News / political
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1 min read
18 years of Viva la Vida, still wearing the costume
Read more . . . →18 years ago today, Coldplay released Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. It still sucks. This was supposed to be the brave one — the big reinvention. They put a Delacroix painting of an actual revolution on the cover, zipped themselves into surplus-store military jackets, and hired Brian Eno to scuff up the corners. Then they handed in the most focus-grouped record of the decade. You cannot cosplay as the barricades and write songs engineered to play under a phone commercial at the same time. The title track is a man who has never lost anything in...
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1 min read
The Big China Deal Is That You Keep Paying
Read more . . . →Trump announced a “trade deal” with China today. Here’s the deal: the 20% fentanyl tariff stays, the 10% reciprocal tariff stays, the effective rate on Chinese goods sits near 30% — the highest on any country on earth — and the bigger tariffs he threatened get paused for sixty days. That’s the whole agreement. He held a press conference to tell you nothing changed and that this is a tremendous win. A tariff is a tax, and you’re the one who pays it. The Tax Foundation put a number on it: this trade war is the largest tax hike as...
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Uber Spent Its AI Budget on Robots, Then Fired the People
Read more . . . →Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months. Engineers ran the tab up on Cursor and the rest until the CTO admitted he was back to the drawing board, because the money he thought would last a year was already gone by April. So the company capped each engineer at $1,500 a month for robot coders — and then, days later, cut 23% of its HR department. Recruiters, facilities, the people who answer your benefits questions when something goes wrong. A spokesperson swears the layoffs had nothing to do with AI. Of course they don’t. Burn...
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1 min read
Poilievre Treats Breaking Up Canada Like a Bargaining Chip
Read more . . . →Alberta is putting a question on the October 19 ballot about whether to start the legal process of leaving Canada. The Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition went out there this week and the strongest thing he could bring himself to say was that the people who want to break up the country “are not our enemies.” Carney called the referendum what it is — a dangerous bluff. Poilievre called it a feeling we should sit with. “We do not need a different country, Alberta. We need different government policies in Ottawa.” Read that again. The man who wants to...
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1 min read
The Manosphere Is Just a Scam With Better Lighting
Read more . . . →Sadiq Khan stood up in London this week and called the manosphere what it is: snake oil salesmen peddling pound shop misogyny to a lost generation of young men. He’s right, and the part everyone keeps tiptoeing around is that it’s a business. Tate, the HSTikkyTokky crowd, the whole grindset content farm — they’re not selling masculinity. They’re selling a course to a 19-year-old who can’t find a job, can’t afford rent, and has been told his whole life that if he just hustled hard enough the door would open. The door’s been bricked up for years. These guys figured...
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1 min read
He Flew to Moscow to Ask Permission
Read more . . . →The manosphere’s hardest man spent this week in Moscow. Andrew Tate — the guy who sells teenage boys a religion of never needing anyone’s approval — showed up at Putin’s economic forum visibly looking for some. He was reportedly invited to promote “Christian values,” which is a choice, given that he’s a Muslim convert under criminal investigation for sex crimes in two countries. He got the bread-and-salt welcome, posted a folk-dance video to his timeline, and drew a grand total of three fans outside his hotel after his people promised a swarm. Here’s the part the algorithm won’t push to...
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1 min read
The Richest School on Earth Just Waited Out Its Own Workers
Read more . . . →Harvard’s grad student union just ended the longest strike in its history — forty days on the line — and walked away with nothing. No contract. The raises they asked for, a real process for reporting harassment, protections for the non-citizen workers Harvard can punish just by doing nothing: all still “on the table,” which is the polite version of saying the table won. Eighty-one percent of members voted to go back, and not because anybody got what they came for. You can’t pay rent with principle, and a lot of these workers are on visas where one missed paycheck...
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1 min read
They Named It a 'Jobless Boom' Out Loud
Read more . . . →Economists came up with a name for 2026 and said the quiet part straight into a microphone: the “jobless boom.” Corporate profits are sitting at the highest share of the economy since 1950. Workers’ share of what they actually produce just hit the lowest point since the government started counting in 1947. The 500 biggest companies grew earnings 28% last quarter. The seven tech giants grew theirs 63%. And they’re spending that money to fire you. Meta’s own internal memos described its May layoffs as a way to “offset the cost of AI investments” — corporate for: we swapped your...
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In My Place turns 24. It still sucks.
Read more . . . →24 years ago today, Coldplay released “In My Place.” It still sucks. One circular guitar line that goes nowhere, a drum part that just keeps time, and Chris Martin doing his wounded falsetto about being lost and singing lines he couldn’t change. He repeats “in my place” until you start to wonder if he forgot where he was standing. It’s three minutes of a man being mildly sad in a very expensive studio, engineered to sell you a sedan during a commercial break — which is roughly where the song lives now. 2002 was a great year for music that...
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The Alpha Male Is in Court This Month
Read more . . . →Andrew Tate is in a London courtroom this month, sued by four women who say he beat them, choked one of them unconscious during sex, and held a gun on another between 2013 and 2015. He denies all of it. The manosphere’s favorite philosopher — the man who spent years selling teenage boys a worldview where being a real man means domination — is finally being asked, under oath, what domination looked like when he actually practiced it. The answer, according to the claimants, is a woman strangled until she passed out and another told “you’re going to do as...
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