The news, such as it is, is that there’s a height requirement for people who want to be part of the Super Bowl halftime show. Not the headliner. Not the star whose name goes on the announcement graphic. The field cast. The dancers, performers, and bodies whose job it is…
Category: Media
Journalism
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Tony Dokoupil’s First Night, the Pause, and the Edit That Followed
On Tony Dokoupil’s first night anchoring the CBS Evening News, the show briefly stopped pretending it wasn’t live. The moment came during a transition. Dokoupil moved from one segment to the next and discovered — in real time — that the handoff wasn’t where he expected it to be. The…
Culture
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7 Guinness World Records You Can Aim to Set in 2026
Guinness World Records has published a list called “The seven records you should set in 2026.” Not could. Should. Which already tells you something about where we are. The institution built on documenting extremes is now pointing at blank spaces and saying, please, someone occupy these. What follows isn’t a…
Culture
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Bizarre ER Injuries and the Quiet Collapse of Shame
Bizarre ER Injuries and the End of “Please Don’t” The headline did all the work. No irony. No flourish. Just a sentence from the New York Post that landed like a dropped tray in a quiet room. You didn’t want to click it. You clicked it anyway. Because a headline…
Culture
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Bureaucratic Absurdity Has Entered Its Leaf Era
A Leaf, a Fine, and Bureaucratic Absurdity The scene is painfully ordinary: an 86-year-old man sitting outside in Skegness, England, minding his business, when a rogue leaf — dry, brown, doing what leaves do — blows straight into his mouth. He spits it out. The state intervenes. This is bureaucratic…
AI
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120,000 Home Cameras Hacked — And Privacy Might Be Dead
Every once in a while, a story comes along that makes you stop and think, Wow… we’ve crossed a line we can’t uncross. This is one of those stories. South Korean police arrested four people for hacking more than 120,000 home and business cameras. That number itself is disturbing. What…
Culture
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Dark Age Forecasts, Now With Confidence
There’s a familiar rhythm to these warnings. A solemn tone. A handful of Roman references. A quiet certainty that this time the collapse is absolute, imminent, and morally clarifying. Enter the latest declaration of the coming dark age, confidently announcing that Western civilization is on the brink — not drifting,…
Media
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Local TV Weather Cuts — When the Forecast Stops Knowing Your Street
Local TV weather cuts don’t arrive with sirens. They show up quietly — a name missing from the chyron, a forecast that feels technically correct but spiritually hollow, a sense that the person explaining tonight’s storm doesn’t actually know where the river jumps its banks. Not wrong. Just… detached. That’s…
Culture
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Even a Koala Have Figured Out How to Escape Traffic
So I heard this story about a koala in Brisbane who wandered into traffic, panicked a bit, and then — with the confidence of someone who knows the schedule — climbed onto a city bus. Not metaphorically. Not “as a symbol.” Physically. Onto the bus. This is where we are…
Media
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An Interstellar Comet Passed Earth and Refused to Make a Scene
I was reading a ClickOrlando story about an interstellar comet making its “closest approach” to Earth. I immediately felt the cultural muscle memory kick in — the part of our brain trained by late-90s disaster movies to assume this ends with fire, sacrifice, and someone hugging their daughter under a…