John Cox

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Vanity Fair

How Jill Biden Concealed the President’s Rapid Deterioration | Vanity Fair

Excerpted from Azadeh Moaveni's book on the East Wing, this piece argues that Jill Biden's First Ladyship was narrow and Joe-centric, shaped by her longtime aide Anthony Bernal's control over her office and by a fear of public exposure, which led her to step back from Afghan women's advocacy and military family events. It closes with the June 2024 debate and her role in the campaign's failure to address Joe Biden's visible decline, framing her as a figure who was both central and opaque.

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Texas Monthly

He Killed His Daughter After Arguing Abouts Trump. Her Mother Seeks Justice. – Texas Monthly

Texas Monthly reports on Lucy Harrison's 2025 shooting death in Prosper, Texas, and on her mother Jane Coates's failed push to reopen the case after a Collin County grand jury declined to indict her father, Kris Harrison. The piece lays out the inconsistencies in Harrison's account, including his drinking that day, his claim that the gun "just went off," and the physical evidence that contradicts his story, alongside a February 2026 British coroner's finding of gross negligence manslaughter that has no legal force in the U.S. It is valuable as a close look at how a contested shooting was investigated and why the grand jury outcome has provoked anger on both sides of the Atlantic.

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aeon.co

The politics of masculinity at the end of the Roman republic | Aeon Essays

This piece argues that Roman masculinity was never a fixed, unproblematic ideal but a contested performance, using Cicero as its case study: his oratory, his exile and his daughter's death, and his late philosophical turn all show a man repeatedly redefining what counted as manly. Its central point is that the modern nostalgia for a Golden Age of shared manhood misreads the ancient world, where virtus, self-control and public speech were as anxiously policed as they are today. The distinctive thread is Cicero's own framing of grief and political loss as emasculating, and his claim that bearing those feelings bravely was itself the truest form of manliness.

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www.indiewire.com

The 10 Best Films for Our Current Political Moment

Armando Ianucci, creator of "Veep," drew parallels between Biden's delayed exit from the race and the final voting scene in his film "The Death of Stalin," where characters fear being the first to act against the prevailing order. The piece uses this moment to argue that art inadvertently captures political dynamics we struggle to acknowledge in reality, then expands into a list of ten films—from "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" to "Lincoln"—that offer deeper insights into contemporary political issues than simple sitcom comparisons can provide.

Permalink filmrecommendationspoliticscinema

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apple.news

apple.news

Church Life Journal

You're a Slave to Money, Then You Die | Church Life Journal | University of Notre Dame

This essay traces neoliberalism from its origins in 1920s anti-democratic theory through its ascendance under Thatcher and Reagan to its current dominance as a comprehensive worldview—arguing that it functions not merely as economic policy but as a quasi-religious metaphysics in which the Market replaces God as the organizing principle of reality. Drawing on thinkers like Hayek and Mises, the author demonstrates how neoliberals deliberately obscured the market's artificial construction behind mystifications of "spontaneous order," used state power to suppress democratic constraints on capital, and cultivated technologies of the self (social media, personal debt, the "entrepreneurial self") that internalize market logic into every aspect of human identity and relationships. The essay concludes by suggesting that imagining genuine alternatives to neoliberal capitalism requires recovering a theological vision of human dignity—that we are creatures of infinite, not market-determined, worth.

Permalink philosophypolitics

Apple Podcasts

This Is Why People Hate the Government

The Ezra Klein Show

This Is Why People Hate the Government

25 August 2026 · 1h 17m

Plays from the show's own host. Nothing is loaded from them until you press play.

Americans waste roughly 12 billion hours annually—$430 billion in uncompensated labor—navigating unnecessarily complex government bureaucracy, a burden that stems not from incompetence but from deliberate policy choices designed to deter access to social programs and tax compliance. Programs like Social Security and Medicare demonstrate that government can be both complex administratively and user-friendly in practice, suggesting that when accessing benefits requires exhausting effort, it reflects intentional design rather than inevitable inefficiency. Lowrey argues that this "time tax" disproportionately harms the poor and that demanding simpler, more accessible government services is a matter of political choice and accountability.

Permalink productivitypolitics

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apple.news

PBS News

7 questions about the national debt hitting $40 trillion

This explainer breaks down the milestone of U.S. gross federal debt crossing $40 trillion, clarifying what "gross debt" actually measures (including intragovernmental IOUs like the Social Security Trust Fund) and tracing the run-up to pandemic-era shocks plus sustained post-2020 deficits driven by bipartisan spending and tax cuts. It contextualizes the figure against other nations' debt-to-GDP ratios—noting the U.S. sits at 125.8%, behind Japan, Italy, and Greece among others—while cautioning that Japan's domestically-held debt structure makes its situation less comparable or reassuring than it might seem. The piece closes with a warning that interest payments now exceed defense and Medicare spending, and flags several fiscal watchdog groups pushing Congress toward earlier, less painful reforms.

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www.readtangle.com

The everything, everywhere, all at once corruption story.

This is Isaac Saul's Tangle News piece cataloguing the Trump family's alleged self-dealing during his second term — crypto ventures, foreign business deals with Gulf and Middle Eastern figures, and suspicious market timing — arguing these dwarf the Hunter Biden scandal in scale yet get virtually no Republican oversight or public traction. Saul, who covered Hunter Biden extensively, uses his own record to argue he's not being partisan, framing the piece as an attempt to compile the sprawling, underreported evidence into one accessible account. It's worth keeping as a straightforward "here's the full list" reference rather than a single-issue exposé.

Permalink politicsnewsreaddonald trump

www.wired.com

Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They’re the Bad Guys

Palantir employees are increasingly breaking with the company's culture of internal debate to openly question leadership over its deepening ties to Trump-era immigration enforcement and military operations, including ICE deportation work, alleged Maven surveillance involvement in a deadly Iranian strike, and CEO Alex Karp's public rhetoric on AI and voters. WIRED documents a year of escalating internal Slack revolts, deleted message logs, contentious AMAs with privacy staff, and a fascism-tinged company "manifesto" that together suggest a genuine identity crisis at a firm founded partly to prevent post-9/11 civil-liberties abuses. Worth keeping as a granular, sourced account of how a secretive, non-disparagement-bound workforce is nonetheless cracking under Karp's unapologetic embrace of controversy.

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www.benjaminlcorey.com

Could American Evangelicals Spot the Antichrist? Here Are the Biblical Predictions:

Corey walks through the standard biblical proof-texts end-times Christians cite for identifying the Antichrist, then applies them point by point to Donald Trump — arrogance, boastful speeches, the seven "hills," a shock election win, enriching himself and cronies through real estate, cruelty toward migrants at the southern border, a staged church photo-op after tear-gassing protesters, and evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham framing his rise as divinely ordained. It's satirical in method but genuinely provocative in intent, using the mechanics of prophecy-matching that his evangelical peers use against liberal targets to instead indict Trump and the Christian right that supports him. The piece is really an extended, tongue-in-cheek polemic against fear-based end-times theology and its political alliance with Trumpism, worth keeping as a sharp, list-driven takedown rather than a serious eschatological argument.

Permalink united statespoliticsdonald trump

kottke.org

www.independent.co.uk

Tributes paid to six US troops killed in Iran drone strike including mother who was two days away from returning home

This piece profiles the six US Army Reserve soldiers killed when Iran struck a logistics command centre near Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, a day into the joint US-Israel "Operation Epic Fury" campaign against Iran. It centres on personal details from grieving families—Sgt. Amor's near-return home and unprotected relocation, Sgt. Coady's fresh promotion and cybersecurity studies, Capt. Khork's ROTC-driven patriotism, and Sgt. Tietjens' martial arts teaching—giving a human face to the first named American casualties of the escalating conflict.

Permalink united statespoliticsnewsmilitary