Click by Pimm Fox

On the rise of antisemitism in American public life There is something almost mathematically precise about the persistence of antisemitism: every civilization that has indulged it has sooner or later found itself diminished, barbarized, or destroyed.  One might have supposed this lesson — written in the ash of a continent — would have been sufficient instruction for the ages.  One would, of course...

Tennessee spent ninety minutes turning an execution chamber into a trembling medical farce — a grotesque national ritual where bureaucracy, vengeance, and incompetence merged into a bloody theater There are countries that build bridges. Countries that cure diseases. Countries that place telescopes into orbit to study galaxies older than language itself. And then there is the United States of Ameri...

How America turned children’s lungs into a revenue stream, regulators into ventriloquist dummies, and nicotine addiction into just another patriotic growth industry wrapped in mango flavor and campaign cash. The great genius of the modern American state is not merely that it permits suffering, but that it industrializes it with the bored efficiency of a clerk stamping parking tickets during a floo...

Civilization has reached that magical stage where a coffee mug can overthrow a corporate executive before lunch. This week in South Korea, the head of Starbucks Korea was fired over a promotional campaign featuring insulated drink tumblers and the catastrophic misuse of the word “tank.” Somewhere in Seattle, a room full of marketing executives is now hiding under ergonomic desks whispering, “Dear...

Waymo’s driverless cars can map fog, detect rain, and identify flooded roads — before driving straight into them, all while Silicon Valley congratulates itself for eliminating the last remaining human beings from daily life. Let's just start with the facts, shall we?  Because the facts — bless their stupid, beautiful hearts — require absolutely zero embellishment. On April 20th, a Waymo robot...

The World Is Running Out of Sand and Nobody Gives a Damn Let me tell you something that will ruin your morning coffee and possibly your will to continue pretending civilization is a good idea: we are running out of sand . Sand.  The stuff beneath your beach towel.  The stuff your kid stuffs into a bucket.  The foundational grit of every concrete tower, every highway overpass, every glass window th...

On the great American achievement of failing to fix a puddle There are civilizations that build aqueducts, cathedrals, observatories, and systems of law.  Then there is modern America, a republic so spiritually exhausted it cannot repair a leaking reflecting pool without transforming the effort into a carnival of vanity, no-bid contracts, algae, lawsuits, and patriotic turquoise. The Lincoln Memor...

America solves its postal revenue crisis the only way it knows how Ladies and gentlemen, your federal government — that shining city on a hill, that beacon of democratic genius — has arrived at a solution so magnificently, catastrophically stupid that it deserves not merely opposition but a moment of awed, slack-jawed silence before the screaming begins.  The United States Postal Service, which ca...

New York wrapped Manhattan in a congestion-pricing girdle, declared victory over pollution, and then quietly rerouted the exhaust to children in the Bronx — before funding asthma programs to cope with the fumes. New York, in its infinite municipal wisdom, has accomplished what generations of urban planners, traffic engineers, and chemically enhanced futurists only dreamed possible: it has discover...

On the FDA’s noble crusade to suppress the very data it paid to produce It takes a particular species of genius — one neither Aristotle nor Darwin anticipated — to fund a scientific study, wait for it to conclude that something is safe, and then bury it as though the truth were a corpse requiring a shallow grave. Yet here we are, citizens of the most expensively governed nation on Earth, watching...

As hunting creeps into America’s last sanctuaries, the line between preservation and target practice dissolves — and even Smokey looks ready to file for early retirement. There was a time when America’s National Parks were advertised as sanctuaries — cathedrals of pine and granite where the only thing stalking you was your own happiness.  Now, thanks to the latest brainstorm from the Department of...

A Dispatch from the Confederacy of Oops, I Mean, the American South Picture a democracy.  Now set it on fire.  Now draw a line around the fire.  Congratulations — you've just gerrymandered the fire.  Welcome to the American South in 2026, where the will of the people is less a sacred covenant and more of a rough first draft that the legislature reserves the right to edit, redline, and shred i...

Somewhere between a bad acid trip and a civics lesson written in crayon, the Trump administration has decided that the best way to manage American science is to fire it. Not trim it. Not reform it. Not even insult it in the usual, ritualistic fashion. No—terminate it, effective immediately, like a disgruntled nightclub owner tossing out the band mid-song because the trumpet player looks suspicious...

A free jet, a grounded Boeing program, and a shopping spree for spare parts — Washington proves once again that nothing costs more than something we’re told is free. There was a time, not long ago, when the American taxpayer was fleeced with a certain modesty — a sheepish decorum, as if the pickpocket at least tipped his hat after lifting your wallet. Those days, alas, are gone. We have entered a...

The Glorious Return of Military Darwinism There are bad ideas, and then there are ideas so catastrophically, historically illiterate that they feel like they were drafted on a cocktail napkin somewhere between the third Old Fashioned and a lobotomy.  Enter Pete Hegseth’s latest brainwave: making flu vaccines optional for members of the United States military. Optional. In the military. Yes, the sa...

A partial inventory of the Trump Administration's Ongoing Demolition of Public Life Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigns. The Border Patrol chief solicits prostitutes abroad. Trump sues the IRS he controls. Corey Lewandowski sells federal contracts. This is Washington, D.C. Let us begin with Lori Chavez-DeRemer, because she is the freshest wound, though in this administration, she is barely a paper cu...

And now, for his next miracle, he will attempt to read There are moments in American public life that force you to confront the outer limits of plausibility. This is one of them. Donald Trump is scheduled to read from the Bible. Read. Not wave. Not autograph. Not hold upside down like a prop in a hostage video for literacy. Read. Words. In sequence. Out loud. Presumably without filing a lawsuit ag...

On the Obama Presidential Center, the Trump glass tower, and the magnificent American tradition of gilding the public with someone else's ego. There is a window-starved building rising on the South Side of Chicago that looks, to any honest eye, as though a Crusader fortress mated drunkenly with a parking garage and produced this gray, hulking, joyless monolith — so aggressively ugly that one...

Santa Claus, Beloved Symbol, Alleged Fraudster We are gathered here today to mourn the passing of Santa Claus’s reputation — found deceased under circumstances involving wire fraud, luxury dining, and what federal prosecutors have described, with the delicacy of people who have seen everything, as “extensive renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey.” The accused, Stefan Pildes — president...

The FAA clears lasers for civilian airspace, and suddenly turbulence isn’t the worst thing overhead There it is, tucked between a coffee cup and the polite typography of institutional calm: the Federal Aviation Administration has cleared the use of high-energy lasers in civilian airspace. Read that again slowly, like a man checking the label on a bottle he swore was bourbon but now glows faintly i...

The state that invented “Virginia is for Lovers” has decided it is no longer in love with paying for your favorite insurrection There is something uniquely, magnificently, almost acrobatically American about a government financially underwriting an organization whose entire purpose is the loving maintenance of a rebellion against that same government. It has the gymnastic elegance of a man hiring...