Latest posts
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America’s New Age of Political Violence: Or, How to Lose Friends and Radicalize People
The Washington Post says we’ve entered “a new age of political violence.” How quaint of them to suggest there was ever an old age that ended. The difference, perhaps, is that now we livestream it, brand it with hashtags, and serve it to audiences like a Netflix series that never gets canceled. The latest episode
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Ceasefire, Interrupted: Israel Bombs the Meeting About Peace
There’s an old joke about Middle East negotiations: the closer the diplomats get to an agreement, the louder the bombs outside the hotel. On September 9, that punchline wrote itself when Israel decided the most efficient way to respond to Hamas’s leadership meeting in Doha—called to weigh a U.S.-backed ceasefire proposal—was to obliterate the venue
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When Drones Mistake Neighbors’ Airspace for Buffer Zone: NATO’s Midnight Wake-Up Call
The Uninvited Nocturnal Ball Somewhere between the cosmic nudge of late evening and the brittle patience of dawn, something peculiar happened above Poland. Imagine a nocturne for air defense: an unexpected ballet of over 415 drones and more than 40 missiles gliding where they were neither invited nor expected. Just when Warsaw was narrowing its
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Twenty-Four Years Later: What We Should Have Learned from 9/11 (But Absolutely Didn’t)
The anniversary of September 11 rolls around every year like a fire alarm that no one bothers to silence anymore. We stop, we remember, we replay the grainy footage in our minds, and then—like a nation addicted to selective amnesia—we forget the one lesson we were supposed to have learned: unity. Not unity as in
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Texas TikToks Its Way to a Senate Race: James Talarico vs. the Methuselah Caucus
There are few constants in Texas politics: barbecue debates, heatstroke, and Democrats losing statewide races. The streak is so reliable it might as well be sponsored by Buc-ee’s. Every two years, the party tries again, strapping on boots of optimism only to be dragged face-first across a desert of gerrymanders, megachurches, and oil money. But
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The Gospel of Countdown and Shrug: Mel Robbins’s DIY Serenity Prayer
Self-help is America’s unofficial national pastime. Baseball, apple pie, and the endless hunt for a three-word mantra to finally make us tolerable to ourselves. Into this crowded bazaar of affirmations and hacks waltzed Mel Robbins, who has done the impossible: sold millions of copies of not one but two rules for living that could fit
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Article II and a Boatload of Problems: How to Commit Extrajudicial Murder Without Even Calling It War
America has always had a complicated relationship with international law. We like to write it, we like to invoke it, and—when convenient—we like to fold it into a paper airplane and see how far it flies before bursting into flames over someone else’s territorial waters. On September 3, 2025, U.S. forces killed 11 people in
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Welcome to the Two-Legged Economy: Health Care, Hotels, and Everyone Else on Crutches
America’s economy has always been a circus, but lately it feels like the trapeze act is down to two ropes. On September 7, 2025, after the latest jobs report limped across the stage, the spotlight revealed a recovery balanced precariously on just two legs: health care and hospitality. Everything else—manufacturing, construction, retail, logistics, white-collar offices—is
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The Man Who Shot Down Shots: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Public Health Hunger Games
The curtain was finally pulled back on the chaos at the heart of American public health. And behind it wasn’t a wizard, or even a bureaucrat in a lab coat. It was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—HHS Secretary, anti-vaccine crusader turned federal kingpin of medicine, and proof that if you complain loudly enough about mercury in
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The VMAs Tried on Broadcast TV and Accidentally Staged a Pop Census
The MTV Video Music Awards are not an award show so much as an annual group therapy session where pop culture confronts its contradictions under a disco ball. For decades, it was a cable-era ritual: eyeliner, explosions, maybe a snake or two. But on September 7, 2025, the VMAs tried on broadcast television for the