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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...

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...

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...

If you’ve lived in Los Angeles or San Francisco long enough, you know the sound. It’s not an earthquake, not a tech IPO, not even a new Erewhon opening. It’s the unmistakable thud-thud-thud of media announcing itself . Loudly. Confidently. With puns. Many, many puns. That sound, this January, belonged to The California Post , which burst onto the West Coast scene with all the subtlety of a leaf blower at dawn. The launch campaign—cheerfully titled “Text on the Beach” —blanketed Los Angeles and San Francisco with billboards, street activations, radio spots, digital ads, and one extremely on-brand food truck collaboration with Yeastie Boys . The message was clear: We’re here. We’re coastal now. We brought carbs. And like all bicoastal transplants, The California Post arrived convinced that the locals were just waiting for it. A New York Attitude With a California Zip Code Let’s set the stage. The California Post is the West Coast sibling of the New York Post , itself a proud proper...

Alright, let’s talk about the most comforting fantasy of 2026: law school as a lifeboat . Not a yacht. Not a speedboat. A lifeboat. Slightly cracked, overcrowded, expensive to board, and launched directly into waters where the sharks have recently learned how to code. Over the past two years, law school applications have surged more than 40%. Lecture halls are filling up. LSAT prep companies are thriving. Admissions consultants are booked solid. And somewhere, a freshly minted college graduate is saying the quiet part out loud: “At least a JD feels… solid.” That feeling— solid —is doing a lot of emotional labor right now. Because this isn’t really about a sudden, collective passion for torts, contracts, or the beauty of Bluebook citations. This is about fear. Specifically, the kind of fear that creeps in when you send out 200 job applications, hear nothing back, and then watch an AI demo casually perform half the tasks you thought made you employable. Welcome to the AI hiring stor...

For roughly seven decades, linguistics has been operating under a shared assumption so deeply embedded that questioning it felt like questioning gravity, or coffee, or whether meetings could have been emails. Language, we were told, is built on deep, hierarchical grammatical structures . Elegant trees. Branches. Constituents nested inside constituents like linguistic Russian dolls. Every sentence, no matter how casual or chaotic, supposedly emerges from an invisible internal syntax engine doing extremely sophisticated math in your head while you’re just trying to order tacos. And now—enter a new study from researchers affiliated with Cornell University , published in Nature Human Behaviour , calmly suggesting: What if language works… more like LEGO bricks? Not metaphorical LEGO bricks. Literal “you keep reusing the same chunks because they work” LEGO bricks. This is the academic equivalent of saying, “We may have spent 70 years reverse-engineering a Swiss watch, only to discover...

The United States has decided to spend $1.6 billion to shore up a rare earths group, and the collective reaction from Washington can be summarized as: “Wait—those minerals are important?” Yes. They are. They’ve been important for years. Decades, even. But better late than geopolitically cornered. This is the part of the movie where the protagonist realizes the entire plot hinges on a thing they ignored in Act One. Cue dramatic music. Cue urgent funding. Cue speeches about “strategic independence” delivered by people who learned what neodymium is sometime last Tuesday. Welcome to America’s latest industrial awakening: critical minerals matter , and it turns out you can’t TikTok, missile-defense, or EV-your-way into the future without them. The Rocks That Run the World Rare earth elements are not rare. The name is branding from the 18th century, back when chemistry was still doing vibes-based research. What is rare is the ability to mine, process, refine, and scale them cleanly,...