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Is there any political word that sounds more embarrassing being said seriously by a grown adult than “woke?” A past tense verb crowbarred awkwardly into doing the job of either a noun or an adjective depending on who or what it’s complaining about at the time. It only really
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The novelist, comedian, TikTok guy Jason Pargin has a bit that he’s been doing for as long as I can remember. Every couple of years he brings it up again, on TikTok or on Twitter or wherever he wants to stir shit, and I’m pretty sure he does
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Last weekend Ben Shapiro’s conservative media outlet Daily Wire, a support group of failed actors, comedians and writers who got together to pretend their failure is due to politics and wokeness rather than just being incredibly bad at making movies, cut ties with one of their key talents, to
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Here’s Ben Shapiro talking about why people should be made to work until the grim specter of old age curls its icy claws around their throats as their trembling enfeebled hand struggles to keep the welding torch straight. “Retirement is a stupid idea,” he spits, noting that everyone he’
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Very occasionally I get an itch somewhere, usually in my leg or my arm but sometimes worst of all it feels like it’s somewhere inside my head. And the infuriating thing about it is that I can’t quite pinpoint exactly what spot on my body is itching. Whatever
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Last week Liz Truss, the former British Prime Minister with a legacy even smaller than her lower jaw, spoke at the American Conservative Political Action Conference for some reason. Truss is Britain’s shortest serving Prime Minister but also arguably its most accomplished—having managed to kill both the economy
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I think a fair bit about the inside lives of my cats. The two girls, Andromeda and Athena, are twins, though not identical. They were in the beginning indistinguishable but for the colour of their eyes, but over time Athena got a lot fluffier. They were raised by us, together,
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Like most writers who don’t get any solid income from this stuff, I have a regular job. It’s an office job. I won’t go into too much detail, but basically a large amount of my responsibility at work involves determining whether people are permitted access to documents,
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In 1948 George Orwell, Eric Arthur Blair, wrote a political satire about a dystopian future, and to show that it was the future he swapped the last two digits of the current year around. It’s a really good book. It’s the best book I’ve ever wanted to
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As the Republican primaries continue to go pretty much exactly as anyone who has been paying attention suspected they would, America (and, kicking and screaming along with the cultural hegemony, the rest of the western world) has started preparing for the inevitable Biden/Trump rematch. This time, Biden is fighting
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Most countries have some sort of national day—one day on the calendar when it’s customary to just celebrate the fact that a particular piece of dirt has a particular name. Maybe it’s the day some treaty was signed, or some battle won. Often it’s an excuse
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Back in the mid 2000s the comedy writer and my former boss Jason Pargin, then writing under the pseudonym David Wong, wrote one of the essays he wound up being best known for—because we are, all of us, cursed to have our early work remain our most notable forever.