Fiery Falcon

I ain't a poet, just a drunk with a pen

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A Nightcrawler For Gen Z

Alex Choi has made a fortune live-streaming the chaos of Los Angeles streets. Is he gathering news? Or profiting off tragedy?

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/magazine/ai-university-college-california.html

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The real story of how L.A. became the epicenter of America's homeless crisis

The surprising story, in words and pictures, behind the homeless crisis in Los Angeles — a tale of law enforcement, housing and economic cro

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The Death of the Texas Political Machine That Bush Built

Ken Paxton routed John Cornyn in this week’s Texas GOP Senate primary runoff. The result is a stunning rejection of a political lifer—and th

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/magazine/polymarket-prediction-wall-street.html

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The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything

Everything is gender, but to understand gender you must understand sex.

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Everyone Lost with Musk v. Altman

The real question of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI was whether the company’s corporate transformation was cynical in intention or merel

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Consider the Sister

Amy Wallace has spent two decades guarding the human her brother was—against a world that prefers David Foster Wallace as a puzzle.

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Here’s What I Told the DNC Autopsy

The report may never see the light of day—so the Harris campaign’s head of digital offers his candid breakdown of what worked, what failed,

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‘I’d Wake Up in the Middle of the Night and Bet $7,000 on Korean Baseball’

The life of Tim McCormack, a gambling addict who got caught up in the Jontay Porter scandal.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/03/us/dairy-farm-butter-ridge-pennsylvania.html

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The Hollywood Feud of the Century

How the fight between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni led to a $300 million trial that could torch both their careers.

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What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat

For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.

”If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, ‘Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.‘ Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.

Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.

When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun.”

https://archive.ph/2026.04.25-050006/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/billionaire-consequence-free-reality/686588/

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Trump's Man in L.A.

Bill Essayli is the face of Trump’s immigration and fraud crackdown in Southern California. Defending his own family’s fraud case, with the

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Hollywood Work Dried Up. So They're Taking Survival Jobs.

Making T-shirts, opening a backyard swim school, translating for doctors. Whatever it takes until they can get back in the business. But is

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Tony Dokoupil Is the Face of the Bari Weiss Revolution at CBS News. Will He Survive It?

With tumbling ratings and savage reviews, the hospital-drama-handsome anchor has hit a rough patch after a meteoric rise at CBS. Insiders ar

No paywall:

https://archive.ph/2026.04.23-202835/https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/tony-dokoupil