Cartoonist, Writer, Cultural Panopticon
As usual, I will add my disclaimer that I’m not talking about ordinary pickups that are used for actual work. I’m talking about the gratuitously large, posh consumer models that suburbanites and cowboy cosplayers use to haul air 99% of the time. I rarely link to the NYT these days because I believe they’ve failed [ ] The post The Truck Stops Here first appeared on Jen Sorensen .
I recently encountered the you re just jealous retort for the thousandth time not directed at me, but at someone else who had argued against extreme economic inequality. This really seems to be what many people believe, and not just members of the upper crust. Those opposed to concentration of immense wealth in the hands [ ] The post Playing the Jealousy Card first appeared on Jen Sorensen .
This is a sequel to my earlier cartoon about e-commerce sites becoming bloated and junky and full of fake reviews. Online retail has become a disorienting hall of mirrors, a world of quantum shopping in which no product exists as a fixed entity in a single place or price point. Consumer Reports came out with [ ] The post More E-commerce Chaos first appeared on Jen Sorensen .
The FCC just approved the test launch of a space mirror-bearing satellite from a company called Reflect Orbital. The plan is to test one mirror this year, and scale up to a constellation of 50,000 by 2035. For a few years now, the company has been touting the illumination of solar farms at night as [ ] The post Selling the Sun first appeared on Jen Sorensen .
This cartoon is in the spirit of the book Motel of the Mysteries. I was initially thinking of Easter Island, which was widely thought to have suffered from population decline due to destruction of natural resources, a theory promulgated by the scholar Jared Diamond. Many researchers have since suggested that the slave trade and introduction of [ ] The post Slop-henge first appeared on Jen Sorensen…
It has become something of a trope to portray Trump as a squalling baby, but I would argue that this comparison is both inaccurate and unfair to babies. While Trump seems to have the emotional control of an infant, and I get the impulse to infantilize aspiring dictators, what is happening to democracy in the [ ] The post Baby vs. Trump first appeared on Jen Sorensen .
This week I m drawing what s on my mind, and that would be the enshittification of flying, to borrow a term that has been thrown around a lot lately. I realize it s a cliché to joke about air travel, but over the past couple years I ve gotten the sense that the system is operating ludicrously beyond [ ] The post Fly the Maxed Out Skies first appeared on Jen Sorensen .
This comic was inspired by a ProPublica article entitled Unfounded Health Concerns are Powering a Solar Backlash. by Anna Clark. She reports that farmers in Michigan are being thwarted from installing solar projects on the basis of completely unscientific health and safety concerns: These fears are especially ironic given the overwhelming evidence of fossil fuels [ ] The post The Dangers of Solar…
This cartoon is, of course, addressing the recent Supreme Court ruling that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act. The recent ruling allows gerrymandering that will severely curtail the voting power of entire communities. States are already scrambling to redistrict before the midterms. John Roberts, who has a long history of hostility to the VRA, made the [ ] The post Roberts Guts the Voting Rights…
I have always found business reporting to be somewhat interesting in that it provides a peek at what s happening on the ground beyond the usual political headlines. But lately when I glance at financial news, it seems increasingly untethered to reality and focused on economic activity that offers little to no benefit to society. Stocks [ ] The post The Post-Human Economy first appeared on Jen…
Since reality was already impossible to exaggerate, I decided to look at other examples of threats uttered by historical figures and famous movie characters. History is littered with over-the-top (and sometimes very odd) quotes from both real and fictitious people trying to verbally intimidate their enemies. Once you start looking at the quotes en masse, [ ] The post Quiz Time: Name That Bellicose…
Millions of people now trust the profit-driven braindroppings of random podcast bros more than the advice of medical professionals or decades of peer-reviewed research. I almost can t imagine being this gullible. Everyone wants to believe there s some secret out there that some meathead just discovered. Meanwhile, these scammers are getting rich off of supplement sales, [ ] The post The…