A Close Look at Modern Mythology, Pop Culture, Hot Media, Book Reviews, and the Psychology That Makes Our Society Hop
Live Last read · last published · next check
Several times recently, I’ve seen social media users post variations on “You mustn’t say ‘chai tea,’ because chai means tea , so ‘chai tea’ means ‘tea tea.’” These posts aren’t verbatim, so they presumably aren’t copypasta; but they repeat the same message, that “chai tea” is a tautology. I take the poster’s point. But I think this misses something important about how language evolves, and how…
Eve Noblezada and Reeve Carney as Eurydice and Orpheus in Hadestown: the Musical The word “catharsis” enters English from Greek through Aristotle, mostly his book Poetics . Therein, Aristotle uses the word “katharsis” to describe the effect he believes tragic drama has on audiences, raising negative emotions and, by expressing them, leaving them behind in the theater. For the most part, only…
President Taco and Dr. Fauci have clearly differed on how to face the problem. I struggle watching the Senate grilling America’s former chief immunologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, for the same reason I avoid Farrelly Brothers-style doofus comedies: because it pains me to watch hapless dorks struggle. While Senators, particularly Rand Paul, fling bad-faith questions, Dr. Fauci responds by avoiding…
John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now Jesus of Nazareth, the man believers call Christ, existed in a time and place. Too many Christians read the Gospels like a fairy tale, a pleasant lesson unmoored from historical context. But, as former Servite Catholic priest and DePaul professor John Dominic Crossan writes, Jesus’ mission took place in the direct shadow of…
John Fugelsang, Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds Let us pray. Lord, we come before you today in a state of grief. Not only grief for our broken world, the poverty we allow to fester, the disease we fail to heal, the human lives we let slip through the cracks. But also grief for the religious…
The now-infamous photo of an unidentified woman surrounded by Patriot Front members, captured by Reuters stringer Cheney Orr By now we’ve all seen the photo taken on July 4 th , 2026, of a lone Black woman on a Washington, DC, commuter train. She’s surrounded by White men in matching polo shirts, balaclavas, ballcaps, and wraparound shades: Patriot Front members heading for a White supremacist…
Today’s quarter-millennium anniversary of American independence is purely formal, if you read history. The document signed on July 4th, 1776, merely clarified the terms of the Continental Congress’s July 2nd resolution of Independence; the signatories famously didn’t begin signing the Declaration of Independence until August. Besides, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, generally considered the…
Ronald Malfi, Bone White A scruffy, frostbitten mountain man wanders into a rural Alaska diner, orders a hot beverage, and casually confesses to eight murders. Then he patiently waits for the state bulls to arrive from Fairbanks. The accused’s strange confession, and the particularly gruesome murders, soon become national news, and Paul Gallo, a Maryland literature prof, recognizes the landscape…
Social media doesn’t allow complex thought, nuanced analysis, or Socratic discussion. I think everyone can appreciate that. Anybody who’s ever tweeted “I like apples” and gotten dogpiled for not including oranges, kumquats, and jackfruit in their synopsis knows what I mean. Especially on platforms like Xitter, Threads, and Bluesky, which cap post lengths, the internet flattens difficult topics,…
Elon Musk Last week’s declaration that Elon Musk has become history’s first trillionaire has me thinking about what a dollar means in today’s economy. Not in the ordinary moralistic sense of it being wrong that he has a trillion dollars, while nearly one in five American children is food insecure . No, rather, I question what Elon actually has. Because it sure isn’t money in the sense that most…
