A minimum wage that can’t buy rent is not a wage. It’s a suggestion with a time clock. America is in a strange phase of capitalism where we have decided inflation is a natural disaster but poverty is a personal flaw. We hold candlelight vigils for the price of eggs, then lecture full-time workers about “budgeting” like they’re blowing their paychecks on yachts and artisanal air.

National security, now featuring grievance management and the administrative leave of anyone who has ever touched a scheduling app. There’s a particular kind of chaos that only exists inside agencies that handle sensitive intelligence. It’s not loud. It’s not cinematic. It’s the quiet kind where people stop sending emails and start communicating through pauses, raised eyebrows, and the ancient federal art of “Let’s talk about this in person, far away from printers.”

A statutory deadline, a disappearing website, and the federal government’s newest genre: partial compliance theatre. Congress did that rare Washington thing where everyone pretends the job still matters. They passed a law. They put a deadline in it. They specified what had to be released. They even limited the excuses, the usual ones about victim protection, sensitive personal information, and legitimately protected law enforcement details.

When corporate consolidation meets political fear, the investigative segment becomes a ghost. There are two kinds of silence in American journalism. One is the ordinary kind, the necessary pause while reporters verify names, confirm documents, and wait for reluctant sources to stop pretending their phones are dead. The other kind arrives after a story has already cleared every hurdle, legal review, editorial approval, promotional rollout, and then vanishes anyway.

When you rename a crisis, you also rename what you’re allowed to do about it. If you ever want to watch a government change the shape of reality without changing the underlying problem, pay attention to vocabulary. Not the boring vocabulary, not the kind that lives in briefing binders, but the kind that arrives with cinematic lighting and a drumbeat. Words that come preloaded with permission.

No particular order, because ranking art is how streaming apps turn joy into spreadsheets. Every year, television looks at America’s collective attention span, flicks it on the forehead, and says, “Come here, I made you something complicated.” In 2025, it felt like the medium finally admitted what we all already know, most of us are not watching TV to “escape,” we’re watching to metabolize.

When the government stops working, it also stops counting who is hurting, and calls that “temporary.” The federal shutdown this year did not just lock doors, pause permits, and turn “please hold” into a lifestyle. It reached into the country’s basic economic dashboard and started pulling out wires like a bored teenager under the hood of a car they do not have to drive.

A terror attack, a nation in shock, and the familiar moment when everyone realizes the system worked exactly as designed, which is to say too late. Bondi Beach is supposed to be the place Australia sends to the world as proof of ease. Sun, water, the soft promise that life can be simple if you stand close enough to the ocean.

A double homicide investigation, a lifetime of work that taught America how to argue, and the sudden hush that follows when a familiar moral voice goes missing. The country woke up to news that does not fit inside the usual compartments. Rob Reiner, the filmmaker and actor whose work helped shape the modern American sense of humor and decency, and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead in their Brentwood home, and police are investigating it as an apparent double homicide.

By 2028 the Democratic Party must stop running as a cautious maintenance crew and instead offer an unapologetic governing vision that begins with abolishing the filibuster to enable majority rule, then moves swiftly into universal government-backed health care, aggressive antitrust enforcement, modern gun safety laws, and a rebalanced tax code that raises rates on billionaires whose paper losses have no lived impact while redirecting revenue into education, childcare, infrastructure delivery, rent stabilization, and large-scale housing construction by stripping away zoning barriers and red tape, all framed as a New Deal for a new era that raises the minimum wage, strengthens labor protections, applies smart deregulation to accelerate building and innovation while using strict regulation to prevent monopoly, corruption, and oligarchy, prepares for AI-driven job displacement with new social contracts and stronger safety nets, expands democracy through voting protections and new states, reinforces safeguards on presidential power, and proves government can move fast and deliver materially for people who are done waiting.

Eight trophies, one gravitational center, and an industry that briefly convinced itself this was destiny rather than appetite. The Game Awards 2025 unfolded like a formal ceremony that accidentally wandered into a single studio’s victory party and then politely decided not to leave. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 did not simply win big. It became the room. By the end of the night, Sandfall Interactive’s breakout RPG had collected eight major awards plus Best Performance for Jennifer English as Maelle, effectively turning the show into a guided tour of one game’s trophy shelf.

Abraham Isaac Quintanilla Jr. was the architect, the gatekeeper, the father, the manager, and the human perimeter fence around Selena’s life, and now that he’s gone, the argument over protection versus possession will keep pacing the room. Abraham Isaac Quintanilla Jr., Selena Quintanilla-Pérez’s father, longtime manager, and the engine behind Selena y Los Dinos, died at 86. If you grew up with Selena in your bones, or if you came to her later through the movie, the music, the series, the shirts, the candles, the TikToks, the constant cultural afterglow, then you already know his silhouette.

A “targeted” hit, a disputed death, civilian casualties, and the world’s most brittle truce doing that familiar thing where it pretends it can survive physics. Israel announced it carried out a targeted strike in Gaza City that it says killed Raed Saed (also rendered Raad Saad), described by the Israeli military as a senior Hamas commander in the Qassam Brigades tied to operations and weapons production, accused of helping plan the October 7 attack and of rebuilding Hamas’s military manufacturing.

Three Americans dead near Palmyra, serious retaliation promised, and the same old lie that a victory lap is the same as an ending. An ISIS-linked ambush near Palmyra in central Syria hit a joint U.S. and Syrian partner movement and killed two U.S. service members and an American civilian interpreter. Three additional U.S. troops were wounded, along with multiple Syrian personnel.

The press asks for information, the podium offers vibes, and the real product is confusion with a patriotic label. There are two ways to look at a White House press briefing. The old way is as a daily information exchange, flawed but functional, where reporters ask questions and the government, at least in theory, answers them in a way tethered to records, data, and basic reality.

A CNBC headline, a market rally, and an entire industry watching the federal government like it’s a moody landlord who might finally fix the heater. Cannabis stocks and marijuana-focused ETFs just did that thing they always do when Washington coughs in their direction: they levitated. After a CNBC report said President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order as soon as Monday directing a major easing of federal marijuana restrictions by moving cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act, traders treated the news like a starter pistol and sprinted into the sector with the enthusiasm of people who have never been harmed by the phrase “expected to.” Names like Tilray Brands, Canopy Growth, SNDL, and Curaleaf got the love.

A small, redacted photo dump, a much larger unseen archive, and a political system that treats transparency like a weapon and privacy like an afterthought. House Democrats on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee just did what Congress does best in an election-era adrenaline rush: released a limited batch of images from a vastly larger trove and then acted shocked that everyone immediately used them as ammunition.

The résumé is flawless, the vibes are “off,” and somehow the safe choice is always some guy who thinks subcommittee work is a type of sandwich. The modern American left has a recurring ritual that looks like accountability from far away and feels like sabotage up close. It begins when an accomplished woman steps forward with credentials, receipts, and the kind of competence that should make everyone exhale.

The administration calls it law enforcement, critics call it a rights grinder, and Congress tries to remember it has a job besides yelling. The House Homeland Security Committee hauled DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in for an oversight hearing and the whole thing played out like a courtroom drama performed by people who hate courts. Noem defended the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown with the kind of flat certainty that works great in a campaign ad and terribly in a constitutional republic.

A holiday travel season, a church-centered cluster, and a virus that does not care about your Facebook degree in “doing your own research.” In the Upstate of South Carolina, public health officials are doing the thing we always swear we want government to do, quietly, competently, with clipboards and contact tracing and the slow dread of watching a preventable disease sprint through a community like it just found a loophole.

One part maritime choke point, one part reality show, and one part global oil market swallowing hard. The Trump administration is preparing more at-sea seizures of oil tankers near Venezuela, and it is doing it with the kind of confident swagger that usually shows up right before someone asks, quietly, what the exit plan is. The first known U.S. seizure of a Venezuelan-linked tanker, the Skipper, reportedly unfolded off Venezuela’s coast in a military-style operation, which is a careful phrase that sounds like “law enforcement” until you picture the hardware.

Two 51-48 votes, two dead plans, and a whole lot of lawmakers acting like “imminent” is a decorative word that looks nice in press releases. The U.S. Senate just performed one of its signature magic tricks: taking a cliff, putting a warning sign next to it, posing for photos in front of the warning sign, and then walking away as if gravity is a private-sector problem.

The Justice Department keeps pulling the lever, and the indictment machine keeps blinking “try again” like it’s a broken arcade game with federal letterhead. There are a few sacred American traditions you can set your watch by, even if nobody can agree what time it is anymore. One is that a federal grand jury will usually do what prosecutors ask. Another is that when power gets embarrassed, it rarely steps back, it just changes the lighting and calls it a new angle.

A rare intraparty “no” lands in the middle of the national gerrymander arms race, and suddenly everyone is pretending they just love local control again. Indiana’s Statehouse spent this week acting like a polite Midwestern family hosting a reunion while a brawl happens behind the deviled eggs. The fight was over House Bill 1032, a mid-cycle congressional remap sold as basic maintenance for the Republican brand, the political equivalent of rotating the tires so the U.S.

The Founding Fathers Forgot to Mention That Napping is Now a State Secret Donald Trump has finally invented a new branch of jurisprudence called "feelings treason," where noticing a seventy-nine-year-old man is tired is punishable by the full force of the internet. It was only a matter of time before Donald Trump, a man who treats the Constitution like a licensing agreement he didn't read, discovered the one flaw in American law: it does not explicitly criminalize hurting his feelings.