Culture

Before You Drop $500 on a Switch 2, Read This The Nintendo Switch 2 is a great machine. But is it $500-better than a $45 handheld that plays the entire NES (Nintendo Entertainment System), SNES (Super Nintendo), Game Boy, Genesis, and PlayStation 1 libraries — or a $249 one that handles PS2 and GameCube? A Little Story A few weeks ago I went looking for something my kids could play classic games on — something I wouldn’t mourn if it got dropped, lost, or used as a frisbee. ...

The Sky Arena: Why Air Shows Are a Moral Anachronism We’ve Somehow Normalized We banned gladiatorial combat. We reformed NASCAR until the deaths stopped. Air shows cannot be reformed — they can only be banned. There is a particular kind of moral blindness that only becomes visible in retrospect. Future generations look back and ask: how did they not see it? How did they sit in those stands, eat their funnel cake, and watch without flinching? ...

The AI PC Kickstarter Gold Rush: A Buyer’s Guide for the Discerning Paranoid Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Buy a Framework Desktop The year is 2026. Every company with access to a Shenzhen ODM catalog and a Canva account has discovered that if you put the words “local AI,” “agentic,” and “private” in a Kickstarter headline, people will throw money at a render of an aluminum cube. We are in the middle of the AI PC gold rush, and somebody has to sort the nuggets from the gravel. ...

A Simple Question That Reveals Everything Do any current Angry Birds games have the same simple elegance as the original? The answer is no. And the reason why reveals something far more disturbing than the decline of a mobile game franchise. The Death of Premium Mobile Gaming In 2009, Angry Birds was a revelation. You paid $0.99 once, and you owned a complete, polished game. Pure physics puzzles that scaled through clever level design. No ads. No energy systems. No daily login bonuses. No loot boxes. ...

The Force Is a Religion: Why Modern Star Wars Can’t Find Its Soul There’s a persistent mystery in contemporary pop culture: why can’t the most valuable intellectual property in entertainment history recapture its magic? Disney has poured billions into Star Wars, hired talented filmmakers, and produced technically proficient content—yet something essential keeps slipping through their fingers. The sequel trilogy divided the fanbase. Solo flopped. The streaming shows range from “pretty good” to “forgettable.” Meanwhile, the original and prequel trilogies, for all their flaws, continue to resonate across generations. ...