Latest posts
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The Rust Belt “Renaissance” Is Just a Going-Out-of-Business Sale in Disguise

Eight months ago, we were promised a manufacturing miracle. We were told, with the kind of decibel level usually reserved for monster truck rallies, that aggressive import taxes would be the adrenaline shot that brought American factories “roaring back” to life. The logic was simple, loud, and beautifully wrong: slap a tariff on everything that
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Trump Wants His 1998 Back: Why ‘Rush Hour 4’ Is Now a Matter of National Security

We often tell ourselves that power is about nuclear codes, interest rates, and the invisible hand that moves aircraft carriers across the chessboard of the Pacific. But in the twilight of the American empire, power is apparently the ability to force a major Hollywood studio to greenlight a buddy cop sequel that nobody asked for
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Legally Bland: How the Trump DOJ Tried to Cast Lindsey Halligan as a Prosecutor and Forgot to Read the Script

We have spent the last two decades treating the movie Legally Blonde as a lighthearted rom-com, but in the year 2025, it has revealed itself to be a prophetic warning about the dangers of underestimating a woman with a plan. The central thesis of that film, beneath the pink sequins and the scented résumé, was
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The Heritage Foundation: The Think Tank That Stopped Thinking to Survive

The Heritage Foundation was once the cerebral cortex of the American Right. For decades, it was the place where guys in bow ties wrote 900-page white papers on enterprise zones and missile defense systems, confident that Ronald Reagan would read the executive summary and change the world. It was a factory for “ideas”—dry, often heartless,
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The Ring Is in the Dishwasher, but the Marriage Is in the Sewer: Why Usha Vance Might Finally Be Tired of the MAGA Casting Call

There is a specific genre of political theater that plays out in the unspoken spaces of a marriage, a silent drama usually reserved for the frantic final act of a melodramatic screenplay. But recently, that drama has spilled out onto the campaign trail and into the glossy pages of People magazine, centering on the ring
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No Good Deed and the Critics: Why ‘Wicked’ Is the Tragedy We Deserve

The lights went down in the theater, and for a brief moment, the collective anxiety of the world—the elections, the economy, the general sense that we are living in the final season of a poorly written reality show—suspended itself in the dark. I sat there with Matthew, my fiance and designated emotional anchor, and our



