The Split covers taste, hustle, and how to live well, with two columnists who rarely see eye to eye.
The March 28 protests made every major outlet. Veterans for Peace showed up with credible, specific arguments against Iran war policy. Editors chose crowd shots and White House reactions instead. Coverage and representation are not the same thing.
By Zara Mitchell · 3 min read
The Columbus statue installed at the White House on March 26 was cast from a replica of the very monument protesters threw into Baltimore's Inner Harbor in 2020. Someone chose that source on purpose. The question is not whether Columbus deserves a statue; it is whether this one was ever meant to be anything other than a provocation.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
A TikTok algorithm serves a teenager body image content every 39 seconds during the school day. Fifty-eight percent of countries have already decided that is unacceptable. The rest are just stalling.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
There is no confirmed TIME MAGA hat cover. What went viral instead were 25 hours of DOGE deposition footage and a federal court fight over whether the public could watch them. The fake story got better distribution than the real one, and that gap is worth examining closely.
By Zara Mitchell · 4 min read
TV gave everyone the same two minutes of Senate floor shouting, and then it was over. Social media gives you a personalized drip of the content most likely to make you specifically furious, and it never stops. The mechanism is not mysterious, and the platforms are not helpless.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
Dolores Huerta is 95, and California just heard her for the first time. The César Chávez fallout isn't a story about rhetoric gone wrong. It's a story about what progressive movements do when a symbol becomes more valuable than accountability.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
No American university earns an 'A' for free speech in 2026. The top school got a B. And 60% of students at one major research university say they won't disagree with their professors. That is not a free speech debate. That is an institutional failure with a measurable output.
By Zara Mitchell · 3 min read
The booing at Eurovision 2026 has become the story, and the actual music is paying for it. When a 12-second clip of jeering travels further than the song it interrupted, something structural has broken. The EBU has the tools to fix it; they are choosing statements instead.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
Boys in trauma therapy idolize Andrew Tate not because they're naive, but because he answers a question before therapy even asks it. The mental health system has a friction problem, and the manosphere has no friction at all.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
The Atlanta Hawks canceled a strip club promotion, got roasted nationally, then won 10 straight games while fans showed up in Magic City gear anyway. The front office understood Atlanta for 11 days and then blinked. That is the actual branding disaster here.
By Zara Mitchell · 4 min read
The packaging shows a cartoon rat. The CDC shows hantavirus. Over 100 U.S. airports and most major retailers have already stopped selling glue traps. The question now is why Congress hasn't.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
Sergey Brin donated $45 million this month to defeat a ballot measure that would tax him once. That spending gap is the whole argument. California's wealth tax fight is less about billionaires existing and more about whether any policy can survive their opposition.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
54% of countries have rape laws that ignore consent. 75% permit forced child marriage. The UN published those numbers this month, and they describe the world after 30 years of international commitments. This is not a values debate. Someone is paying to keep those laws in place.
By Zara Mitchell · 3 min read
SXSW had a $1,995 platinum badge this year and an artisanal street taco tent charging $18 next to a 22-year-old cash-only stand. That proximity is not a coincidence. It is corporate absorption running exactly on schedule.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
The MAGA hat is not an empty symbol, which makes using it as cover bait lazier than it looks. TIME knows exactly what reaction it's buying. The question is whether buying that reaction counts as journalism.
By Lena Paige · 4 min read
Meta's own internal documents confirm what the algorithms were built to do. Anger drives sessions, sessions sell ads, and the math has always been that simple. The question is whether regulators will finally treat it as a product liability problem.
By Zara Mitchell · 3 min read
A well-made political joke requires the same precision as a recipe perfected over decades. But the platform delivering it has no interest in craft, only in what makes you share before you think. Satire in 2026 is confirming what you already believe, faster and louder than ever.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
TikTok pays $0.40 to $1 per 1,000 views. A 10-million-view hit earns you between $4,000 and $10,000 from the platform itself. That is the ceiling, not the floor. Real creator income is built somewhere else entirely.
By Lena Paige · 4 min read
Justin Booker's flyers went up on March 13, came down the same day, and made national headlines by March 14. FIRE issued a formal demand. Campbell issued a statement. Nobody changed their mind about anything. That is the campus free speech economy working exactly as designed.
By Zara Mitchell · 3 min read
Timothée Chalamet said no one cares about opera anymore. Then Seattle Opera ran a discount code with his name and 30 first-timers showed up for "Carmen." The demand was never the problem.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
The 'should billionaires exist' debate is a cultural performance, and it is doing actual damage. The richest Americans pay a 24% effective tax rate while average households pay 30%. That gap has a fix; it just requires less outrage and more legislative specificity.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. topped the midweek charts and confused everyone about what kind of artist Harry Styles is now. The confusion is not a mystery. An August 2025 production deadline is doing most of the explaining.
By Zara Mitchell · 3 min read
The stage was dressed in cane fields and utility poles before Bad Bunny sang a note. Most American media reported a great concert. The people who grew up knowing what those images mean watched something else entirely.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
Colman Domingo wore four brooches to the Golden Globes. Not one. Four. That is a designer making an argument, not a celebrity making a choice. The 2026 Oscars red carpet is where fashion houses claim cultural territory, and the stakes are higher than they look.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
