Latest posts

  • Tribal Theater in Fiji: Survivor 49’s Grand Illusion of Fairness

    Tribal Theater in Fiji: Survivor 49’s Grand Illusion of Fairness

    The two-hour premiere of Survivor’s latest season dropped us straight into the tropics: Fiji. Sand, sweat, whispered alignments, and the familiar tension that says, “You’re not safe.” But what struck me most was not the immunity challenges or the plundered rice rations — it was the spectacle of alliances forming and betrayal already baked in.

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  • The $100 Billion GPU Marriage: Nvidia and OpenAI’s Compute Cathedral

    The $100 Billion GPU Marriage: Nvidia and OpenAI’s Compute Cathedral

    There’s something uniquely American about announcing a hundred-billion-dollar partnership with the casual bravado of a press release that might as well have read: “We’re building God’s calculator, and we’d like you to know the first down payment clears next week.” That’s what Nvidia and OpenAI just did. The “letter of intent”—a corporate prenup written in

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  • When Politicians Pretend They’re Revolutionaries: The Palestine Recognition Spectacle

    When Politicians Pretend They’re Revolutionaries: The Palestine Recognition Spectacle

    They said “symbolic.” They said “diplomatic.” They said “a step toward peace.” But when the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia stood up in unison and said, “Yes, Palestine is a state,” it looked less like diplomacy and more like a performance. One of those moral theater pieces meant to reassure the

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  • The Bots Are Coming From Inside the House

    The Bots Are Coming From Inside the House

    We were warned about the robots. We were told they’d take our jobs, our cars, maybe our dating lives if someone perfected the silicone. What we weren’t prepared for was that they’d take our democracy. And not even in a cool, cinematic Skynet way—no, in the most humiliating way possible: by faking retweets and filling

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  • The Strongman Starter Pack: From Manila to Mar-a-Lago

    The Strongman Starter Pack: From Manila to Mar-a-Lago

    Rodrigo Duterte’s rise in the Philippines wasn’t an accident—it was a case study in how democracies willingly hand the keys to strongmen when fear, spectacle, and fatigue collide. Donald Trump is running the same script in America: cult of personality, demonization of enemies, attacks on the press, selective empathy, institutional erosion, and an endless blurring…

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  • Who Owns Your News (and Why It Keeps Tilting Right)

    Who Owns Your News (and Why It Keeps Tilting Right)

    Picture it: you turn on your “local” TV station, expecting weather updates, high school football scores, maybe a feel-good segment about a cat reunited with its owner. Instead, you’re greeted with a syndicated commentary package, an ominous chyron about “chaos in the classroom,” and a panel of people who look suspiciously like the ones you

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  • Merit, Excellence, and a Half-Billion Dollar Shuffle: The Education Department’s New Hunger Games

    Merit, Excellence, and a Half-Billion Dollar Shuffle: The Education Department’s New Hunger Games

    The Department of Education has always been a strange beast—part accountant, part social engineer, part referee for our endless cultural blood sports. On September 15, it decided to moonlight as a pit boss, shuffling chips from one table to another, all while insisting this was about “merit and excellence.” Translation: somebody’s walking out of the

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  • The Party of Free Speech Wants a Muzzle—As Long as It’s for You

    The Party of Free Speech Wants a Muzzle—As Long as It’s for You

    Ah, yes. The brave defenders of free speech. The warriors against cancel culture. The self-styled martyrs of the “say what you want, snowflake” movement. They’ve spent years assuring us that America needs to be a safe space—for their offensive jokes, for their racist uncle’s Facebook rants, for their senator’s homophobic tweets typed at 3 a.m.

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  • Groypers, Grievances, and the Great MAGA Family Reunion

    Groypers, Grievances, and the Great MAGA Family Reunion

    Every political movement develops factions. The Bolsheviks had Mensheviks, the Catholics had Protestants, the Beatles had Yoko. But no coalition fractures quite like the MAGAverse, which has managed to stuff twelve different ideological cliques into one red hat—and none of them particularly like each other. If the Republican Party used to be a country club,

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  • The Eternal Gravity of Shit: Why Hierarchy Is Humanity’s Favorite Hobby

    The Eternal Gravity of Shit: Why Hierarchy Is Humanity’s Favorite Hobby

    We like to tell ourselves that human beings are noble, empathetic creatures. We write novels about kindness, sing songs about love, build religions around compassion. But spend thirty seconds in line at Starbucks or thirty minutes Doordashing lukewarm Chipotle to someone in yoga pants, and the truth hits you in the face like a soggy

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