Drawing back to West Wing, I wonder how much of this also just flatters the affectations of some liberal voters. The idea of reasonable adults coming together to freely exchange ideas, and the best and most morally good ones eventually win out. In order to uphold this fantasy, one would have to pretend that the GOP is reasonable and will compromise.

There’s a fairly common sentiment amongst the Very Online that suggests it’s a privilege to “log off” and not constantly bombard yourself with a ceaseless stream of thermonuclear headlines. Sure, willful ignorance is a luxury for those who remain unscathed from the brute, idiotic force of American sadism, though I’d argue it’s a privilege to delude yourself into thinking that posting in and of itself is anything other than low-effort activism. This pseudo-conviction morphs you into an “I just smoked a seed blunt and here’s what I think” person.

This became a topic of debate between some close friends and…

For the past two weeks, it had snowed long and hard, stripping the color of Chicago away and leaving an uncommonly beautiful scene, a magical texture. The city is quiet, frozen in the final stretch of a pandemic that’s unfolding as a groggy and exhausting process of crawling towards the light. The sky is gray and everything else is a subtle shade of that same gray. We’re half-stuck in our domiciles within this half-baked libertarian lockdown, trudging through a multiply horrific and disheartening year that was miserably unstuck in time. The “real” world outside is exclusively mediated through the internet…

For those of us who enjoy watching it, football demands its viewers to be comfortable with a level of regulated violence. Being a fan, even as an aggrieved spectator, always came with its share of moral ambiguity: The spate of domestic abuse incidents, catastrophic injuries, draconian (if not regressive) drug policies, and years of denial on the executives’ part that they were essentially facilitating a concussion epidemic became the queasy price of admission for Sunday entertainment. As the NFL wheels toward Super Bowl Sunday, the league’s attempt to belatedly make its gladiator spectacle coexist with a rampaging pandemic feels especially…

It was at some point during my seven years of singledom when I came to terms with the possibility of dying alone. A lovestruck stranger might assume this to be the end-product of some terminal apathy, but I encountered a sort of liberatory revelation. We all share a grand cosmic loneliness and transcience. Accepting this fiercely unkind reality is the first step toward making an honest peace with the forbidding facts of the human condition. Our inability to fully cohabit within one another partitions us all into fractal selves — and as we float further from youth, we drift toward…

It might be difficult to tell with 25,000 National Guard troops warding off violent rioters or DC being declared a “Green Zone” or the FBI warnings of “armed protests” at every state capitol, but America is officially ready to be United. The hours building up to Joe Biden’s solemn swearing of the oath were mostly banal theatrical pomp about bipartisanship and healing — as if dozens of elected Republicans never abetted Donald Trump’s blowzy fixations and low-effort fascism until it incited a braindead siege. Biden has a pretty narrow and facile way of looking at a luridly busted society…

In the weeks since the election, it was tough to describe Donald Trump’s coup attempt as a coup attempt because it was fumbling and shambling and he posted skeins of bizarrely punctuated tweets that were basically “I WON THE ELECTION” followed by, “If I kill myself, no one would even care!” Since the god-emperor lost to the most mentally decimated candidate the Democrats could’ve run, he has been lobbing cartoon bombs at the columns of democratic legitimacy. Like all things Trump-related, it has been both hilarious and grotesque. The public life of clammy end-stage Rudy Giuliani has somehow gotten even…