Cultural Commentary

On the morning of Feb. 19, 2022, Cassandra Black Elk, a 26-year-old indigenous woman in North Dakota, woke up to find her three-week-old daughter, Starlight, unresponsive in the bed next to her. It was every mother’s nightmare, but for Black Elk, this was just the beginning. Within 10 minutes of …

Ladies and gentlemen, it appears Aaron Rodgers, who’s taken a grand total of four snaps as quarterback of the New York Jets, has lost his mind. This week, during his weekly appearance on ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show (or if a WWE wrestler on bath salts hosted a sports program), …

Back in the halcyon days of the early 2020s, when we were optimistic about the vaccines and our new President and the general health and stability of superhero franchises, there was a meme called the yassification trend. It basically entailed taking photos of prominent historical figures — Alexander Hamilton, for …

It’s a dramatic, messy era on the internet. Everything is changing rapidly. There’s broad dissatisfaction with the dominant search engine, and activists are worried about the privacy implications of increasingly intrusive online surveillance. While investors prattle on about esoteric topics like digital currencies and virtual reality, back in the real …

Ozempic. It’s been touted as a miracle drug, used endlessly as a Hollywood punchline, and become the impetus for almost $5 billion in sales for pharmaceutical companies in 2023 alone. Since its release in 2017, the injectable weight loss medication and others in its class have revolutionized the landscape of …

Back in 2016, Elon Musk claimed that Tesla cars could “drive autonomously with greater safety than a person. Right now.” It was a lie, one that sent Tesla’s stock price soaring — and made Musk among the wealthiest people on the planet. That lie is now falling apart in the …

There is a snippet of “The Illiad, or The Poem of Force,” Simone Weil’s 1940 essay about the blind poet Homer’s Trojan War epic, that has always stuck with me: “The progress of the war in the Iliad is simply a continual game of seesaw. The victor of the moment …

When infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones recorded a video last week saying he hoped Elon Musk would watch an interview he gave to Tucker Carlson, it was clear what he wanted most of all: a comeback. “Elon Musk says he’s a free-speech absolutist, but still hasn’t let me back on …

Every once in a while, you come across a social media post that is so successful at making a lot of people very angry that it almost seems like it was lab-engineered by a Russian troll farm for the express purpose of destabilizing Western civilization. Such is the Dog Lady …

Advances in astronomy and science make it more clear by the day that, unexpectedly, the math is on the side of aliens. As late as the 1990s, scientists weren’t sure that there were planets anywhere else in our galaxy or in the universe beyond, but advances like the Kepler Space …