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Open your wallets, donors:

At donor retreats and in pitch documents seen by The New York Times, liberal strategists are pushing the party’s rich backers to reopen their wallets for a cavalcade of projects to help Democrats, as the cliché now goes, “find the next Joe Rogan.”

Here’s the thing, Rogan could lean left (not centrist, left). Remember this?

On May 5th, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute held its annual fundraising gala. The event showcases the extraordinary imaginations of people who design exorbitant clothes and the gutsiness of those who dare (and can afford) to wear them. I’m dimly aware of this annual extravaganza because of my interest in knitting, spinning, and weaving — the crafts involved in turning fluff into yarn and yarn into cloth. Mind you, I have no flair for fashion myself. I could never carry off wearing the simplest of ballgowns and I’m way too short to rock a tuxedo. My own personal style runs to 1970s White Dyke. (Think blue jeans and flannel shirts.) But I remain fascinated by what... Read more

Source: No More Dog Whistles appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

One of the things so compelling about Margaret Ross’s Saturday is her obsessive fidelity to a purity of description: “Beige clouds in a greenish sky / seen through cheap sunglasses.” To that, she adds an instability of syntax and line break that she makes into a thing of cool beauty. Here’s a couple of stanzas at the end of “A Present,” a title whose multiple possible meanings is also a sign of Ross’s themes and capacities:

Touching certain strangers
I could feel the future just
below the surface of their skin, things
can happen, you could sense time
quicken beneath your hand.

The future? I want to know do I
hurt people because of what
they have made me feel or do I
have feelings I have always had
and try to make the world
look like it gave them to me?

The sentences, measured but already somehow headlong, roll against and over the ends of the lines. Sentences do not match the length of line. Sometimes these two elements dance, and sometimes they quarrel. Here they are dancing, at the beginning of “New York”:

I’ve lived in this city for decades, but I’m noticing more and more problems. There’s crowding, congestion, changing people, tall buildings, and the biggest problem: This city is a literal city.

I love living in a city, but I hate dealing with other people. I shouldn’t be subject to the whims of my neighbors, something I constantly scream at them during city council meetings.

You can’t walk down the street without seeing some new expensive building going up. It’s all I can think about until I’m safely ensconced in my million-dollar apartment, scornfully looking down at the construction.

I don’t recognize anyone in my neighborhood anymore! Why do the kids I used to know seem to grow taller, look older, and move away? I need every political candidate to clarify their position on the passage of linear time.

It wasn’t always like this. I moved to this city as a wide-eyed twenty-year-old, ready to take on the world with energetic abandon. Now, I’m no longer twenty years old. Something really has changed with this city.

On 5 November 2024, the night of Donald Trump’s historic second election victory, it suddenly — and unexpectedly — looked as though he would win Pennsylvania. Of all the seven swing states Trump needed to win in this intense, closely fought race, Pennsylvania was said to be the most important, not least due to the […]

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

“Bruce Springsteen has spoken out against the White House again after President Donald Trump called him a ‘dried-out prune’ on social media. Speaking in Manchester, England, the musician criticized the government for the second time during his Land of Hopes and Dreams tour, despite Trump previously biting back.” — Newsweek, May 18, 2025

I’m a middle-aged guy from Jersey. A freedom-loving, meat-and-potatoes family guy. A Springsteen guy. A Trump guy.

I’ve seen the Boss forty-seven times and own one of the largest collections of Springsteen bootlegs in North America. I’ve also been a registered Republican since I was old enough to vote and was part of the great Gen X wave that brought Trump back into office.

If you’re thinking that Springsteen’s empathy for the working class and exploration of the runaway American dream are about as far as you can get from President Trump’s plans to make America great again, well, my leftist daughter would agree with you.

Hey team. It’s your CEO. I know your time is valuable, so I’ll cut right to the chase: It’s come to my attention that some of you have been bad-mouthing the Giant Plagiarism Machine.

I’d like to remind you that our company policy is pro–Plagiarism Machine. We’re a tech-forward, future-oriented company that doesn’t shy away from the promise of new innovation—even if that innovation is a Giant Plagiarism Machine that copy-pastes existing innovation into fake sentient sentences.

Lately, it feels like some of you aren’t the techno-optimists I took you to be. You’ve been heard uttering slurs like “I’m worried about my job stability” and “I just don’t think it’s positive for humankind,” neither of which sounds remotely optimistic or techno. I’ve even heard shocking reports of teams failing to incorporate plagiarism into their processes, because—I can’t believe I have to repeat this—“it’s not helpful.”

These are some comics I submitted to The New Yorker.

Chinese and American flags flying together

Since Industrialization military power has been a function of three factors: