Friendships have ended. Family dinners turned silent. Coworker’s small talk dried up. For 37 percent of Americans, politics didn’t just create tension — it ended relationships entirely. A study published in PNAS Nexus surveyed 3,791 people across four datasets and found that political breakups now affect more than a third…
Category: Politics
International Relations
Read more
America’s Allies Are Reviewing the Relationship — And the Silence Says Everything
America’s allies are quietly reviewing their relationships with the United States, according to Politico’s latest reporting. Not dramatic breaks. Not public denouncements. Just be careful, methodical reassessments of what American partnership actually means when democracy itself becomes a variable instead of a constant. The conversations happening in European capitals, in…
Culture
Read more
We’re the Only Country Where More People Think Their Countrymen Are Immoral
Americans Think Their Neighbors Are Trash — And We’re the Only Country That Does Pew Research surveyed 25 countries and asked people to rate the morality of their fellow citizens. In 24 of them, optimism won. More people said their compatriots had good morals than bad ones. Then there’s us….
Canada
Read more
We Turned Our Neighbor Into an Enemy
The US-Canada relationship just fell off a cliff, and if you grew up straddling that border as I did — Farmington Hills, Michigan, twenty minutes from Windsor — this one lands differently. Not abstract. Not academic. Personal. Politico just dropped five charts documenting how thoroughly we’ve torpedoed the longest undefended…
Culture
Read more
Doomsday Clock 2026: Closer to Catastrophe, Further From Solutions
The Doomsday Clock 2026 announcement landed this week with all the fanfare of a fire alarm in an empty building. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the clock four seconds closer to midnight. We’re now at 85 seconds — the closest humanity has ever been to self-inflicted annihilation since…
Culture
Read more
Two Dead, Three Weeks. The Civil War Simulation Didn’t Account for Body Count
I don’t know when “war gaming” stopped being a Pentagon basement thing and became a university ethics department warning label — maybe right after someone decided “defensive shots” was a better phrase than “we killed a guy” — but here we are anyway. In October 2024, the Center for Ethics…
Culture
Read more
Measles Is Back — Because We Decided Vaccines Were Optional
A kid at Clemson has measles. Let that land. One of the most contagious viruses on earth—something we eliminated from the U.S. in 2000—is back. Not in a remote, rural pocket. Not overseas. Right in the middle of a 30,000-person university. The university confirmed the case. They’re contact tracing. The…
Culture
Read more
Political Exhaustion Is the Carryover Balance From 2025
Happy New Year The calendar flipped. That was the clean part. Everything else came with us — the noise, the backlog, the unresolved messes that never quite ended, they just lost their headline slot and waited to reappear. Political exhaustion isn’t something that suddenly arrived in 2025. It accumulated. Day…
Media
Read more
America’s Not Working—And Neither Is Congress
We’ve hit that point again. Government shutdown season. Cue the outrage, the speeches, the finger-pointing. One side blames the other, and somewhere between “fiscal responsibility” and “moral outrage,” the actual governing stops. Let’s be clear — both parties built this mess. Chuck Schumer and Mike Johnson are just the faces…
Humor
Read more
Paris Official Declares Truce With Rats. The Rest of Us Declare Nausea
There’s a Paris politician who walks around with a live rat on his shoulder. I wish that sentence were a joke, but it’s not. His name’s Gregory Moreau, and this isn’t a Halloween stunt or a social experiment. It’s his actual campaign to “reconcile Parisians with rats.” I’ve seen some…