Outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray stressed during his farewell address that the bureau must sidestep “partisanship and politics” in maintaining “independence” and “objectivity.” Wray delivered his speech during a farewell ceremony at FBI headquarters, days before he is expected to resign from the post he has held for over seven years. He emphasized the FBI...
President-elect Trump said he will create an environmental advisory group lead by his former environmental consultant. “I am pleased to announce that Ed Russo, an Environmental Expert, will lead our Environmental Advisory Task Force, which will advise my Administration on initiatives to create great jobs and protect our natural resources, by following my policy of...
Those of us with friends and families spent the end of 2024 celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, and the Advent of the New Year. The internet’s most miserable misanthropes closed out the holiday season raging against the nation’s H-1B visa program. They’re mad about the program, which aims to bring foreign workers to the U.S. for skilled […]
There are many commendable adaptations of Charles Dickens‘s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, but if your family is anything like mine, The Muppet Christmas Carol is the version that gets watched by the entire extended family every year. It’s the little things that make the Muppet version a crowd favorite. Everyone has their favorite scene. […]
On an election night that gave conservatives nearly more luminous moments than we could count, one shone with particular clarity. Around 1 a.m., before the networks called the presidential race but long after the result was obvious, CNN’s Van Jones faced the camera to deliver a characteristically weepy monologue. Black women and Hispanic people, Jones […]
We are told every day to fear the rise of the “Christian nationalists,” you know, those religious extremists who believe their rights come from God rather than from the state. But when they can catch their breath from their hyperventilations about theocracy, our media minders inform us that conservatives — pro-lifers, for instance — have […]
California voters decided in November that they wanted to celebrate the holidays and ring in the new year by locking up criminals who are finding out the hard way that their get-out-of-jail-free cards have been revoked. California voters defied the pro-criminal sympathies of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and other leading state Democrats to pass Proposition […]
The homeless population in the United States surged by 18% in 2024, the largest annual increase since the Department of Housing and Urban Development started collecting data in 2007. Worse, the number of homeless families increased by 39%, also a record. Although the HUD report released in December tries to hide it, President Joe Biden […]
“In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening anywhere in the world without leaving his own house,” the gypsy chief Melquiades prophesies to the settlers of Macondo on Page 2 of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Fast-forward 415 pages, and we learn that Melquiades’s chronicle of […]
Elon Musk could have retired after making his first fortune with PayPal. He had more than enough money for a lifetime and might have devoted his remaining years to spending it. Instead, he brought his energy and enterprise to Tesla, then SpaceX, then X, and is now throwing himself with the same intensity into politics. […]
Angela Merkel hired no fewer than eight English language translators to work on the German text of her new autobiography, Freedom, which is astonishing when one considers how little of substance she has to say. Upon assuming the chancellorship of Germany in 2005, Merkel made history not only as the first female leader of the […]
Before al Qaeda and ISIS, before the age of attacks at crowded celebrations such as the Boston Marathon or the prelude to a Sugar Bowl, the “dangers” at a New Orleans New Year’s celebration were considerably more, well … entertaining. As one year passes to the next, the famous French Quarter is usually jammed in […]
In typical American fashion, Halls of Fame have lost their glory in their translation across the Atlantic from the original shrines established in Europe. Seemingly every high school has one for its graduates, and every profession seems to have its own miniature pantheon. There are Halls of Fame for pornography, social workers in California, and […]
Right before Thanksgiving, social media’s latest viral star was born: a Cambridge academic named Ally Louks, who posted a photo of herself on X posing with her successful dissertation only to generate hundreds of thousands of comments mocking her work due to its title, “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose.” […]
In viewing A Complete Unknown, I must admit to remaining mystified that rock biopics continue to get made at all in the wake of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the hysterically funny and tragically underseen 2007 parody of basically every rockstar biopic ever made. Indeed, so comprehensive is its satire that the titular Cox […]
This year, three particularly foul-mouthed and insulting young rappers named “Lil Jeff,” “Lil Scoom,” and “Ybcdul” recorded a song together. All three had been killed before the end of the summer. For anyone who pays attention to the underground rap scene, and the internet spectator culture that follows both the music and the violent crime […]
