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In an era of "uncs," "bums," and "goons," one term circulating among American teenagers stands out for its deeply political, and largely unknown, origin: "chud." The word began its life as the title of a 1984 horror film, "C.H.U.D.," an acronym for "Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers." From there, it was adopted by left-wing communities on 4chan as a derogatory label for right-wing individuals, before migrating into mainstream social media as a broader insult directed at anyone...

In June 2026, the same companies that just a few years ago were racing to add rainbows to their logos and drive floats through pride parades have gone quiet. No profile picture changes. No statements. No floats. The silence is not neutral. Corporate Pride People inside queer communities saw this coming. For years, the criticism of corporate pride sponsorship was consistent: the attraction to queer aesthetics felt transactional, a cash grab by companies that did little to materially support...

The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press. That sentence has been interpreted by courts for over two hundred years. What is happening right now is not a repeal of that sentence. It is a quiet, systematic redefinition of what it protects, who it protects, and when its protections apply. Text from the First Amendment highlighting fundamental freedoms, including religion, speech, press, assembly, and petitioning the government for redress. In...

The Trump administration cut 1.1 billion dollars in federal funding from public broadcasting this year. NPR stations across the country are contracting or closing. PBS faces a similar reckoning. Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and several other public-interest broadcasters have had their funding slashed or eliminated entirely. The justification offered by administration officials is that the government should not be in the business of funding media. That argument has a...

In October 2025, the Pentagon introduced new press guidelines. The guidelines required journalists seeking access to sign a 21-page policy restricting their contact with military and civilian staff, warning that reporting on information not officially approved could lead to consequences regardless of how the information was obtained or whether it was classified. Almost the entire mainstream press corps refused. The Associated Press, Reuters, NPR, The New York Times, and every major network...

On January 1, 2026, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City. He is the first Muslim to hold that office. He is the first Asian American to hold that office. He is also a democratic socialist who represents a district in Queens and who ran on a platform that most political analysts, as recently as three years ago, would have described as unelectable in a major American city. The significance of this moment does not reduce to identity, though identity matters. The first Muslim,...

Livestreams depict young men sitting in fancy cars and standing in bustling clubs, smiling awkwardly while steroids course through their bodies. If you turned the lights on, you would see red marks on their cheeks and jaws from hammers, the stubble barely starting to fill out their young faces. "Looksmaxxing" has entered the public zeitgeist as the newest form of self-improvement. Young men take extreme measures to increase their attractiveness, often pursuing dangerous practices with little...

The week of May 11 through May 17, 2026, produced a set of civil rights developments that, taken individually, each warranted serious coverage. Taken together, they describe something more alarming: a coordinated, sustained effort to weaken the federal government's role in protecting racial equality. Voting rights took a hit. DOJ enforcement activity against civil rights violations slowed. Immigration policing expanded in ways that civil rights organizations and international human rights...

In March 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case of Priscilla Villarreal, a citizen journalist in Laredo, Texas, who was arrested in 2017 for asking a police officer a question. That is not a metaphor. She was arrested for asking a question. Villarreal, who operates under the name La Gordiloca, published news stories about a border agent's suicide and a car crash after contacting law enforcement sources for information. Texas prosecutors charged her under a state statute that...

On May 19, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order directing banks to screen customers for immigration status. If you are undocumented, the federal government now wants your bank to know it. The order instructs financial regulators to identify signs that customers without legal status are opening accounts or obtaining loans. The Treasury Department is tasked with issuing risk guidance to financial institutions. An earlier draft of the order would have required banks to collect...

Across six continents, the legal machinery of the state has been turned against queer people. Understanding why requires confronting what law actually is — and what it has always been used to do.

Teen Vogue dissolved its politics team in November 2025, one day before a major election. The timing was not accidental. It was a statement, whether Conde Nast intended it to be or not, about which kinds of coverage are considered expendable when the business pressure is high enough. Teen Vogue was not just another youth publication. It was, for about a decade, one of the most consistently serious outlets in American media. It commissioned incarcerated writers. It published grassroots...

A protester in Kansas City marches with students from Crossroads Preparatory Academy in 2022. On Thursday, City Council repealed a ban on so-called conversion therapy, a scientifically discredited practice that seeks to “convert” LGBTQ+ minors to a heterosexual lifestyle. On March 31, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that Colorado's ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ minors violated the First Amendment. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was...

The United States is now ranked 64th in the world for press freedom. Not 64th in GDP. Not 64th in military spending. 64th in its ability to protect the people whose job is to tell the truth about power. Reporters Without Borders released its 2026 World Press Freedom Index last month, and the findings are damning. For a country that has long held up its First Amendment as the gold standard of democratic values, slipping to 64th out of 180 nations should be a national crisis. Instead, it barely...

Graduating undergraduate students are terrified of the labor market they are about to enter. They fear the impact that AI will have on virtually every field, especially in the humanities and creative work. Despite the volume of student concern about the replacement of human talent, a significant number of high-profile educators and professionals remain either oblivious or indifferent to the alarm their pupils are raising. That disconnect came to an uncomfortable head this May. Graduations are...

Creatures of the night, stalking through stone-brick towns, clinging to trees, watching through windows. The story of the vampire is universal, shifting between different themes and appearances to adapt to each culture and era. "Vampire" is a broad term with only one true requirement: the consumption of blood. Other supernatural abilities usually accompany this trait, but they are negotiable. The blood never is. Early iterations of what we now call vampires appear across the world, though the...

Two people I knew in high school earned Associate's Degrees before they ever received their diplomas. Today, one is at UCLA and the other at UC Berkeley, each on track to graduate at least a year ahead of their classmates. Neither spent a dollar on most of their credits. Both were admitted as first-years. This path offers a cheaper, fast-track through college than AP tests. It gives you a significant and directly transferable credit boost while making your college application stand out. If...

Records are flying off the shelves at thrift stores. Printed polaroids are taped to bedroom walls. Zines line the aisles of local bookstores. Gen Z has developed a genuine appreciation for physical media, a sensibility that felt lost in the early days of the internet and digital downloads. The old desire for efficiency has been replaced with something different: a need for tangible, personal memory. Today's teenagers and young adults want something they can hold, not just scroll past. The New...

Public media is not just background noise. It is the news infrastructure that serves places no one else will.

Gas is $4.55 a gallon. The Pentagon has spent $25 billion in nine weeks. And the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil moves, is still closed.

It is not just an aesthetic. The cigarette is back as a prop, a statement, and a cultural signal, and the reasons why tell you something real about this moment.

The Trump administration opened a civil rights investigation into a private women's college for admitting trans women. Legal experts are baffled. The implications go far beyond one campus.

Seven Republican state senators in Indiana voted against Trump's redistricting push. Now $7 million in outside spending is trying to end their careers. This is what political loyalty looks like in 2026.

Cole Allen walked into the most press-saturated room in Washington with a shotgun and two pistols. The story everyone covered was the shooting. The story fewer people covered is what it means for journalism.

The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's majority-Black district as an 'unconstitutional racial gerrymander.' The timing, right before the midterms, is not accidental.

If you steal money from a homeless man’s basket, only to later discover he is the hiring manager for the company you’re interviewing with, you probably won’t get the job. And, of course, it’s not a very nice thing to do. But in a game where you can step outside your own body while still shaping the world around you, things are different. You probably still won't get the job, but you gain the unique ability to see how that choice affects the way people perceive you. You can witness how it...

Streaming was supposed to give us more. More stories, more voices, more risk. What it gave us instead was an industry that decided its audience couldn't be trusted. In the era of mobile devices and fractured attention, the way people consume media has shifted fundamentally, and the writing of film and TV has followed. Stories feel flat. Characters explain themselves out loud rather than through the quiet work of performance. Subtlety, it seems, has been declared a liability. Everything must...

You Were Never Supposed to Feel This Tired There is a kind of exhaustion that feels less like a bad night and more like a pattern. You wake up tired, move through the day tired, and instead of asking why, you correct it. The correction is almost automatic. Coffee. What is striking is not that coffee works, but that we rarely question why we need it to work at all. The fatigue is treated as normal. The solution is treated as routine. That is where the story begins. Capitalism Needed More Than...

Markiplier in an interview in NYC. The Beginning of His Journey On March 6, 2012, a college dropout from the University of Cincinnati named Mark Edward Fischbach launched his first YouTube channel. The channel name "Markiplier" is a portmanteau of Mark and multiplier. He originally planned to upload comedy sketches and action videos, but it was his lifelong love of gaming that drove his growth. His first breakout series was "Amnesia: The Dark Descent," which earned him roughly 94,000...

In the summer of 1969, the Earth felt like a very small place. While the world below was tangled in political unrest and social change, three men were sitting on top of a controlled explosion, waiting to be hurled into the dark. When the Apollo 11 mission successfully touched down on the lunar surface, it did more than win a race. It proved that the limits of human achievement are only as small as our imagination and our willingness to take massive risks. A Decade of Desperation and Discovery...

ICE, otherwise known as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was established to protect communities. That purpose has been catastrophically abandoned. In recent months, ICE has not simply been detaining undocumented immigrants. It has been abusing detainees, separating children from their families, shooting innocent bystanders, and setting records for deaths in custody. This is not enforcement. It is terror. A Pattern of Violence In October 2025, ICE shot U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez...

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on Louisiana v. Callais. The 6-to-3 decision, drawn largely along partisan lines, dismantled a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, dealing a significant blow to minority representation in Congress. The case turned on the application of Section 2 of the VRA, the Gingles Test, and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Louisiana v. Callais, a group of non-African American voters sued Louisiana over...

Anime has become a dominant form of global cinema in the twenty-first century. For many Western audiences, the term is still relatively new. Anime is a unique form of animation that originated in Japan. It is characterized by distinctive colorful styles, complex narratives, and thematic depth that sets it apart from Western animation. A Brief History of Anime The earliest anime can be traced back to 1917. At that time, Japan was heavily influenced by Western animation techniques. However, the...

It is statistically unlikely. California has 10.37 million registered Democrats and 5.78 million registered Republicans; Democrats overwhelmingly dominate the state. Yet somehow, two frontrunner Republicans have led the California governor polls while a Democratic base remains split among four likely candidates. There are multiple reasons why Republicans are optimistic about this race: the top-two primary system, Democratic division, and a string of ongoing controversy. Had this election been...

Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant concept. It is woven into how we search, how we study, how we work, and increasingly, how we feel. And as AI grows more capable and more present in our everyday lives, one question becomes impossible to ignore: is it behaving responsibly? The Basics AI ethics is a set of moral principles designed to guide the development and use of artificial intelligence toward outcomes that are fair, safe, and beneficial. What was once a purely human concern,...

A Different Job Market Than Before For many young people today, finding a job is not as simple as it was for previous generations. In the past, a high school or college graduate could step relatively quickly into a stable position. The path into the workforce was worn and familiar. That path no longer exists in the same form. The job market is more competitive, more credentialed, and far less forgiving of people who are just getting started. Entry-level jobs routinely require prior...

It can feel, at times, like there is no escape from it. You open the news and the first thing you encounter is a disaster, a tragedy, or a crisis unfolding somewhere in the world. That feeling is not a personal failure or an overreaction. It reflects something real about how information reaches us: bad news travels faster, earns more clicks, and commands more attention. But that is not the whole story. The same week that brought coverage of an attempted school shooting in Oklahoma, an arson...

Demon Slayer Infinity Castle Anime has become a dominant form of global cinema in the twenty-first century. For many Western audiences, the term is still relatively new. Anime is a form of animation originated in Japan, characterized by distinctive colorful styles, complex narratives, and thematic depth that sets it apart from Western animation. The earliest anime can be traced to 1917, when Japan was heavily influenced by Western animation techniques. The industry did not gain significant...

A World Shaped by Conflict Wars happening right now across the world affect far more than the nations directly involved. The current generation grows up in a time when global conflict is constantly shown in news and social media feeds. Even students not directly affected still feel the effects in many different ways. Constant Exposure Through Media and Technology Today, information spreads faster than ever before. Social media, news apps, and videos deliver real-time updates from war zones....

"It's not you, it's me." In 2026, these words still carry weight. The year is marked by terms like "love bombing," "ghosting," and "options culture," now normalized across dating apps and social media. Someone always seems better. There is always something wrong with her, him, them, or you. But this wasn't always the case. Where did this cultural shift come from? The roots trace back to hook-up culture, amplified by social media trends, celebrity influence, and the digitization of dating...

Recently, citizens across the United States have noticed concerning details about President Donald Trump's appearance, including bruising on his hands and rashes on his neck. He has also exhibited unusual behavior in recent months. These observations pose a question that resonates across the political spectrum: is the U.S. government providing accurate information about the state of President Trump's health? At 79 years old, Trump is the oldest president to be sworn in. Health concerns, while...

The term “Astrology Girls” has become a fixture of online discourse over the past few years. It refers, usually with a smirk, to teenage and college-age women who organize their lives around spirituality: collecting crystals, consulting horoscope decks, and making decisions guided by the twelve zodiacal signs. January birthdays are Capricorn or Aquarius. February, Aquarius or Pisces. And so on around the calendar. The label implies that these women are irrational. The reality is more...

Twenty people were killed across southern Lebanon on Wednesday, hours after Lebanese and Israeli officials met face-to-face in Washington for the first time since 1993. The diplomacy and the destruction arrived in the same 24-hour window. Both felt like a statement.

In recent months, the Solar Panel Project of volunteer organization Sunflower Seeds Ukraine (SFSU) completed a remarkable feat: delivering nearly 200 solar panels across more than 8,500 kilometers of land and ocean to the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI). The effort required passionate volunteers, international cooperation, and generous donors. SFSU, a fiscally-sponsored program, accepted four tons of decommissioned equipment from an American nonprofit in Montana and transferred it to KPI,...

A Culture Shaped by Many Influences Caribbean traditions continue to shape families and communities across the world. The Caribbean spans many islands and cultures: Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and beyond. Because of this breadth, Caribbean heritage is rich and layered. Over hundreds of years, it absorbed African, Indigenous, European, and Asian influences. Each island carries its own customs, yet many Caribbean traditions share a common...

A Statement Goes Viral On April 7, 2026, President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social a message about Iran’s regime that quickly spread across news platforms and social media. In the post, Trump warned that a whole civilization would die that night, never to be brought back. He issued what many read as a direct threat tied to potential U.S. strikes on Iranian bridges and power plants. Trump called explicitly for complete and total regime change, expressed hope for something revolutionarily...

Political literacy is more than just knowing who runs the government or what laws are passed. It is a vital skill that empowers us to understand the systems shaping our lives, engage meaningfully in civic life, and challenge the narratives that influence public opinion. In a world saturated with information and misinformation, political literacy becomes a tool for clarity, agency, and justice. Why Political Literacy Matters More Than Ever Political literacy is the foundation of a functioning...

Before the Trend In the past year, a wave of trends swept across social media: Labubu plush toys from Hong Kong, pistachio Dubai chocolate, and AI-generated Italian brain rot videos. But no trend proved more durable or more widely adopted than matcha, the bright green powdered tea that migrated from niche local cafes to nearly every major coffee chain in the country. What most people ordering a lavender matcha cold foam frappuccino do not know is that the drink they are holding has almost...

The Attention Problem Technology is everywhere. It shapes how students learn, communicate, and spend their time. And there is growing evidence that the way this generation uses it is quietly working against them. The issue starts with attention. Students are spending hours cycling through short videos and social media feeds, content designed to deliver constant stimulation. Against that baseline, sitting with a chapter, working through a problem, and staying engaged in class feels slow and...

A Presidency Without Pause It has been difficult to identify a sustained period of peace since the beginning of the Trump administration. Every other month brings a new war, conflict, or so-called military operation. This pattern of interventionism is not unprecedented; presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Truman all demonstrated a sustained reliance on military force across party lines. Under this administration, however, the pace feels almost unrelenting, with breaks between conflicts rarely...