“Can no one read anymore?”
I commented this on a series of images by a travel influencer named Lily.
I’ve seen so much ‘inability to comprehend’ shit lately that I’ve had enough. I’ve been mired in political discourse for the better part of a year and I’ve only seen it get worse. This post wasn’t even about politics.
I’d finally combusted and it was on a carousel about cheap travel.
Lily posted tips and tricks for traveling while “broke as hell.” It’s how to make your Instagram posts look like you’re living a life of luxury when you’re not. It’s tips for packing lightly and smartly. It’s ideas on how to get to and fro in ways that may not be convenient but are hella cheap.
The first comment said, “How the hell are you traveling if you are broke?”
That is… what the post is about.
“This is answered by the post?” I write. Great. Now I’m defending a travel influencer I don’t even follow. I’ve lost my mind.
“A 15-hour bus trip?! Absolutely not. What tf kind of vacation is that??”
Me: “One that is cheap. As is explained in the post.”
Later, I saw a Reddit thread about the anti-ICE, anti-fascist activists downtown in LA.
One of the top replies said: “Ya know, I have completely lost respect for the protestors that go down to city hall. A friend of mine went out and got arrested over it. Respect to him for standing up for his beliefs.”
He got arrested. For standing up for his beliefs. Which you respect. Which is what the protests are about.
For Slate.com, my longtime collaborator and the brilliant writer Allison Raskin wrote a piece about the “gender disappointment” she experienced when she found out she was pregnant with a baby boy. In the article, she moves through the feeling and when he arrives, she loves her son very much.
Someone wrote: “What a terrible take. My wife and I both hope to have a boy first simply because we both grew up in homes where a boy led the pack. But if it is a girl we will be just as happy. Children are a sacred gift.”
That is… gender disappointment. You are describing what the article is about. You hoped to have a boy but you’d be okay with a girl.
That is the article!
I see a video from an intersex influencer named Jackie about how she is unable to have babies as she has no eggs. She tells the lovely story of how her sister carried a baby for her and her husband using donor eggs.
The first several comments are people asking if she used donor eggs.
WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING, YOU GUYS?
On the trailer for a movie adapted from a book:
On a video with this caption:
My friend Eric posted photos he took of soccer star David Beckham getting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Beckham’s award is being bestowed up him by the actor Tom Cruise, who is the cult of Scientology’s most famous member.
In the photos, two or three protestors (one with their phone camera on a stick) stand by the event. In another photo, the police issue them a citation. I get into it with a commenter who says the protest isn’t big enough to make a dent and makes the actual anti-Scientology movement look stupid. These guys aren’t even doing anything.
You’re so close, baby. Why would the police ticket protestors who aren’t even doing anything? Think! Come on!
It probably seems like I’m picking the specifically stupid comments. Maybe I am. But there are just so many of them. Where is the breakdown? Jesus Christ.
Law enforcement still hasn’t found Nancy Guthrie, the mother of news anchor Savannah Guthrie. She was allegedly kidnapped from her home by a man in a balaclava. The footage is terrifying. The story dominated the headlines for a while and then Savannah went back to hosting her show. The search died down. The latest headline is that a ransom note says she is dead. A ransom note?? For the kidnapping of a famous woman’s mother?? And it’s unsolved??
Even the juiciest mysteries come and go these days. A theory is decided upon and that’s what happened. There’s a Netflix documentary. People watch it and think they know what happened, even if there are no conclusions available. The end.
Does nothing excite us anymore?
The crimes that endure are distorted through games of telephone. Scandals are dead. Mysteries are dead. The world is run by a pedophile cult just like your uncle out in the shed has been saying since 1992. It’s all boring and old.
A great example is in the new Boots Riley film “I Love Boosters.” One of the big discoveries the women uncover is that most “random” civilian interviewees on the news are not only plants. They are flesh-stripped bodies wearing changeable skin suits.
These skinless humans go on the news to defend themselves. The world so easily accepts their existence that now it’s only their purpose that is up for debate. The news moves so fast there’s nothing to latch onto.
Right now, there are concentration camps up and running in the US. They’ve already left the front page. The President, who probably has dementia, posted a random photo of the wife of a rich supporter that was taken in the 1990s at Camp David. It was accompanied by a nonsensical caption. I barely heard about it.
I told my Spanish tutor who lives in Buenos Aires about the 2026 Counterterrorism Report that the White House put out recently. It includes the phrase “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You” about a wide range of “domestic terrorists” including anti-fascists and those with extreme gender ideology.
We will find you and we will kill you. Even some of my most politically engaged friends hadn’t heard of the exact wording. I don’t think it was front page news anywhere.
My tutor was shocked. I had to send him the official counterterrorism document put out by our government for him to believe it. His reply was to tell me I have to get the hell out of the United States. He couldn’t understand why this wasn’t the biggest global story.
Baby, it wasn’t even a big story in the US.
I spend a lot of my time wondering what I could do that would break through the noise. The prisoners at the Adelanto ICE Detention Center are on a hunger strike to bring attention the heinous conditions inside. A brave man named Aaron Bushnell lit himself on fire in 2024 outside the Israeli embassy to protest for a free Palestine. He was not the only person to do this for Palestine with the second one happening in Atlanta in 2023.
There’s a huge fire in Boyle Heights in LA right now and my friend shared a video of a massive LAFD helicopter over the reservoir picking up water to put it out. The air is toxic. There’s shelter in place orders.
People walk on by. They picnic next to it. They don’t look up at the noise.
Justice Forral, Bajun Mavalwalla II, and Jac Archer aka The Spokane Three were found guilty for a June 11 protest against ICE. Fifteen people in Minnesota were arrested as part of “antifa.” Children are in a concentration camp in Dilley, TX and the most I’ve heard about that story has been from a children’s entertainer turned activist named Ms. Rachel.
I recently went through a list of the 100 most powerful photos in the world. I recommend it. It helped me see that this isn’t solely a modern problem. People are drawn to categorizing what they’re seeing through their own solo lens or else it’s too much for the human brain to handle.
Missing the point is protection.
“Bloody Sunday” is an extremely disturbing photo from 1937 of a Chinese baby crying in the aftermath of a Japanese air attack against civilians during the Battle of Shanghai. (I won’t put it here to spare you.)
The photo alerted people to the war crimes committed by the Japanese against the Chinese during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It was instrumental in growing anti-Japanese feelings in the US and was labeled “the most successful propaganda photo of all time.” The photographer worked for Hearst who famously said about a different war something along the lines of: “You show me the photo and I’ll show you the war.”
There was widespread concern the photo was staged in the sense that the baby was placed where it was by the photographer. A later photo taken by the same photographer showed the baby on a stretcher missing an arm.
I’m not an expert on this particular photo and the politics surrounding it. But I found the focus on whether the photo was “true” to be interesting and possibly a distraction from the point.
The baby was actually there crying in the wreckage of a massive bombing on civilians. He was missing an arm. As a journalist, I understand the need to capture events exactly as they are. I get the dislike for the photo. But I can’t help but feel the discourse surrounding it was built to ignore what we are seeing in favor of arguing about what we aren’t seeing. It avoids making us uncomfortable.
Was the photo exactly real? I don’t know and I do agree that it is important to know. But a baby is crying in the middle of a bombed out place. He is brutally injured. He is real and he is there and he has no arm.
Can we focus on that for a fucking second?
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