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Liberal subreddits such as r/clevercomebacks and the collapse of the opposition

Imagine a loyal MAGA foot soldier like Hawley, above, or Mike Lee or Pete Navarro tweeting the following: “Starting TODAY, due to their stubborn resistance to becoming the 51st state, all Canadian citizens caught within USA borders may legally be caught, cooked, and served as cocktail wieners due to Daddy For Life’s newest executive order. Take THAT, libs!” There are roughly two types of…

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Taiwan is next.

The next move of the loose alliance of autocratic states couldn’t be more obvious if it were broadcast on all of MAGA-aligned social media sites simultaneously. After Trump’s widely anticipated betrayal of Ukraine came less than a month after his inauguration, Putin’s confederates in China, North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela know they need to get while the getting’s good. The situation remains…

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A football fan reviews 2024's pop releases

I’ve been on a real pop-music bender for the last couple years and… look, I don’t always know where my obsessions come from. For a while I was obsessed with CGI despite having absolutely nothing to do with the movie industry. But seriously, CGI is usually so much worse these days than in 2009’s Avatar… and people just let them get away with it. Why? But I’ve been into this music even before the…

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The Eighty Year Crisis Returns: Part One

There is something odd about America that it is defined by existential battles arriving roughly every eighty years, or roughly every four generations, starting with its birth in 1776. The next one arrived at 1861, the one after that in 1941. We were due for ours in 2021. Somehow, due to a combination of the pandemic, Trump’s campaign strategy at that time, and general weariness of weekly if not…

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I mostly predicted the Yankees' postseason to date and now I'm mad I don't gamble

So I was writing this book and wanted to give the main character a cool job, but not one of the obvious cool jobs like police detective, surgeon, etc. I looked up and Aaron Judge was on the TV, so “works marketing for the Yankees” jumped out at me. And I’m not even a baseball guy. But working the front office of your favorite team is any guy’s dream job, right? So I thought it’d be cool to have…

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Do women marry beta men?

The following Reddit post broke the internet last week. Everyone, and I mean everyone, had a hot take on this. Misogynists declared that this is why women are terrible. Feminists replied it should’ve been obvious what she meant, and that men are terrible. But most of all, this post was a body blow to men who’d been sold the vision that there are two completely distinct types of guys: the ones…

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Why Is Country Pop Everywhere Now?

Back in the hazily-remembered pre-pandemic days of December 2018, a curious hit emerged from a then-unknown rapper called Lil Nas X. It quickly became something you heard everywhere back then, from the radio to bars and clubs to children’s parties: Old Time Road. It was quite the spectacle nobody knew exactly how to classify. Here was a flamboyantly gay, Black rapper producing something that…

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Public Relations

He jerked back, startled, as the file flashed on his screen. MCMURRY, SARAH. DOB 06/09/94. Wow. A name he hadn’t seen in… how many years? Barry clicked. University of Michigan, class of ’16, graduate in communications. Wow. This is really her. Sarah. Unbelievable. What were the odds? He scrolled down as memories of her floated into his mind. Sarah. Sarah McMurry. From college. How long ago…

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Various and et cetera, June ’24 edition

programming note: this is part of a series of three unrelated mini-posts, the topmost of which is always guaranteed not to be about politics. promise! There’s something men just don’t grasp about growing up female that needs to be talked about more. No, not just talked about more. Needs to be downright pervasive. This topic needs to be as onerous and in-your-face and with as many ads/PSAs as…

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It does not matter why they went MAGA.

NeverTrump writer Nick Cataggio has a cottage industry of trying to psychoanalyze why his former comrades on the right betrayed principle in the service of Donald Trump. One of his central themes is this question: are they just mouthing MAGA platitudes for cynical ends such as their political careers, or are they true converts no less fanatical than your typical zealot camping out for days for a…

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Case Records of the Urgent Care 15: The Crimson Tongue

A 5 year old Hispanic girl presented to the urgent care yesterday for a chief complaint of fever. It was described as coming and going, felt from the forehead (tactile), associated with malaise and loss of appetite, lasting about 3 days. However, there was no cough, runny nose, congestion. The child had thrown up once on the day of presentation. There was also note of her toes turning red and…

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All It Takes Is One.

Finally got around to reading Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario and the striking thing is not the ending, exactly — our radioactive annihilation has been played out in countless books and movies, with the Cold War movie Threads frequently hailed as among the most realistic. It’s the beginning of her book that’s scary. See, the conventional nuclear scenario in most works is a buildup of…

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The Wild Rush

I want a deep-dive article, podcast, or documentary on a virtually unknown ’00s country singer named Britni Hoover. Hoover was an entrant on the ’00s Nashville scene who released one album and, despite her best efforts, made almost zero impact to the point where she doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry; hence the lack of links. And I want to know more about her story. It might be tough to…

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Would You Read This? Edition 2

Next in the fiction series, I present you: THE MANDELA EFFECT. My bad day was hot, sweltering hot. My old wall A/C unit chugged and strained at full blast, still only barely compensating for the wet heat. Zoom call number five. Kill me now, I thought. “Tell me where we are on the Vimerity numbers, Kash,” Larry said. My mind was mid-wandering through Tekken when I heard my name. Zoom calls are…

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What is your generation ranting about lately?

So, I was researching characters for something I’m working on and I was curious to know what GenX people are listening today. As in, what’s on their playlists now, not what was on their CDs in their car in 1998. My 50-something guy is driving down the road, listening to… what, exactly? Since I don’t exactly have Spotify’s market research on hand, and since I don’t even know if GenX uses…

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Would You Read This? Edition 1

programming note: this is a series where I’ll be bouncing some original writing off you all to see if this is a short story or novel you’d be into, or whether it’s ass. Please comment with any thoughts! DECEMBER 19, 1998 The door dinged open. Gerald was there early. “Freezing in here, Owen,” Gerald said miserably, leaving his coat and gloves on. “Don’t Vick know he’s gonna freeze his pipes one…

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Various and et cetera, March ’24 edition

The magazine Time is no longer a serious publication. But you knew that already. Behold, the crisis in modern journalism as told in four covers: Everyone knows the only point of all the gazillion celebrity awards shows out there is to let the organizers party and hobnob with the celebrities. That’s it. And it’s no different for Time’s annual TIME100 gala in New York, some invites for which may…