America may not have come to terms with it yet, but you’ve just witnessed the most spectacular and consequential episode of Mythbusters in history, and Adam and Jamie weren’t even there to guide us through it. To explain: One of the most important things that the United States
The pains of this election come in waves like the plagues of Egypt. After the initial shock and horror died down, next comes the insufferable smugness of the pro-Trump independent journalists. If you spend any time on social media platforms amidst the protruding skeletal frame of legacy media’s beached
Well, not “relax,” but you’ll see what I mean. So America just overwhelmingly voted for a guy who admires Hitler. That’s not great! When Hitler, the actual one, was voted into Germany’s government he neither had a history of praising Hitler (maybe technically) nor got anywhere near
First of all, some news: This column and newsletter are now also being mirrored on Ghost, a rival service to Substack. Many Substack users will remember Ghost as one of the major alternatives that several big-name writers such as Ed Zitron and Platformer moved to earlier in the year out
All right, America, here we are again. I guess we’re fucking doing this. It’s October 2016 again and it’s back to coin-flip odds between sanity and madness. I often find myself hoping that my talking about American politics so much doesn’t count as foreign election interference
“To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.” — Cecil Rhodes, from his last
As the southern United States picks up the pieces after being smashed by two insanely powerful hurricanes in under a fortnight, the political discourse is tenser than ever, which is exactly what nobody wanted going into an already terrifying election. Every year there is a brand new “biggest storm ever
Last week the independent journalist Matt Taibbi spoke at an event that was essentially a softcore Trump rally. It wasn’t a Jonestown tent revival, it was a pop-up market stall just outside of Jonestown, enticing the public with a taste of the goods and the promise of some much
All right, so Matt Walsh has another deplatformed documentary out that you’re not allowed to see. This one is in cinemas, too, so it’s even more widely unavailable than his previous film, What Is a Woman?, which was so blacklisted that Elon Musk, the new owner/operator of
I honestly never thought that anything was going to surprise me anymore about US politics, let alone shock me. There’s always been some degree of plausible deniability involved in the insinuation that Donald Trump and his party are “racist”—not that I’m among the deniers (on a scale
As many of you know by now, I’m somewhat critical of capitalism, which is why it might surprise many of you to learn that, in my weaker moments, I yearn for the return of the days of relentless, ubiquitous advertising. I’m not just referring to some of those
On July 13, at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, the then-only-presumptive Republican nominee for president, a guy named Donald Trump who might be familiar to you if you follow the news closely, was shot in the ear by a kid who managed to sneak a gun onto the roof of a