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From Sears to Speakeasies: How Private Clubs Are Eating the Mall

By Tony Hicks
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Once upon a time, the American mall had anchors. Big ones. Literal temples of mass consumption where you could buy socks, a lawn chair, a microwave, and a sense of mild despair all under one fluorescent roof. Sears. JCPenney. Macy’s. These weren’t just stores — they were civic infrastructure. They told you where to park, where to enter, and how long you’d probably stay before questioning your life choices. Now? The anchor tenant isn’t a department store. It’s a members-only club with a wine director, a velvet rope, and initiation fees that quietly scream, this space is not for everyone, and that’s the point. Welcome to the new American retail reality, where malls aren’t dying — they’re being privatized, curated, and filtered for income, taste, and social signaling. The escalator that once took you to bed linens now takes you to a speakeasy. The old food court has been replaced by a tasting menu. And the biggest draw in the shopping center isn’t a sale — it’s access. This isn’t a qui...
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The Texas Surprise That Has Republicans Checking the Locks

By Tony Hicks
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Every election cycle has its jump-scare moment—the one result that makes party strategists drop their coffee, refresh spreadsheets, and quietly text each other, “Okay, but… how?” This time, that moment came out of a place Republicans have treated like a gated community with a long-standing HOA rule against Democrats: a Fort Worth–area Texas state Senate district that just elected one anyway. In a runoff that landed with the political grace of a bowling ball through a china cabinet, Democrat Taylor Rehmet beat Republican Leigh Wambsganss by 57% to 43% in Senate District 9. Not squeaked by. Not “within the margin of error.” This was decisive—clean, loud, and impossible to wave away with the usual “low turnout, weird vibes, Mercury in retrograde” excuses. If this were just another special election in a sleepy district no one’s ever heard of, it would be a footnote. But it wasn’t. This was a deep-red district that had voted for Donald Trump by about 17 points in 2024. Democrats didn’...
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February Is a Peak Pruning Time — If You Don’t Go Rogue With the Shears

By Tony Hicks
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These 7 plants will reward you with absurdly good displays if you cut them back now (and not everything else you feel like attacking) February is that strange, liminal month. Winter is technically still here, but it’s losing confidence. Snow is melting into slush, the sun suddenly feels like it remembers your name, and gardeners everywhere are pacing around their yards clutching pruners like they’ve been cooped up too long. This is the danger zone. Because February really is one of the best pruning windows of the entire year — if you know what you’re doing . And it’s also the month when well-meaning gardeners accidentally delete spring flowers like they’re clearing old photos from their phone at 2 a.m. Late winter pruning is powerful. It’s decisive. It sets the tone for the entire growing season. Do it right, and your garden comes roaring back with bigger blooms, stronger growth, and plants that look like they actually belong there. Do it wrong, and you’ll be staring at a whole l...
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“I Was Really Surprised by the Swimmers’ Powerful Energy”: Or, How Almost Breaking Your Back Makes You Notice That Humans Are Weirdly Impressive

By Tony Hicks
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There are two kinds of art-world origin stories. The first kind goes like this: I was born with a camera in my hands. I always knew. I saw the light differently. At age six I framed my first decisive moment. The second kind goes like this: I got violently reminded that my spine is not, in fact, indestructible. Jorge Perez Ortiz belongs firmly to the second category, which already makes him more interesting. Three years ago, Ortiz was on a small wooden boat traveling from Cartagena to nearby islands when the ocean decided to remind everyone onboard who actually runs the planet. A wave hit. His body lifted. His body came down. A vertebra fractured. The word “emergency” entered the chat. Surgery followed. This is not the glamorous part of the artist biography. There are no gallery walls here, no flattering lighting, no carefully chosen captions. There is just a human body doing what it does best when surprised: failing abruptly. And yet, this is the moment that eventually leads to T...
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AI Music Is Here to Stay. How Do We Reckon With It?

By Tony Hicks
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In the year 2026, listening to music has quietly become a parlor game. Not “name that tune.” Not “who sampled whom.” The real challenge—the one we all play half-consciously now—is Spot the AI . You scroll, you listen, you squint with your ears. Is that voice too clean? Are those harmonies suspiciously frictionless? Why does this lo-fi beat feel like it was assembled by a ghost with an MBA? Some days the tells are obvious. The psychedelic rock band that sounds like it was trained exclusively on crate-digging Reddit posts. The inexplicably viral Japanese gay porn anthem that feels less like a song and more like a proof of concept. The ambient sludge that drifts by in endless playlists, engineered to be pleasant enough that you don’t skip it and hollow enough that you don’t remember it. Music has always had its share of filler, but now the filler has learned to reproduce at scale. Streaming platforms, for their part, have mostly shrugged. YouTube lets uploaders “disclose” synthetic medi...
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🎬 When a Movie Gets Pulled So Hard It Practically Self-Deports

By Tony Hicks
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4 There are box-office flops. There are critical disasters. And then there is whatever category we now need to invent for a movie so radioactive that an entire country looks at it, squints for a moment, and says, “Actually? No. All of us are good.” Welcome to the curious case of Melania , the glossy, heavily marketed, extremely expensive documentary centered on Melania Trump , a film that was scheduled for wide theatrical release in South Africa before being abruptly and collectively escorted out of every major cinema in the country. Not banned. Not censored. Just… declined. Politely, bureaucratically, and decisively. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a nation hitting “Do Not Recommend” and moving on with its life. And if you think this story is about one documentary, you’re missing the larger picture. This is about power, image laundering, political optics, and the limits of spectacle in a world that has seen this movie before—even if it hasn’t actually seen this movie. 🎥 The Movie T...
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