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Ryan Zickgraf is a journalist based in Harrisburg, PA.
Democrats spent the last year asking where their Joe Rogan was. Hasan Piker is one of the few left-wing figures with the audience they covet — but the party is deeply hostile to the spontaneity and independence that make figures like him appealing.
Eight million people showed up at last weekend’s No Kings protests. Donald Trump’s response? Release footage of a skyscraper bearing his name, a golden statue of himself, and a throne room with paid parking — and call it a “presidential library.”
Twenty-five years ago, someone like Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson would have had little to offer the world. His rise to global phenomenon suggests that virality is emptier than even pessimists thought possible.
Twenty years before Donald Trump was posting AI images of himself as a king, the internet learned how to meme by exaggerating the masculine superiority of Chuck Norris. What began innocently with “Chuck Norris Facts” has evolved into MAGA’s empire of slop.
For roughly half a century, a certain strain of American evangelical theology has taught millions of believers to read conflicts like Trump’s war with Iran not simply as geopolitics in action but as prophecy unfolding in real time. I was one of them.
Thanks to AI, white-collar workers are discovering what blue-collar workers learned a half-century ago: they’re disposable.
It’s hard to imagine viewers who end up tuning in to the new hagiographic Melania Trump documentary, Melania, having a reaction other than “time to sharpen our guillotines.”
Bryan Johnson’s sexless brand of “wellness vampirism” is the perfect metaphor for Silicon Valley. It’s a utopian promise of a limitless future disguising a brutal, extractive reality that leaves us all drained.
In 2018, #AbolishICE was everywhere. Seven years later, the agency is bigger than ever, yet the slogan’s champions are nowhere to be found.
How one artist rode the NFT wave to fame — and then crashed with it.
The Dakota Access Pipeline company just won a landmark suit against Greenpeace worth over $660 million. At the heart of the case is a new and particularly sleazy form of partisan communications masquerading as journalism.
Joe Rogan built his empire by presenting himself as an entertaining, independent commentator. He gave it up for the 2024 election.
Americans are trading bar culture for wellness apps and mocktails. But despite alcohol’s many shortcomings, our national sobering up is not a simple cause for celebration. We’re also losing social spaces and traditions in an increasingly alienated society.
The liberal attempt to counter Rush Limbaugh on the airwaves was too little, too late.
Democrats had a billion dollars to pull off a Kamala Harris victory. They hurled much of that money at celebrities and designing lavish environments to say the word “joy” in. It was one big A-list party, and Americans didn’t feel invited.
Working-class American men are getting lonelier and sicker, and their lives are getting shorter. It’s not just a sad state of affairs; it’s a full-blown crisis that demands policy solutions.
The indie comic Justice Warriors: Vote Harder is a heartening sign that genuinely subversive political satire remains possible, even in a world that feels like satire itself sometimes. And like the best of the genre, it hits a little too close to home.
The DNC revealed a Democratic Party still in love with the Obamas. The fantasy is that Kamala Harris will be a reboot. Brat summer is cooling — are you ready for an Obama autumn, heavy on feeling good and light on political substance?
J. D. Vance portrays his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, as a dying backwater with a culture of irresponsibility and laziness. It’s actually seeing a revival — thanks not to a mindset change but to massive public investment of the type the GOP opposes.
White Rural Rage is another attempt to blame the Democratic Party’s decline in rural counties on mean and bigoted white Americans.