Senator Ted Cruz grilled FBI Director Christopher Wray about an FBI Internal Document — It’s Just a Performance — “Our law enforcement has been weaponized and politicized, rather than rather than remaining apolitical as it has been for the for the history of our country,” Ted Cruz said to FBI Director Christopher Wray on August 4th. The fact the FBI didn’t exist for even half of the country’s history…

The Duffer Brothers edited Stranger Things episodes after they were released. Is Will’s birthday is the new ‘Han Shot First’? — What if I were to tell you that you do remember seeing a Starbucks cup on Game of Thrones? In my best Morpheus impression, I tell you that you’re not wrong, but you won’t see the visual gaffe if you rewatch the fourth episode of season 8 on HBO. After…

Nathan Fielder’s new show attempts to prepare for every eventuality — and fails — in the same ways that computer algorithms do — There were several times during the first episode of Nathan Fielder’s new HBO show The Rehearsal where I noticed something oddly familiar about the project. While it’s supposed to be a show that expands upon his Nathan For You finale from years ago, in 2022, Fielder’s show also doubles as…

Dispatches from a month of global education in Rome, Italy — You can hear the ubiquitous coughing. The sort of cough that has a raspy, almost wet sound to it. You can see it on people’s foreheads as beads of sweat gather into drips and on the damp backs of shirts. You can smell it in the air. It smells like…

Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme that revealed that Trump’s far-right strategy is based on shallow revenge — On June 24, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appointed justices overturned the “settled law” of abortion rights in the United States. The justices, guided by Trump’s politics of resentment and aided and abetted by Trump’s far-right enablers, are acting almost as though they were trolling the citizens of the United States…

Eric Greitens’ violent ad asks followers to go “RINO hunting” — and it’s right out of the fascism playbook — On June 20, US Senate candidate Eric Greitens posted an incredibly violent political campaign advertisement on his social media channels. The ad, which features a militarized police force destroying a house and Greitens pumping a shotgun, resembles contemporary examples of extreme far-right propaganda. The video, mirroring terrorist visual rhetoric, displays…

Even if an engineer thinks a machine may have a soul, it may just be in the imagination — “My battery is low and it’s getting dark,” messaged the Mars Opportunity Rover to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2019. All over the internet, people reacted emotionally to the “death” of the Mars rover. Outside the scientific community, the “loss” of the Opportunity Rover affected very few people, but…

Exactly a year after Burnham released his Inside special on Netflix, he released the outtakes on YouTube — I watched Bo Burnham’s Inside Outtakes while waiting to board my flight at the airport. It’s the first time in years that I’m flying international as I, like many others, spent a great majority of the last few years inside. While I wore a mask, I was surrounded by mostly…