Ryan Zickgraf is a journalist based in Atlanta.
Early Pentecostal preachers railed against elites and uplifted the oppressed — a far cry from their recent efforts to elect right-wing populists like Donald Trump. There are deep contradictions at the heart of Pentecostalism, and they aren’t resolved yet.
Many fear that Twitter under Elon Musk will fall to bigots and harassers. Maybe. But instead of arguing over who should be kicked off Twitter, we should ask what it’s designed to do to those who stay on it.
Conservatives are convinced that Disney is trying to implement a radical left agenda. But even with its altruistic-seeming new housing development for workers, the company is just looking out for the bottom line.
The avant-garde pop star Grimes has made a heel turn away from left-wing politics toward the Silicon Valley libertarianism of her ex Elon Musk. She calls herself “a bit of a socialist, but not economically.” Let’s just call her a manic pixie dream capitalist.
BlackRock president Rob Kapito has a lot of nerve calling young Americans entitled brats. In reality, millennials and Zoomers are struggling to find a foothold in a harsh economic climate that BlackRock executives themselves helped create.
Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties imagines the decade as dominated by pop culture, not politics. In reality, Gen X was passionately political during the 1990s — and centrists were busy laying the groundwork for the politics of the next century.
Decades after the end of Jim Crow, cities like Mobile, Alabama, are still shot through with racial segregation. That segregation is reflected in the city’s Mardi Gras culture, where some social societies still maintain white-only membership.
All professional sports team owners are evil. But the sight of billionaire LA Rams owner Stan Kroenke hoisting the Super Bowl trophy on Sunday should inspire particular revulsion — he’s one of the most despicable owners on the planet.
Liberals have made a cottage industry out of breathless warnings about impending apocalypse at the hands of the Right. This rhetoric isn’t just overblown — it’s also politically useless.
Housed within McDonald’s Chicago HQ are both white-collar workers upstairs, enjoying a relaxed work environment and decent compensation — and restaurant workers downstairs, making the company’s profits but facing unsafe work environments and low wages.
America is experiencing a massive shortfall in hospital beds, harmful to both COVID and non-COVID patients needing care. But the pandemic didn’t create the hospital bed crisis — it exacerbated an existing one that our government refuses to address.
Has anyone ever seen Jeff Bezos and Superman supervillain Lex Luthor in the same room?
The Matrix Resurrections makes a convincing case that the Matrix franchise is keeping us plugged into the Matrix. Unfortunately, it exhausts the viewer in doing so.
Thanks to her investing prowess, the Speaker of the House’s wealth grew by an estimated $16.7 million in 2020, just as millions of Americans fell into poverty and struggled to make ends meet during the COVID-19 pandemic. Long live the Queen of Stonks!
Millions of players agree that Microsoft’s Forza Horizon 5 is a beautiful, fun, and endlessly seductive video game. It’s also an eerie transitional technology that hints at the dystopian metaverse to come.
OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, which played a key role in creating America’s opioid crisis, has dissolved. But the crisis rages on, lives are still in danger, and the profits are still flowing — now to street dealers who manufacture synthetic drugs.
The Facebook founder intends to usher in a new era of the internet where there’s no distinction between the virtual and the real — and no logging off.
Michael K. Williams wasn’t just one of the most talented actors in America. He was also in the middle of a political awakening, speaking out on a range of issues from police reform to fighting poverty.
Once the proud land of Lincoln, downstate Illinois — devastated by unemployment, deindustrialization, and an infamously corrupt political class — is quickly becoming a failed state.
The Second Gilded Age is starting to look more and more like the first.