The Funeral Attendee Who Disappeared
Drop These Words from Your Vocab, Period
The not-vaunted, totally non–Ivy League Lake Superior State University has dropped its annual list of banished words, and you should 100% exile them from your vocabulary for the duration of this era, period.
First utilized in 1976 as a cringe-worthy publicity stunt to promote the little-known bastion of higher education by its public relations director, W.T. “Bill” Rabe, a Detroit-area PR guru (can we please banish that phrase?!), the list was released “as a safeguard against misuse, overuse, and uselessness of the English language.” The list was a game changer for LSSU, and has netted the university publicity for half a century.
Here’s the 2025 list of banished words:
1. cringe
2. game changer
3. era
4. dropped
5. IYKYK (if you know, you know)
6. sorry not sorry
7. skibidi
8. 100%
9. utilize
10. period
When it comes to this list, IYKYK, and if not, sorry not sorry, so go flush these overused and abused terms down your skibidi toilet and be done with them.
Just Another Day for the Chaos Monkeys in Washington
Playbook: “The simplest and most important reason for the country’s expected return to a peaceful transfer of presidential power is that Trump actually won this presidential election, unlike the last one. As a result, he and his Republican allies have not mounted a public campaign of lies in an effort to mislead his supporters into thinking that he won, and they haven’t lobbied Republican elected officials to try to get them to throw the election to him anyway, as they did after the 2020 election. (Oh, there will also be much more security tomorrow, too.)”
“But even if tomorrow’s congressional certification goes off without a hitch, there is no question that the events on Jan. 6 four years ago — and the legal system’s response to them — will continue to loom large in American history and politics, and that they will continue to shape our perception and understanding of some major political figures.”
The Tech-Bros at Home Sung to the tune of 'Old Folks at Home' or 'Suwanee River'
(With apologies to Stephen Foster and thanks to Paul Krugman for coining “Muskaswamy”)
Way down upon the Muskaswamy
Far, far away,
That’s where my H-1B visa takes me —
That’s where the tech-bros play.
Outside the techno-libertarian coalition,
MAGAs sadly roam,
Stuck in mediocre stultification,
Far from the tech-bros at home.
(Chorus)
All along the Muskaswamy,
Brilliant immigrants roam,
Oh, MAGAs how your hearts grow weary,
Far from the tech-bros’ new home.
Alabama Can’t Quit Enslaving People The state profits from leasing prisoners to private companies, including Best Western, Budweiser and Burger King
AP: No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private companies than Alabama. With a sprawling labor system that dates back more than 150 years — including the brutal convict leasing era that replaced slavery — it has constructed a template for the commercialization of mass incarceration.
Best Western, Bama Budweiser and Burger King are among the more than 500 businesses to lease incarcerated workers from one of the most violent, overcrowded and unruly prison systems in the U.S. in the past five years alone, The Associated Press found as part of a two-year investigation into prison labor. The cheap, reliable labor force has generated more than $250 million for the state since 2000 through money garnished from prisoners’ paychecks.
