Latest posts

  • Workers Over Billionaires: Labor Day as America’s Awkward Family Reunion

    Workers Over Billionaires: Labor Day as America’s Awkward Family Reunion

    On September 1, 2025—Labor Day— America finally remembered what the holiday was supposed to be about: not barbecue sales at Home Depot, not posting an “end of summer” bikini pic, but actual workers demanding rights. Thousands marched in hundreds to 1,000+ “Workers Over Billionaires” rallies nationwide. The very phrase carried its own absurd poetry. Workers.

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  • The Great Victory Parade: When History Becomes State-Sponsored Fanfiction

    The Great Victory Parade: When History Becomes State-Sponsored Fanfiction

    There are two things authoritarian governments love more than power: parades and revisionist history. So it was no surprise that on September 1–3, 2025, Beijing gave us both in one dazzling, over-produced spectacle—an 80th-anniversary Victory Day parade so self-congratulatory it made the Oscars look humble. Xi Jinping, standing tall on his reviewing platform, hosted none

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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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  • Cardi B v. The Courtroom: When Justice Goes Viral

    Cardi B v. The Courtroom: When Justice Goes Viral

    By the summer of 2025, America had already transformed nearly every human institution into content. Elections are Twitch streams. Presidential debates are meme generators. Even funerals trend if the right celebrity posts a photo. It was only a matter of time before the courtroom—long a solemn stage for justice—was converted into a live-action reality show.

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  • Big Brother, Small Man: The Rylie Jeffries Eviction Tour

    Big Brother, Small Man: The Rylie Jeffries Eviction Tour

    When Rylie Jeffries was evicted from Big Brother Season 27, he didn’t walk out of the house so much as stumble into a reality that had been waiting to eat him alive. On the inside, he was the cowboy-hat-wearing bull rider with a showmance and a storyline. On the outside, he was suddenly the subject

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  • The Soundtrack of Survival: Thirteen Artists Who Speak To Me

    The Soundtrack of Survival: Thirteen Artists Who Speak To Me

    Growing up queer, biracial, abandoned, and too often invisible, I didn’t have a roadmap. What I had were songs—other people’s stories sung like confessions, shouted like rebellion, whispered like prayers. These artists didn’t just entertain me; they saved me. They gave me language for my own sadness, resilience for my own survival, and proof that

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  • Nano Banana: How Google Turned Your Face Into Clip Art

    Nano Banana: How Google Turned Your Face Into Clip Art

    In August 2025, Google launched a product that proves Silicon Valley has officially run out of adult supervision. It’s called Nano Banana, a name so unserious it could double as a Mario Kart power-up, yet it refers to something deadly earnest: the Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model. The marketing copy insists it will “democratize sophisticated

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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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  • Hate Speech, Incorporated: How Social Media Turned Bigotry Into a Business Model

    Hate Speech, Incorporated: How Social Media Turned Bigotry Into a Business Model

    By 2025, it is no longer controversial to say that social media has become a sewer. What’s controversial is admitting that it was designed this way. The polite version is to call it “polarization,” “contentious discourse,” “a marketplace of ideas with some bad actors.” The honest version is that platforms like Facebook and X have

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  • SNL at 51: Reinventing Reinvention Until It’s Just a Costume Change

    SNL at 51: Reinventing Reinvention Until It’s Just a Costume Change

    Here’s the thing about Saturday Night Live: it is always dying and always about to be reborn. That’s the premise, the pitch, the myth. Every time someone leaves, the show is declared finished; every time someone arrives, it’s hailed as reborn. By now, SNL has spent 50 years on its deathbed and 50 years being

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