In the grand forensic tradition of whodunits, Nate Cohn’s recent newsletter in The New York Times attempts to answer the question: Who killed the Democrats in 2024? And like any good sleight of hand, he pulls the reader away from the crime scene just as the murder weapon is being polished in the next room. Spoiler: it was the media with a heavy assist from Mr. Cohn himself. Cohn’s June 26 post-election piece — “The Tilt: Final Word on 2024 Turnout” — arrives as the Gray Lady’s version of a co...

The Curtain Rises: Vacuity as Performance “This vacuousness is the choreography of illiberal power.” It sounds like the kind of phrase that belongs in a graduate seminar — abstract, a little haughty. But it is not an abstraction. It is a diagnosis. We live in a country where the dance of emptiness is no longer background noise but the show itself. Trumpism didn’t invent the performance of hollowness. It perfected it. The rally chant with no policy, the executive order with no enforcement, the...

After nearly three hundred essays and dozens of podcast episodes, I’ve reached a simple conclusion: I’m done writing on a schedule, and I’m done writing for platforms that confuse noise with vitality. When I began this experiment, I thought the work would matter in the way words used to — that reason and wit might still pierce the fog. I believed there was an audience hungry for insight instead of outrage, context instead of clickbait. I believed satire could still reach the public nerve. May...