Latest posts
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The Parasocial Comfort Blanket: Why SmartLess Owns My Brain
It’s not easy to admit that the most stable relationship in my life right now involves three middle-aged white men who don’t know I exist. And yet, here I am, another hopelessly devoted listener of SmartLess, the podcast where Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes invite celebrity guests, mispronounce each other’s words, interrupt constantly,
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When the Crime Rate Falls, Call in the Troops
Washington, D.C. is enjoying its lowest violent crime levels in over thirty years. The data says so: a 35% drop in 2024, another 26% decline so far in 2025. Homicide is down. Robbery is down. Carjackings are down. The FBI and DOJ dashboards are practically waving at us with little “congratulations, you survived the nineties”
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Pete Buttigieg and the Litmus Test That Ate 2028
This was supposed to be Buttigieg’s strength: grace under pressure, a knack for threading impossible needles. Instead, he’s left with the political equivalent of a half-buttoned shirt in a job interview—too casual for the formal crowd, too formal for the casual one. The Gaza litmus test has no safe answers. But what Pete Buttigieg discovered…
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The Sandwich That Shook the Republic
In a different era, this would’ve been a throwaway story — a quirky “and finally…” item at the end of the evening news. But in 2025, with an administration hungry for proof of chaos, it’s an entrée. A wrapped sandwich has been elevated to the level of a threat to national order. The bread is…
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When Big Brother Hires a Hall Monitor: FCC’s ‘Bias Monitor’ and the Death of Media Independence
The beauty—and the danger—of the First Amendment is that it protects the press even when the press is bad at its job. Even when it’s biased, sloppy, arrogant, or out of touch. Especially then. Because the alternative is a press that is only allowed to be “good” according to the standards of the people in…
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When Your AI Won’t Pledge Allegiance
Someday, there might be a museum exhibit about this: The Chatbot That Knew Too Much. And if the MAGA museum curators get their hands on it, the placard will read: “An early example of AI misinformation, quickly corrected by patriotic engineers.” The rest of us will know it for what it was: the only thing…
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Redefining Gender, One Eraser at a Time
The danger isn’t just this one policy. It’s the normalization of using administrative power to erase marginalized identities from legal recognition. Once that’s accepted, it can be applied anywhere — and to anyone. Today it’s trans students. Tomorrow it could be any group that makes those in power uncomfortable. The only qualification for being targeted…
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MAGA-fying the Museum: How to Curate History Without the History
Maybe one day, years from now, there will be an exhibit about this moment. It will feature press releases about “aggressive reviews,” news clippings about political interference, and maybe — if the curators are feeling bold — a case labeled “Democracy, in Decline.” Visitors will walk past it on their way to the dinosaur hall,…
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Jim Acosta Interviews AI-Generated Shooting Victim, and Journalism Finally Eats Its Own Soul
here’s a point at which “innovative” stops meaning forward-thinking and starts meaning we ran out of shame. We are well past that point. Journalism’s job is to speak to the living, hold the powerful accountable, and honor the dead with accuracy and dignity. This? This is puppeteering the dead for clicks, calling it progress, and…
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Trump Taps Heritage Foundation Economist to Run Bureau of Labor Statistics — Because What Is Math Without Ideology?
It’s easy to shrug off an appointment like this as inside-baseball politics. But the numbers the BLS produces influence interest rates, Social Security cost-of-living adjustments, wage negotiations, and how every American feels about the state of the economy. Put the wrong storyteller in charge of those numbers, and you can warp not just policy, but…