It’s probably happened to you: A stranger starts talking to you at a party. In this moment, you’re not nearly as clever or charming as you hoped you’d be, and you struggle to volley with the anecdotes, opinions, and witticisms lobbed your way. At the end of it, you come away thinking, “They totally thought […]

The post-modern philosopher Jean Baudrillard infamously argued in 1991 that the Gulf War did not take place, by which he did not mean that no fighting had actually occurred, but that the real events were something entirely separate from the carefully choreographed presentation the world saw thanks to the novel phenomenon of 24-hour cable news.  […]

America is getting old. Between 1960 and 2024, the share of Americans over 65 doubled — from 9 percent to 18 percent. And the US will only grow grayer in the coming years. Within a decade, America’s seniors will outnumber its children for the first time in history, according to Census Bureau projections. By 2060, […]

Open the internet today, and you’ll find entire worlds most of us never encounter. Spaces built around practices so strange, so hyper-specific, they read like satire at first glance.  One of the most unsettling of these worlds calls itself the GoonVerse. It’s a digital subculture organized around endless pornography and what can only be described […]

On Sunday night, President Donald Trump took to the stage in Washington, DC to host the annual Kennedy Center Honors. Presidents traditionally attend the awards, although Trump declined to do so in his first term. Now, after purging the Center’s traditionally bipartisan board of ideological rivals and installing himself as chair, Trump has become the […]