Operation Campaign Reel: The War That Started Because Trump Got Bored on a Yacht

    Operation Campaign Reel: The War That Started Because Trump Got Bored on a Yacht

    The Caribbean has always had a cinematic allure: turquoise water, tropical breezes, and now, apparently, a naval blockade that could double as the trailer for a Michael Bay reboot of Bay of Pigs. Since early September, President Donald Trump has pushed the United States to the brink of open war with Venezuela, cloaking the move

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  • The Algorithm Will See You Now: How YouTube Became Television’s Final Boss

    The Algorithm Will See You Now: How YouTube Became Television’s Final Boss

    There’s a poetic cruelty in watching television networks—once smug arbiters of American attention—now refreshing their own YouTube analytics like anxious creators in ring lights. For decades, they owned the living room. Now, they’re tenants, and the landlord’s name is YouTube. The deep dive is no longer theoretical: YouTube has eaten TV’s lunch, commandeered its dinner

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  • Artillery Over the 405: America’s Longest Traffic Jam Turns Into a Military Parade

    Artillery Over the 405: America’s Longest Traffic Jam Turns Into a Military Parade

    There’s something quintessentially American about the sight of artillery fire streaking across a highway full of Teslas. It’s not just the juxtaposition of power and paralysis, of steel ambition and rubberized helplessness—it’s that we managed to turn an interstate into a battlefield metaphor without even noticing. On October 18, 2025, California drivers got front-row seats

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  • No Kings Day: America Remembers We Do Not Bow To Authoritarian Rule

    No Kings Day: America Remembers We Do Not Bow To Authoritarian Rule

    I woke to drums on my phone, not the kind that say war, the kind that say get dressed. Somewhere a sousaphone blared and a snare line snapped, and every clip in my feed looked like a country remembering how to count. A multi-city rhythm rose up from breakfast tables and bus stops and union

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  • Trump Justice Department’s Loyalty Program: Prosecuting Critics for Points

    Trump Justice Department’s Loyalty Program: Prosecuting Critics for Points

    There’s something almost admirable about the efficiency of it all. America’s justice system, once the weary guardian of impartial law, now runs like a Vegas rewards app for political vendettas. Axios’ reporting on the “enemies to defendants” scoreboard inside Trump’s Justice Department reads like dystopian fan fiction written by a disbarred screenwriter who found QAnon

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  • The Moral Collapse of MAGA: How Hitler Memes Became Conservative Icebreakers

    The Moral Collapse of MAGA: How Hitler Memes Became Conservative Icebreakers

    There’s a certain nausea in watching a nation re-enact its own moral autopsy and call it performance art. You scroll through Politico’s leak of the “Young Republicans” group chat, where grown men with government titles type “I love Hitler” like it’s an inside joke at a frat mixer, and then you flip to The Atlantic’s

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