Cortado Joe

Thirty years after Falling Down, Douglas and Joe Rogan are still talking about that perfectly good road getting torn up because somebody has a budget to spend. A depressing little detail with an incredible shelf life...

Chuck Lorre has a restaurant rule for sitcoms: serve one bad episode, and viewers might remember it like a cockroach in their dinner. That’s a lot of pressure for a job built around making people laugh. From rock...

A farmer hits a buried stone, and suddenly a three-thousand-year-old dragon has something to say about the Bible. Meanwhile, a verse can spend centuries in the margin before making it into the main text. What ancient...

LL Cool J helped build a record label out of a homemade demo. These days, he's learning what it feels like to get flattened by somebody better at jiu-jitsu. Honestly, that range explains a lot about him. The tape that...

Sharaf knocked out Gable Stevenson in twelve seconds, reportedly as a 2,400-to-one underdog. Then he went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and wondered whether he should ever fight again. The knockout The win and its cost...

David Grusch thinks the U.S. will acknowledge non-human intelligence before Trump leaves office. He also says the people who control access to the alleged programs are resisting the president's declassification order...

Sam Morril finishes a special, walks back into the Comedy Cellar, and immediately wonders if he should quit. Apparently, the reward for writing an hour of comedy is starting over in front of people who can tell...

A boat-shaped formation near Mount Ararat, a stone that rings, and a pyramid that might have made fertilizer. Ancient history has entered its group-chat era. Floods and the stories that survive Myths and missing pieces...

Imagine your entire comedy career gets vaporized because the Cold War ends. Then imagine rebuilding it with breakfast, a 2,000-seat theater, and a psychology doctorate. That is an absolutely wild résumé. When the wall...

Every time somebody calls an electric car or an AI server “clean,” ask one tiny follow-up: clean where? Because far from the charging cable, people are digging the ingredients out of toxic ground with their bare lives...

A single great minute can launch a comedian’s career. It can also launch them directly into a terrifying situation where they need another fifty minutes by Friday. Meanwhile, somebody’s hauling 140 pounds up a hill for...

A particle can refuse to pick a path until something interacts with it. Humanity, meanwhile, has picked a path involving AI, nuclear weapons, and leaders allergic to compromise. So, a cheerful little cosmic espresso...

Your brain changes when you struggle, your sleep protects your brakes, and somebody is already wondering whether to microdose a GLP-1 with their roommate. That’s a lot for one nervous system, so grab your cortado...

A fake NFL player allegedly pulled in $1.3 million with social media pages, a helmet in his car, and search results that looked close enough. That is the whole modern era in one scam: confidence, costume, algorithm...

Imagine being 18, playing gigs in Vietnam while mortars are flying, then decades later walking onstage to thousands screaming for “Jessie’s Girl.” Rick Springfield’s life has enough plot for three biopics, and somehow...