Photo: me As a New York City resident, I take an interest in where my tax dollars are spent. Yesterday, at least some of those dollars were being spent to pay NYPD cops to hang around—in riot helmets—outside the locked gates of Columbia University. (Presumably, Columbia paid for the festive balloons on the gates.) The vibes at Columbia were exactly as strange and slightly ridiculous as that picture when I swung by on Sunday. I’m on record as saying that I don’t think we should spend much time as a society stressing about what happens on fancy college campuses, but the Columbia leadership’s w ..read more

Well, here we are. The moment you’ve all been waiting for. The most important day of 2024. The day when we reveal….the winner of Fowl Hysteria 2024. Over the past five weeks, we have watched, in awe and wonder, as 32 birds took part in the world’s oldest and most prestigious bird-themed bracket tournament. We saw nail-biting thrillers and jaw-dropping blowouts. We saw underdogs triumph and sure winners fade away. We saw birds from every corner of the world show up and make their presence known. It has been a titanic contest, and we salute every single one of our birds. In a way, they’re all ..read more

This is a blog about whether or not Joe Biden has had a facelift. If you scroll down you will find a poll where you can vote on this matter! There are arguments for and against the idea that Joe Biden has had a facelift. And we will get into some of those. But first, let me tell you how this whole thing unfolded. Here is a picture of Joe Biden. Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images This picture was taken on Tuesday. My first thought when I saw it was “this looks like AI.” My second thought was “man, Joe Biden’s facelift is really…doing a lot here.” (Yes, this is where I reveal myself as Team Fa ..read more

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images While the now-trite observation that “the internet isn’t real life” may not fully apply anymore, there remains a kernel of truth in the argument that many of the things that take place online are, ultimately, not really important when it comes to how most people actually exist in this world. Have you ever tried explaining some dramatic bit of internet gossip with someone who isn’t already terminally online? They look at you like you’ve just explained your favorite method for cooking a labradoodle. Share It’s alarming, then, that leading politicians are increasing ..read more

CNN If you are a person with access to even a slight amount of rationality and common sense, you will have watched the events of this weekend—in which Iran launched hundreds of missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israel’s attack on Iran’s embassy complex in Syria—and thought, “OK, I really hope that is where this whole thing ends. Israel attacked, Iran responded, now let’s have everyone chill.” Joe Biden’s pilot light flickered on long enough for him to tell Benjamin Netanyahu to hold off on getting World War III going by attacking Iran for a second time. Which, again, is the only reasonab ..read more

Getty Images We’ve spent the last six months seeing the nauseating ways in which the media can massage and finesse language to arrive at whatever predetermined point it wants to make. So it’s funny, in a way, to see all the top news organizations fall all over themselves utterly failing at figuring out what to say about O.J. Simpson, who died on Wednesday at 76. If you take a survey of all the big obituaries about Simpson—who was acquitted in 1995 of the brutal double murder of Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, whose family has ever since been saddled w ..read more

Samuel Corum/Getty Images All things considered, my professional life has been relatively tolerable thus far. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend “freelance magazine journalist” to anyone, I did play video games for a couple hours today and conduct most of my job via various messaging apps. It’s all good, in other words. I’ve worked good writing jobs and bad writing jobs but all told, not a terrible line of work. That said, I’m pretty sure I have identified what is maybe one of the worst jobs in the world: Speaker of the House in a Republican “controlled” Congress. Ever since Donald Trump ..read more

YouTube Who could have seen this coming? It hasn’t even been two years since the craven conservatives on the United States Supreme Court bench gleefully nuked decades of legal precedent by repealing Roe v Wade, and already nearly half the states in the country have enacted some sort of draconian restriction on vital reproductive healthcare. It’s extremely bad and only getting worse, as we saw on Tuesday, when Arizona’s top judicial body officially reinstated a particularly vile law written in the mid-1800s, thus criminalizing virtually all abortions across the board. (The law is on hold for ..read more

It has been a little over two days since we launched our fundraiser for journalist Mohammed Mhawish. In that time, we’ve raised over 23,000 dollars. If you haven’t donated yet, please click the button below. Click to donate 23,000 dollars! And it’s come from hundreds of people who have dug deep and done what they can to help Mohammed and his family have a chance to escape the horrors of Gaza. Because of all of you, it looks really likely that he will get that chance. But I should be clear: this is not a happy story. Mohammed and his family will be exiles if they make it out of Gaza. Everyth ..read more

Mohammed, his wife Asmaa, and their son Rafik. I don’t usually use this platform for personal reasons, but I’m breaking that convention today to ask you all to help get Mohammed Mhawish, a journalist in Gaza who has written for me many times over the past six months, the money he and his family need to make it across the border into Egypt. You can click the button below to donate to the fundraiser that we’ve set up for Mohammed and his relatives. Click here to donate Mohammed is 25 years old. He has a two-and-a-half-year-old son, and his wife is pregnant with their second child. For the last ..read more