Latest posts
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Mirror Life: The Science Experiment Nobody Asked For
It takes a special kind of human optimism—or arrogance—to look at the planet, currently reeling from climate collapse, pandemics, and authoritarian cosplay, and say: You know what we need? A second form of life. Not new ecosystems, not sustainable energy, not even better TikTok filters. No. What we really need is “mirror life”—synthetic organisms whose…
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Mariah Carey Finally Gets Her Moon Person: The VMAs Discover What the Rest of Us Knew in 1990
Awards are a strange currency. They aren’t proof of greatness, only proof of consensus—or more often, proof that enough voters remembered to tick the right box after too many cocktails. But every so often, awards act as an accidental confession. That’s what’s happening on September 7, 2025, when the MTV Video Music Awards will finally…
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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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The Chains That Bind Us: A Love Letter to America’s Most Hated On Restaurants
It’s fashionable in 2025 to sneer at the chain restaurant. The discourse demands that we all pretend our palates are calibrated exclusively for chef-driven farm-to-table concepts where someone in a denim apron insists the kale was “foraged.” To admit you still eat at Olive Garden is like confessing you still burn CDs or own a…
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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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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
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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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
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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America’s Newest Crime: Fighting Fires Without Papers
On August 27, 2025, as the Bear Gulch Fire raged through Washington state—thousands of acres incinerated, towns choking on smoke, families evacuating with pets stuffed into backseats—the federal government identified the real emergency. Not the wildfire consuming homes. Not the climate that breeds a new inferno each week. No, the emergency was the possibility that…