1. There’s an innovative American automotive manufacturer being run by a total bigot.
2. In large swaths of the country, a marginalized community is banned from using certain bathrooms for no other reason than to make their lives miserable.
3. Marijuana is legal in some states but not others.
4. The US experiences widespread outbreaks of childhood diseases like measles, which many parents treat with homeopathic remedies.
5. It’s trendy to call your bar a “speakeasy.”
6. The US economy is controlled by a handful of cartoonishly wealthy business tycoons.
7. Though it used to be legal everywhere, abortion is now illegal in much of the country.
8. Elites are nervous after an anticapitalist of Italian descent perpetrates an elaborate act of violence in New York City as a protest against corporate greed.
9. Conservatives are drumming up fears of socialism to scare people into voting for them.
10. Americans are disillusioned by a costly war and a global pandemic.
11. The Yankees have a slugger hitting record-breaking numbers of home runs.
12. There is a spate of new laws designed to limit immigration from “undesirable” countries.
13. A popular form of entertainment involves listening to well-known personalities chat with one another; audiences tune in regularly via an audio-based entertainment platform.
14. Though the American economy has grown steadily, the growth hasn’t been felt evenly across the country; there’s a growing sense that something about the way modern society is set up just isn’t working for most Americans; combine that with growing xenophobia and white nationalism, both in the US and Europe, and you get the sense that the global social fabric is beginning to unravel in ways that could soon spiral into economic meltdown, world war, or both; you start to ask yourself, “Is catastrophic conflict an intractable part of human civilization? Are pluralistic societies doomed to periodically devolve into infighting? And does the moral arc of the universe actually bend towards justice, or is our species doomed to Sisyphean cycles of inequality that oscillate between bad and slightly less bad?”
15. Cocktails cost a fucking fortune.
Answer Key
Both: 1–15