David’s path from a college humor magazine to the White House ... David: Trump doesn’t hate Obama—he envies him ... Obama’s “real” sense of humor ... The story behind Obama meeting his “Anger Translator” ... Why is Sean Spicer a household name? ...

After Trump, do ideas even matter? ... Why Trump and Obama both reject "the Blob” ... How foreign leaders make sense of Trump’s public contradictions ... Do rumor mills have a place in the ideas industry? ... Dan: TED Talks are for thought leaders, not public intellectuals ...

The moral ambiguities of punching Nazis ... ContraPoints’s experience with gender dysphoria ... Why does the far right dominate YouTube? ... How YouTube stars pay the bills ... Interpreting Pewdiepie’s recent “heated gaming moment” ... Why ContraPoints left academia for YouTube ...

What is Trump's pathology? ... Therapy dogs for Trump-induced depression ... Zandy: Give Renée Zellweger a break ... A straightforward approach to men’s fashion ... The oft-overlooked positives of Twitter ...

What does Houston mean to American culture? ... Nathan Bedford Forrest, the KKK, and Confederate statues ... The fraught territory of Confederate-themed TV shows ... Was the Civil War inevitable? ... Bill’s experience as a young suburban Neo-Confederate ...

First reactions to the Game of Thrones season finale (spoilers ahead!) ... Littlefinger as a working class hero ... Michael’s professional opinion of GoT’s editing ... Will the series have a Hollywood ending? ... Does George R.R. Martin have a huge trick up his sleeve? ...

How Zero Books came to publish Kill All Normies ... The early days of online trolling ... How the "manosphere" turned political ... Harassment from the right, moral shaming from the left ... Doug: Zero Books would shift right to fight fascism ...

What B.D. saw in Charlottesville ... What should we do with Confederate monuments? ... Mixed feelings on the Durham statue-toppling ... Is the monument debate a distraction? ... Were Charlottesville police negligent? ... Ideas to fix the toxic statue debate ...

The surprising controversy over young adult novel The Black Witch ... A brief sociology of "callout culture" ... Kat: YA's diversity problem is real ... Kat fields impassioned responses to her piece ... Why YA is for adults, too ...

How Sean's satirical novel Lost in Arcadia foretold Trump's presidency ... Which is more relevant, Veep or House of Cards? ... Orwell vs. the Marx Brothers ... Is Trump too stupid to pull off an international conspiracy? ... Surveying modern political satire ... Sean compares modern society to the saturated commercialism of Infinite Jest ...