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Friction Without Contact: Or, How Physics Just Side-Eyed 300 Years of “Obvious Truths”

By Tony Hicks March 24, 2026

There are few things scientists love more than a law that feels permanent. Not legally permanent—no, no, that would require Congress—but the kind of permanent that sits comfortably in textbooks, quietly shaping how generations of students imagine the world works. Friction, for example. That old, dependable concept. The thing you learned in middle school when someone dragged a block across a table and said, “See? That’s friction.” Simple. Intuitive. Comforting. Friction requires contact. Two surfaces rub together. Energy is lost. Heat is generated. Things slow down. The universe makes sense again. Except… now it doesn’t. Because researchers have decided—very rudely, I might add—that friction can happen without contact . That’s right. No touching. No rubbing. No surfaces grinding together like a stressed-out grad student’s teeth. Just… forces. Invisible ones. Magnetic ones. Doing friction-like things while staying socially distant. And just like that, a 300-year-old assumption—the ...

The Real Threat of Religious Law in America (Hint: It’s Not Who You’ve Been Told to Fear)

By Tony Hicks March 23, 2026

I’ve noticed something strange about fear in America. It doesn’t behave like a rational emotion. It doesn’t track evidence. It doesn’t follow probability. It follows narrative. It follows repetition. It follows whoever is loudest, most confident, and most willing to say, “Be afraid of them.” And for years now, one of the most persistent fears floating around our national psyche has been this idea that America is on the brink of being overtaken by some kind of foreign religious legal system. You’ve heard it before. It gets whispered in comment sections, shouted on talk shows, and baked into campaign rhetoric like it’s a proven inevitability instead of what it actually is: a cultural ghost story. The story usually goes something like this: There’s a creeping threat, quietly advancing, waiting to replace American law with something alien, oppressive, and incompatible with “our values.” It’s framed as an invasion, a takeover, a ticking clock. And the villains in this story are almost alw...

The “She Said It Was Love” Defense: When Authority, Delusion, and Power Collide

By Tony Hicks March 22, 2026

There’s a certain script society expects when a teacher is charged with having a sexual relationship with a student. It usually comes with outrage, headlines, and a collective moral reflex that says: this is wrong, full stop. But then something strange happens. The details come out. The teacher is young. The student is male. And suddenly, parts of the internet—those deeply unserious corners of human consciousness—start asking questions like: “But what if he wanted it?” “But what if it was love?” “But where were teachers like this when I was in school?” And just like that, the conversation derails into a carnival of bad takes, moral confusion, and deeply broken cultural wiring. So let’s slow this down and talk about what’s actually happening here—not just in the courtroom, but in the collective psyche. Chapter 1: The Fantasy vs. Reality Gap There’s a massive disconnect between how people imagine these situations and what they actually are. In the fantasy version: The...

At 25, She Owned 5 Rental Properties… and Still Managed to Learn the Hard Way That “Winning” Can Be Expensive

By Tony Hicks March 21, 2026

There’s a certain kind of headline that makes the internet collectively inhale through its teeth. “At 25, she owned five rental properties.” Pause. That’s the kind of sentence designed to make half the population feel like they’ve wasted their lives, and the other half open Zillow with a newfound sense of urgency and a dangerously inflated sense of competence. But then comes the twist—the part that doesn’t trend as well on social media: “…but says investing in real estate was her No. 1 money mistake.” Ah. There it is. The emotional plot twist. The financial equivalent of a rom-com where the dream guy turns out to be emotionally unavailable and deeply into crypto. And suddenly, what looked like a victory lap becomes a cautionary tale. Let’s talk about that. The Cult of Early Success We’ve created a culture that worships early financial wins like they’re divine intervention. Buy property at 23? Genius. Own multiple rentals before 30? Visionary. Use the word “portfolio” unir...

Filibusters, Shortcuts, and the Art of Legislative Laziness: Why Even Republicans Are Side-Eyeing the SAVE America Act Strategy

By Tony Hicks March 20, 2026

There are few things in Washington more sacred than the illusion of principle. Not principle itself—let’s not get carried away—but the illusion of it. The Senate filibuster, that ancient relic of procedural theater, has long been treated as one of those sacred cows. Not because it always produces good outcomes (it doesn’t), but because it forces lawmakers to at least pretend they’ve thought things through. So when a GOP senator publicly calls the idea of gutting the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act a “foolish and lazy idea,” it’s not just intra-party squabbling. It’s a rare moment where someone in the room says, “Hey, maybe bulldozing the rules every time we’re impatient isn’t the flex we think it is.” And in a city powered by impatience, that’s practically heresy. The Filibuster: Dysfunctional, Yes—But Also a Speed Bump Let’s start with the obvious: the filibuster is messy, outdated, and often abused. It has been used to stall everything from civil rights to routine appoi...

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