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  • Soap Operas, Talk Show Thrones, and the Gospel According to Drew Barrymore

    Soap Operas, Talk Show Thrones, and the Gospel According to Drew Barrymore

    There’s a special kind of American optimism in handing out golden statues while the world burns. On October 17, the 52nd Daytime Emmy Awards beamed from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, where a theater full of people in sequins and spray tans cheered for the institutions that have taught us to cry at noon, gossip at

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  • No Kings Day: America Remembers We Do Not Bow To Authoritarian Rule

    No Kings Day: America Remembers We Do Not Bow To Authoritarian Rule

    I woke to drums on my phone, not the kind that say war, the kind that say get dressed. Somewhere a sousaphone blared and a snare line snapped, and every clip in my feed looked like a country remembering how to count. A multi-city rhythm rose up from breakfast tables and bus stops and union

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  • Is America Replaying 1930s Germany? Trump, Fascism, and the Creep We Pretend Not to See

    Is America Replaying 1930s Germany? Trump, Fascism, and the Creep We Pretend Not to See

    I remember sitting in history class as a kid and staring at the photos they always brought out for the chapter on Germany, the ones with the flags and the straight lines and the faces that were either rapturous or empty, and thinking how did they let this happen. I was convinced there must have

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  • Prince Andrew’s Title Tantrum: When the Crown Smells Smoke From the Epstein Files

    Prince Andrew’s Title Tantrum: When the Crown Smells Smoke From the Epstein Files

    There’s something about the smell of royal scandal that hits differently—less like smoke and more like an expensive candle trying to cover up the scent of a body decomposing under the palace floorboards. The official word from Buckingham Palace this week is that Prince Andrew, formerly the Duke of York, is voluntarily “stepping back” from

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  • Top Secret, Do Not Forward: The Bolton Doctrine of National Security Scrapbooking

    Top Secret, Do Not Forward: The Bolton Doctrine of National Security Scrapbooking

    The federal government has finally located the one man in Washington who can make Donald Trump’s document crimes look like a Marie Kondo project. His name, once again, is John R. Bolton—a man whose mustache has seen more classified briefings than most senators. According to a newly unsealed federal indictment in Maryland, Bolton, the hawkish

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  • Trump’s Failing Ceasefire That’s Cosplaying As A Peace Plan

    Trump’s Failing Ceasefire That’s Cosplaying As A Peace Plan

    At the midpoint between “mission accomplished” and “please hold,” the Gaza ceasefire now lives in the liminal space where optimism is just fatigue wearing better clothes. Cameras caught the handshakes, the solemn statements, the flags arranged like theater props—but now the applause has faded, and the work has begun to creak under its own paperwork.

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  • When Democrats Are “Terrorists, Criminals & Aliens”: The White House’s Latest Dehumanization Exercise In Rhetoric

    When Democrats Are “Terrorists, Criminals & Aliens”: The White House’s Latest Dehumanization Exercise In Rhetoric

    In the new normal of American politics, dehumanization is no longer a slip—it’s a strategy. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt recently told Fox News, and amplified across social platforms, that the Democratic Party’s “main constituency” is made up of “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” The line exploded across headlines and digital chaos,

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  • Trump: The Mirror, The March, and the Misdirection

    Trump: The Mirror, The March, and the Misdirection

    A field guide to déjà vu in a country pretending it has never read this chapter He tells a story about a wounded nation and casts himself as the cure, and the lights are bright because glare is a better costume than truth and the soundtrack thumps because rhythm is easier to remember than evidence.

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  • The Hatch Act: The Law That Everyone Violates and No One Enforces

    The Hatch Act: The Law That Everyone Violates and No One Enforces

    Somewhere in the dusty filing cabinets of American democracy, beneath the “Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Law” mattress tags and the ghost of civics classes past, lies the Hatch Act. Passed in 1939, it was meant to be the firewall between government work and campaign work. The promise was simple: no mixing taxpayer business

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