Alright, folks, the big moment has arrived. For the first time, a Black and South Asian woman is standing on a presidential debate stage. And she's the leader we need. Follow my debate live-tweeting here.

(thread) Also, if you enjoy my analysis...

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A few months ago, in the midst of the national fervor over President Biden’s debate performance, I was in a pretty terrible mood listening to it all and decided to take a long walk through D.C.

(thread) I put on some sunscreen, popped in my earbuds with a good playlist, and took a stroll around town, about an hour later finding myself on a residential street.

All of us kids were sleeping in my mother’s room when the gunshot went off. The three of us who weren’t holding a gun woke up almost immediately. My mother, improbably, slept through it.

(thread) I sat up, obviously startled and a bit foggy, and saw my younger stepbrother, almost four at the time and barely over three feet tall, standing next to me and facing the bedroom window.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before.

A Navy SEAL, a doctor, and an astronaut walk into a bar.

They’re all the same guy.

(thread) Last week, NASA announced that 40 year-old U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Jonathan “Jonny” Yong Kim will deploy to the International Space Station in March onboard the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-27 with cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky for eight months.

I’ve had a nagging feeling over the past several years that there’s an important aspect to evangelical church culture in the United States that’s been consistently overlooked, or simply unknown to most of the public.

(long thread) I was a senior in high school when I became a Christian, and while I was certainly primarily motivated by Christ’s teachings, there was another factor that played an enormous role in keeping me going to church: the warmth of community.

We practiced with caskets that were stored outside our barracks building. To simulate the weight of honored remains, we’d toss several full sandbags into the belly of the casket and then, for hours, we’d go through our exact movements.

Over and over and over.

(thread) Those were hot and humid D.C. summers, and it didn’t matter. Drink water. And then back at it. We’d march up crisply, pick up the casket, go through the entire funeral protocol—with an earned coordination that would rival any synchronized swimming team—and then do it again.

On Wednesday night, at the Democratic National Convention, America was introduced to 17 year-old Gus Walz, the son of Gwen Walz and Gov. Tim Walz, who instantly became a national treasure due to an unexpectedly emotional moment of pride and joy for his father.

(thread) When Gov. Walz told his family, seated in front of the stage, that they were “his whole world,” the young man was so overcome with emotion that he stood up, tears streaming out of his eyes, pointed toward the podium, and shouted: “I love you, dad! That’s my dad!”

According to a survey by Pew Research Center in late 2021, a whopping 44 percent of childless males say it is unlikely or not at all likely that they'll have children someday. Of those, 50 percent simply (and selfishly) offer a simple reason: they just don’t want kids.

(thread) America stands in a grave moment: the institution of the family is increasingly threatened by the instability of social change, birth rates in the United States have been declining for decades, and of course, masculinity has been in a freefall for quite some time.

It’s been a surprising three weeks in American politics, to say the very least. After Pres. Biden announced his decision to step aside as the nominee on July 21st and endorsed VP Harris, she informally secured the nomination through party support in fewer than 32 hours.

(thread) Ever since then, Trump and J.D. Vance and the Republican Party have been perpetually on the back foot, seemingly unable or unwilling to take common sense steps to stabilize their campaign.

Love of mythology is central to the American experience. We’d be much less happier—or perhaps, less entertained—without it.

(very long and fun thread) Mythology permeates our country: George Washington axing the cherry tree, the sweet but apocryphal story of the first Thanksgiving, stacking back issues of The New Yorker near our desk with the false implication we’ve read any of them.

A little over two weeks ago, a user on Twitter posted a joke claiming, with a knowing wink, that J.D. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio and Trump’s running mate, had been quite intimate with an alluring chesterfield.

(long thread) They have since locked their account, but here’s the original tweet:

@TomCottonAR @JDVance Wait, you're talking about service records?

Ha, okay, let me take y'all on a journey of Tom Cotton's stolen valor since this performative coward feels the need to attack great patriots like Tim Walz.

Buckle up. Tom Cotton lied about being an Army Ranger.

(long thread) @TomCottonAR @JDVance Tom Cotton put out literature during his first campaign for Congress and has otherwise made several statements claiming to have served as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan. He did not.

Wait, you're talking about service records?

Ha, okay, let me take y'all on a journey of Tom Cotton's stolen valor since this performative coward feels the need to attack great patriots like Tim Walz.

Buckle up. Tom Cotton lied about an Army Ranger.

(long thread)

https://twitter.com/TomCottonAR/status/1821266477737222318

Tom Cotton put out literature during his first campaign for Congress and has otherwise made several statements claiming to have served as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan. He did not.

It was 1999.

The previous year, Matthew Shepard, just 21, had been beaten, tortured, and left to die on a fence post in Laramie, Wyoming because he was openly-gay.

(thread) I had just turned 12 in Central Texas, and as a closeted trans girl—very much in the closet—I was terrified by what I saw in the news. I couldn’t talk about it to the adults in my life.

I’m 37, and I don't want kids and I’m in a period of my life in which many of my friends—if not most of them—either have kids or plan to have kids.

(thread) And I love it. I love to see the joy my friends are experiencing. I love the chance to peruse through a registry and pick the perfect gift. I love it when my friends tell me about the latest thing their kids have done: things that make them proud, make them laugh, give them hope.

Look, I don’t know for certain what happens next.

I don’t think any pundit or reporter or big donor knows for certain what happens next. I don’t think any senior Democratic leaders know for certain what happens next, except for one.

(thread) Only President Biden knows what happens next because only he can decide what happens next. There was a primary. He was the victor of that primary. The decision rests with him alone on whether or not he’ll be the Democratic nominee.

It was June of 2019, and I had no intention of supporting former vice president Joe Biden in the primary for the Democratic nomination. It wasn’t personal. Honestly, I wasn’t even considering him enough for it to be personal.

(thread) Despite the former vice president having a plurality of support among Democratic primary voters in almost every national poll that year, neither I nor any of my friends and colleagues took much notice of his candidacy beyond basic acknowledgment.

Four years ago, I stayed at a hotel during a short work trip, and late one night, when I took a brief visit to the lobby to take advantage of their snack bar, I unexpectedly wound up in conversation with a friendly married couple at the front desk.

(long thread) I forget where they were from or how the conversation got started, but we quickly took a liking to each other.

Alright, it’s been a long day in what’s already a long week. Time for some lighthearted, nerdy political fun. My pal @DCHomos got hold of a box of Election ‘92 trading cards and gifted me some. I kid you not. These are 32 years old. They’ve never been opened. Join me…

(thread)



It’s been three decades, so the cards are stuck together. I have to peel them away. The first card I see is for Murphy Brown, which is terribly appropriate for this election.

Here’s the story: sitcom “Murphy Brown” premiered on CBS in 1988. It starred Candace Bergen as a highly-respected journalist and news anchor. It got pretty solid ratings and quickly grew in popularity.

In the 91-92 season, Murphy Brown gets pregnant and after the baby’s father wants nothing to with the child, Brown decides to have the baby and raise him alone.

This storyline caused a HUGE stir with social conservatives, culminating with then-VP Dan Quayle giving a campaign speech in which he criticized Murphy Brown for “mocking fathers.”

You might be wondering: wait, don’t social conservatives want women to go through with their pregnancies instead of getting an abortion?

Yes, but once again, we see hypocrisy and callousness on full display within the anti-choice movement.

Anyway, the show opened their 92-93 season, six weeks before the election, with an episode called “You Say Potatoe, I Say Potato,” taking dead aim at Quayle.

You see, that previous June, Quayle had been visiting a school in New Jersey, and a young student had spelled “potato” on the chalkboard. Quayle then erroneously corrected the spelling by adding an ‘e’ at the end. On the chalkboard. On camera. During an event about education. Pretty embarrassing!

So, with the controversy over Murphy’s pregnancy already making enormous waves, the season premiere with THAT title was clearly gonna be about Quayle.

44 million viewers tuned in and watched as Bergen, as Murphy Brown, responded to Quayle by featuring diverse families in the episode, which ends with her having a truck dump a pile of potato aplenty on the Vice President’s lawn. It was nominated for an Emmy.

Bergen herself was later magnanimous and said she mostly agreed with Quayle about the importance of fathers.

But his messaging was pretty insulting toward single mothers.

Notice a theme with Republicans moralizing to American families and policing the lives of women?

It's official: Beyoncé's eighth studio album "Cowboy Carter" has now dropped. It's the second album in her planned trilogy after 2022's "Renaissance."

For funsies, I'm gonna do a first listen review over the next several hours. 27 songs, 79:03 run time.

(thread) Like many, I have been waiting for this album for so damn long. I grew up on country music. I love Beyoncé. The fact that she's making Texas such a huge theme for this album delights my little Texan heart to no end.

Okay, let's do this! I'll be checking-in on each track.

Alright, friends, I shall be live-tweeting tonight's proceedings. President Biden's 2024 State of the Union, now hyped up to ludicrous levels of importance, the fate of democracy and free world hanging in the balance.

Delightful. Follow along. Article II, Section 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution mandates that the president shall, from time to time, essentially report on the State of the Union and make recommendations, but it wasn't until Woodrow Wilson that this started to become the very public event we see today.