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2 weeks ago | 
compactmag.com | Ryan Zickgraf |Ryan Smith
Earlier this month, Ohio State University unveiled its new “AI Fluency Program,” a campus-wide initiative designed to ensure that every student graduates fluent in artificial intelligence. Not merely familiar—fluent. The message is unmistakable: Using AI isn’t just permitted, it’s expected. Mastery of large language models is now a prerequisite for success, a kind of digital literacy for the age of optimization.
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Feb 18, 2025 | 
compactmag.com | Ryan Zickgraf |Ryan Smith
At first glance, the “No Kings on Presidents’ Day” protest in Harrisburg, Pa., might have been mistaken for a surprisingly progressive Trump rally. MAGA caps and pussy hats alike were missing from the heads of the 500 or so Pennsylvanians who gathered on the state capitol steps on Monday. I spotted nearly as many Stars and Stripes and Gadsden flags—coiled rattlesnakes over the phrase DON’T TREAD ON ME—as I did emblems of Pride and Palestine.
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Feb 18, 2025 | 
compactmag.com | Ryan Zickgraf |Ryan Smith
At first glance, the “No Kings on Presidents’ Day” protest in Harrisburg, Pa., might have been mistaken for a surprisingly progressive Trump rally. MAGA caps and pussy hats alike were missing from the heads of the 500 or so Pennsylvanians who gathered on the state capitol steps on Monday. I spotted nearly as many Stars and Stripes and Gadsden flags—coiled rattlesnakes over the phrase DON’T TREAD ON ME—as I did emblems of Pride and Palestine.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
compactmag.com | Ryan Zickgraf |Ryan Smith
The patriarchy died in its sleep sometime during Obama’s first term. Or so goes the argument of The End of Men, a 2012 polemic that’s being revisited in the wake of the election. As Donald Trump aggressively courted young men on his way to victory, the mainstream media desperately searched for the right kind of talking heads to help explain the widening gender divide haunting our politics.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
jacobin.com | Ryan Zickgraf
In the premiere episode of The Franchise, HBO’s warts-and-all satire of the movie business, an assistant director named Dag has a brief existential crisis about the wisdom of spending her life (and someone else’s fortune) on hacky comic-book adaptations. “What if this isn’t a dream factory?” Dag wonders aloud to a colleague.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
compactmag.com | Ryan Zickgraf |Ryan Smith
In July, some observers were baffled that Bernie Sanders and The Squad—the democratic-socialist contingent in Congress—were among the last Democrats to abandon ship as President Biden’s re-election bid unraveled following his disastrous debate performance. Why expend political capital as a dead-ender for an unpopular centrist? The explanation is simple: For all of Biden’s flaws, his domestic agenda was the most economically populist since the neoliberal turn in the 1970s.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
compactmag.com | Ryan Zickgraf |Ryan Smith
It felt a bit like a joke: The wealthiest man in the world walks into a church to pay people to vote for his porn-star-loving friend—all in the name of God. But no one laughed at the spectacle of Elon Musk’s recent Get Out the Vote rally at the Life Center Church in Harrisburg, Pa. After all, Musk wasn’t trying to get into heaven on his four-date speaking tour; he was simply trying to get Donald Trump back into power using his wealth and a PAC called America. What would Jesus do?
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
compactmag.com | Ryan Zickgraf |Ryan Smith
The handful of people who turned up at an arts center in downtown Harrisburg, Pa., last month for a Democratic Party karaoke fundraiser stumbled onto a haunting scene—a cold, empty concert hall with the backdrop of a movie-theater-sized screen crackling with visual static. It was reminiscent of the iconic TV-comes-alive scene from the 1982 Steven Spielberg horror classic Poltergeist but missing an ethereal blonde girl to announce, “They’re not here.”Where was everyone?
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Oct 5, 2024 | 
jacobin.com | Ryan Zickgraf
Sometimes I think about the fifty-year-old man living in my mom’s garage. Todd is an affable giant, his red beard and long hair giving him the air of a medieval Viking. But his life is far from a fairy tale. Since his divorce years ago, he’s floated between housing situations and minimum-wage jobs.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
jacobin.com | Ryan Zickgraf
Donald Trump may not have entirely killed satire, but he’s helped sunder it into two countervailing forces, neither of which are very funny. The liberals used to be the class clowns. But while the counterculture of the 1960s spawned Saturday Night Live, Monty Python, and the stand-up-comedy-industrial complex, its political heirs are now the pious, self-serious ones.
