Latest posts

  • The Jobs Report That Wasn’t a Crash, Just a Stall With the Seatbelt Light On

    The Jobs Report That Wasn’t a Crash, Just a Stall With the Seatbelt Light On

    On September 5, 2025, the August jobs report landed like an anemic cough. U.S. nonfarm payrolls rose by a mere 22,000, a number so small you could tuck it into a single suburban warehouse and still have space for a pickleball court. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%, the highest in nearly four years.

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  • Trump vs. Harvard: When Federal Grants Become Campaign Props

    Trump vs. Harvard: When Federal Grants Become Campaign Props

    On September 3, 2025, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs did something rare in modern America: she called bullshit in a ruling and put the federal government back in its constitutional corner. Her decision ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze nearly $2.2 billion in research grants to Harvard, a freeze that was less about academic

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  • Knock Knock, Who’s There? America’s Gun Obsession Killing Kids Over Doorbells

    Knock Knock, Who’s There? America’s Gun Obsession Killing Kids Over Doorbells

    On late August 30 in east Houston, 11-year-old Jullian Guzman did what children have done for generations: ring a neighbor’s doorbell and run. It was mischief, not malice. A prank so old it predates TikTok “challenges,” one of those goofy rites of childhood designed to make kids laugh and adults groan. Instead, it got him

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  • The 33,295-Page Transparency Illusion: Congress Dumps Paper, Not Truth, on the Epstein Files

    The 33,295-Page Transparency Illusion: Congress Dumps Paper, Not Truth, on the Epstein Files

    Transparency, we are told, is democracy’s disinfectant. Shine light on the secrets, cleanse the rot, and let citizens bask in the glow of accountability. On September 2, 2025, Chairman James Comer’s GOP-led House Oversight Committee took that adage and set it on fire, dumping 33,295 pages of Jeffrey Epstein–related records into the public sphere. Thirty-three

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  • Rudy Giuliani and the Post-Motorcade Fragility of Heroes

    Rudy Giuliani and the Post-Motorcade Fragility of Heroes

    On August 30–31, 2025, Rudy Giuliani once again managed to headline America’s surrealist carnival, though this time not with a press conference at a landscaping company or a leaked deposition. Instead, at 81 years old, the former mayor of New York City found himself in a New Hampshire trauma center, nursing a fractured thoracic vertebra

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  • Prestige TV, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Firehose

    Prestige TV, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Firehose

    By 2025, prestige television no longer means anything. It’s like calling water wet, or calling Marvel “cinema” just to rile up Scorsese. Prestige used to be rarefied air—The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men. Now it’s practically background radiation, humming behind every streaming app. Prestige has metastasized. Every show arrives pre-packaged as “prestige,” the way cereal

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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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  • Florida vs. Chalk: The State’s Ongoing War on Rainbows

    Florida vs. Chalk: The State’s Ongoing War on Rainbows

    On August 29, 2025, the Florida Department of Transportation rolled out new signage in Orlando, stern warnings planted like weeds beside the Pulse nightclub memorial crosswalk. The rainbow-painted asphalt, created to honor the 49 people murdered in the 2016 massacre, now comes with its own government-issued disclaimers: “Defacing Roadway Prohibited” and “No Impeding Traffic.” The

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  • Katrina at 20: America Remembers, Forgets, and Repackages

    Katrina at 20: America Remembers, Forgets, and Repackages

    Twenty years later, America still doesn’t know how to talk about Hurricane Katrina. Not because there’s nothing left to say, but because the event itself was already so saturated in meaning that everything since feels like a remix. The anniversary observances in New Orleans this August were equal parts solemnity and stagecraft—brass-band second lines echoing

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  • Bruce Willis, Dementia, and America’s Fear of Aging Out of the Script

    Bruce Willis, Dementia, and America’s Fear of Aging Out of the Script

    Two years after the world learned of Bruce Willis’s frontotemporal dementia (FTD) diagnosis, his wife Emma Heming Willis sat across from Diane Sawyer in a primetime special titled “Emma & Bruce Willis: The Unexpected Journey.” The title was reverent, hushed, softened by violins. And there it was: Emma saying plainly, “His brain is failing him.”

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