Powderhorn

This was the year when public broadcasting was gutted and hyper-partisans prospered, when the First Amendment was exhaustively praised and opportunistically abandoned. It was the year when media capture came to America.

Before 2025, “media capture” was a term used exclusively overseas, describing the compromise of a free press to curry favor with the regime in power. Sometimes this happened through threats and intimidation, greased by partisan group think. Other times, the cudgel was money: wealthy administration allies would buy independent news organizations and neuter them to fall in line with the state-backed version of facts.

Hungary is often cited as a prime example of media capture — and so it seemed notable that Hungary’s elected autocrat Viktor Orban was repeatedly praised by Donald Trump and Republicans during the 2024 election. It was a clear sign of intent.

One year later, we’ve gotten used to Baghdad Bob-like lies from Trump administration flacks and absurd sycophancy from Cabinet secretaries. We expected spinelessness from the vast majority of congressional Republicans. But the lack of leadership inside news media when faced with an explicitly hostile executive branch has been surprising, largely driven by corporate owners who hid behind a fig leaf of “fiduciary responsibility” to shareholders and genuflected when threatened. They shoveled out millions to Trump for perceived slights (and there is always a perceived slight) that never would have held up in court.

I never knew what I was going to write from one week to the next. Once I was managing editor, I was like "fuck, fuck, fuck, I have to write a column" while herding cats.

You run a college newsroom sometime and tell me how it goes.

But back to the topic at hand, I had a very simple process that lasted my whole career. That title? It's why I'm writing right now.

So as not to bury the lede, the formula is this:

• Have a headline.
• Have a thesis.
• Know where the fuck I'm going.

I'm only posting this because I know where I'm going.

Being a columnist is one of the easiest jobs in the world. Even with a few interviews here and there, you get to spout off about current events. One of the nice things about student journalism is no one has already worked in, say, the White House press office.

So we just wing it. Not the East Wing at this point, I'd imagine.

There were several Tuesday evenings where I was concerned I'd not fill the left of A4. On Tuesday nights, as such, I became far more interested in what reporters were working on.

Here's the bar: "Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me!"

And then, usually about 25 minutes later, my column was headed to the copy desk, after which the edited copy was discarded, and I ran the original, because, oh, yes, I was also the designer.

Look ... I'm a copyeditor by trade over the decades, but in college, the desk may as well have been the error-introduction desk. The chiefs were all solid, but under them? Yeah, I'll keep my original copy, let you play editor and then run what I wrote. (This is, incidentally, a very bad idea, as everyone needs an editor.)

It has been the same every time since I settled into column writing in the late '90s: Once I have a hed, the whole thing flows out so fast I'm not even thinking about it. Maybe that's an odd writing process, but until I've seen the whole thing writ large, I can't even start. Once I know, then it's a simple matter of getting from Point A to Point B.

Unlike the rest of my life.

Every Tuesday at dawn, Raildon Suplício Maia goes to the market in Macururé, in Brazil’s Bahia state, to sell goats. He haggles with buyers to get a good price for the animals, which are reared in the open and roam freely.

Goats are the main – and sometimes only – source of income for the people of Macururé, a small town in the Brazilian sertão. This rural hinterland in the country’s north-east is known for its dry climate and harsh conditions.

But earning a living from goat rearing is becoming more difficult as the dry season extends and the native vegetation withers in the Caatinga, a shrubland and thorn forest biome that spans much of the sertão, leaving even these hardy animals starved for food.

“It used to rain earlier,” says Maia, 54, a short, wiry man with the weathered face of someone who has spent a life outdoors. “Now, there are no cacti, there’s no grass, there’s not enough water. We have to spend what we earn from selling the animals on buying feed.”

This seems innocuous enough until you learn that two of these stickers were slid under my door, and the very few people who know where I park have disavowed knowledge.

So, I don't know what to make of it.

I have no idea who placed them, why, or the reasoning, which is frankly maddening. At least one of these would be nice to have.

I instead have a pair of stickers that could have come from 1999, when I blew up my life for the second time.

I mean, that's oddly specific terminology on a sticker.

On the banks of the Yukon River, after arriving by canoe only a few miles from the Canadian border, I shared some salmon with Karma Ulvi, the chief of the Native Village of Eagle in Alaska. But the fish we ate wasn’t caught locally: A plane had delivered the salmon from Bristol Bay, in the southwest corner of the state, over 1,000 miles away. For the Native tribes that have lived along the Yukon for millennia, importing is the only option. “We haven’t been able to fish for seven years,” said Ulvi.

In the last stronghold for wild salmon on earth, these tribes are fighting to save the fish. But it’s a war with many fronts, none of them simple: climate change, federal funding, competing scientific narratives, and, ultimately, corporate greed. Heat stroke during the summer has left scores of dead fish on the banks, unable to reach their spawning grounds. And over the last few decades, Alaska has seen more rain in the fall, causing floods that wash out salmon eggs. “They’re not managing for sustainability,” said Ulvi of fisheries management that allows billions of dollars of commercial fishing to take place while Native villages face malnutrition. “They’re managing for maximum profit.”

At the village’s first “culture camp,” attendees cleaned and processed fish while speaking their own language—a rare dialect of Hän Athabascan—and practiced traditional dances. First Nation tribes in Canada have been doing these camps for years, as have some Alaska villages on the Yukon, creating a place for Indigenous practices to be taught and applied.

When Céüze 2000 ski resort closed at the end of the season in 2018, the workers assumed they would be back the following winter. Maps of the pistes were left stacked beside a stapler; the staff rota pinned to the wall.

Six years on, a yellowing newspaper dated 8 March 2018 sits folded on its side, as if someone has just flicked through it during a quiet spell. A half-drunk bottle of water remains on the table.

The Céüze resort in the southern French Alps had been open for 85 years and was one of the oldest in the country. Today, it is one of scores of ski resorts abandoned across France – part of a new landscape of “ghost stations”.

More than 186 have been permanently closed already, raising questions about how we leave mountains – among the last wild spaces in Europe – once the lifts stop running.

This is a rare question hed I can actually abide. The sourcing doesn't prove anything either way.

Susie Wiles has the gimlet eye of an alcoholic’s daughter. She is always on edge, vigilant to the slightest movement, fearful of sudden danger, and has learned to withdraw herself from the chaos in order to survive. She is keenly observant, sees through people around her who are not drinkers to decipher their underlying motives that might flare into unexpected menace, and practiced in passive aggression of which her interview with Vanity Fair is a classic case study.

Wiles defines herself as the child of a raging drunk and it is through that singular lens of her formative experience that she defines her current boss. “I make a specialty of it,” she told the writer Christopher Whipple for his Vanity Fair profile of the Trump White House chief of staff in one of the eleven interviews she granted him. Donald Trump, she stated, “has an alcoholic’s personality,” though he does not drink. She didn’t stop there, but elaborated that “high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Trump, she said, “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”

Saying Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality” reveals Wiles’ personal understanding about a megalomaniacal celebrity who fosters pandemonium around himself without any care for others. Her father, Pat Summerall, the great football placekicker and the play-by-play broadcaster of National Football League games on CBS for 40 years, was the original bad daddy. “Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,” she said. She remembered him as a mostly absentee father and so drunk he “wouldn’t recognize” his granddaughter, which Wiles thought “horrifying.” Alcoholism, she said, is a “disease that clouds your judgment,” and no one, however smart they think they are can “out think addiction.” In 1992, Wiles and her mother staged an intervention to take him to the Betty Ford Drug Rehab Center. She gave him a letter reading, “Dad, the few times we’ve been out in public together recently, I’ve been ashamed we shared the same last name.” That is what she means when she says someone has an “alcoholic’s personality.”

This is a Tom Nicholas video. These are always of high quality.

Donald Trump wants us to believe that the “war on Christianity” is spreading across the globe. The US president recently sounded the alarm on the “mass slaughter” of Christians in Nigeria while threatening a US invasion of the African nation. We shouldn’t be surprised. This falls right in line with Trump’s ongoing attempts to project Maga Christianity on to the global stage and crack down on religious freedom.

Maga Christianity represents a self-serving, commercialized version of the Christian faith – putting power over service and empathy – and it is everywhere in our federal government. In February, Trump announced a taskforce led by Pam Bondi with the goal of rooting out “anti-Christian” bias. In September, Trump announced his plans to protect prayer in schools. Later that month, he issued a memorandum identifying anti-Christianity as a potential driver of terrorism. These are not just one-off incidents. This is a national effort to push the Maga Christianity agenda on Americans, and we’re already seeing the consequences.

Despite the Bible’s clear call to “love thy neighbor”, the Maga movement has used its version of the Christian faith to oppress immigrants, oppose the rights of women and condemn the LGBTQ+ community. At the same time, we’ve seen shootings at places of worship and arrests of faith leaders at peaceful protests.

The Danish postal service will deliver its last letter on 30 December, ending a more than 400-year-old tradition.

Announcing the decision earlier this year to stop delivering letters, PostNord, formed in 2009 in a merger of the Swedish and Danish postal services, said it would cut 1,500 jobs in Denmark and remove 1,500 red postboxes amid the “increasing digitalisation” of Danish society.

Describing Denmark as “one of the most digitalised countries in the world”, the company said the demand for letters had “fallen drastically” while online shopping continued to increase, prompting the decision to instead focus on parcels.

Her grandson's mom ended up with a dead car that meant she couldn't get him there for Christmas. I'm not even going to go into the rest of that branch of the family, as his dad is beyond useless.

So, being indigent, I did what I could and called Mom. Babe was quite irritated by this. Mom was unwilling to help for reasons that historically make a lot of sense.

But I had to try.

As I listen to Nine Inch Nails' Something I Can Never Have in an attempt to right myself, things are only deteriorating. NIN is always a bad sign.

Those two days together, with such reconnection, served as exactly what I didn't need. I don't know what the fuck I was thinking ... it was a terrible fucking idea, but with my dad dying, I needed something to cling to.

Oh, I now have something; it's just not what I'd wish on anyone else. God, I wish we'd not gotten along ... I'd have had closure instead of this fucking mess.

I'd be seriously considering social services but for the fact that they treat me like an incompetent idiot, which does not advance the cause. I'm a victim of bad luck professionally, not some sort of microbrain that needs to be told how basic operations happen.

To touch someone intimately again, to just default to assisting each other again, was intoxicating. This is "hey, it's Christmas in five days, and fuck off for trying to help."

I don't have the funds to go up there, and even if I did ... it wouldn't end well. Leaving me feeling very alone in my van (at least it's not cold tonight) and knowing that, well, we gave it another shot, but here we are.

I've been home nine days but can't bring myself to change out of her clothes. I smell like her (yes, in every way; dryer sheets eventually stop working), and I mean, I'll take that over Tide and Bounce.

But I don't know what to do about it. And I'm now worried this could go somewhere incredibly dark. I don't want to specify exactly how many suicide attempts I have under my belt, nor how serious they got, but I'm not OK, and I don't have the resources to do anything other than crack open another beer and kick the can to tomorrow.

Fuck, is it frustrating to have your person ... and have her totally unavailable. You'd think I would have learned my lesson over 16 years, but I didn't. I'm not particularly stable nor aware of how normal people interact.

While my career was intact, this was marginally doable. Without that, I'm lost. I'm just lonely and know that my soulmate was a brief respite, but now I have to deal with my dad being dead; my mom telling me I'm making bad choices; my body, heart and mind all saying the same thing; and the door is shut.

For now. We've played the waiting game for years before, but it hits a bit different at 46 than 25.