The Split covers taste, hustle, and how to live well, with two columnists who rarely see eye to eye.
A 29% drop in young women calling faith 'very important' isn't a cultural mystery. It's a ledger. Purity culture built a shame framework aimed disproportionately at girls, and the mental health costs landed on the women who absorbed it, not the institutions that sold it.
By Zara Mitchell · 3 min read
Gianni Infantino handed Donald Trump the FIFA Peace Prize. That ceremony, staged ahead of a World Cup where ICE may patrol stadium gates, tells you everything about what pop culture fandom actually does to political resistance in 2026. It decorates power. It does not challenge it.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
The vegan vs. omnivore debate has been running at full volume for a decade. The science moved on without it. What the research actually shows is less satisfying than either side wants to hear.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
Verified creators earn 3.5 times more than unverified ones. Algorithms amplify established accounts. The MrBeast lawsuit shows what the labor conditions look like underneath the brand. The democratization story is the product, not the reality.
By Zara Mitchell · 3 min read
There was no verified Jordan Peterson walkout at Princeton. The story spread anyway. That spread, not the event, is what tells you something real about where campus discourse actually lives right now.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
A Cork influencer filmed a woman receiving paramedic care and posted it as a prank. TikTok removed it. Meta did not. That gap between two platforms is where victims disappear, and it is entirely fixable if anyone decides to fix it.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
An amuse-bouche arrives on a slate tile. It is a single pea in foam, described in 40 words, eaten in one second. That gap between ceremony and substance is where fine dining's cultural authority quietly collapses.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
Netflix calls its April 2026 lineup 'made for binge-watching.' That's not a content description; it's a consumption instruction. The real cost of binge culture isn't that TV gets worse to watch. It's that it gets impossible to remember.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
Julius Rosenwald funded nearly 5,000 schools for Black children during Jim Crow, in direct partnership with Black leaders. Of 500 built in South Carolina, 44 structures survive. The gap between those 2 numbers is a policy choice, not a coincidence.
By Zara Mitchell · 3 min read
Darryl Bohannon has been performing as Ms. Demure on Dayton public-access TV for over 25 years. Ohio's House Bill 249 could end that, along with a May suicide prevention fundraiser. The Senate should look at what's actually at stake before it votes.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
Purity culture's damage wasn't that it stopped millennials from having sex. It was that it made sex feel like a moral verdict. The shame architecture outlasted the belief system, and most institutions that built it haven't said a word.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
A machine can now identify a Rembrandt from a 1-cm² paint sample with 95% accuracy. That tells you nothing about whether the painting is worth your time. The real algorithmic threat is subtler: exposure metrics are being treated as quality metrics, and the art market is paying for that confusion.
By Zara Mitchell · 4 min read
The Kenya-led security mission has been in Haiti for nearly 2 years. Gangs now control 85% of Port-au-Prince, and 1.4 million people have been displaced. A new Gang Suppression Force deploys in May. The ICRC is already warning it will make things worse.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
A TikTok creator with 30,000 followers earns $25 to $50 a month from the platform's native program. Brand deals pay more, but the effort-to-income ratio is brutal and nothing compounds. The math on influencer revenue deals is not close, and small creators keep ignoring it.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
ARMY called for a boycott over BTS's Israeli brand deal. The streams kept climbing anyway. K-pop fan activism in 2026 is loud, politically serious, and almost entirely disconnected from the numbers that actually move labels.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
Finland convicted a sitting MP for a pamphlet she wrote in 2004, and the ruling is a problem regardless of what you think about her theology. Hate speech law that cannot distinguish doctrinal argument from incitement is not protecting anyone. It is just expanding what the state gets to punish.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
64% of streaming discovery sessions now start with a text prompt, not a human recommendation. The algorithm doesn't care if your song is good. It cares if your metadata is correct. That's a different problem, and the music industry is pretending it isn't.
By Zara Mitchell · 3 min read
A Eid dinner in Dearborn and a flexitarian in Copenhagen are both making decisions about meat, but they are not making the same kind of decision. The debate keeps failing because it refuses to notice the difference. Context is not a footnote here; it is the entire argument.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
The Episcopal Church lost more than half its members since the 1960s. Ryan Burge says the trend is almost certainly irreversible. The reason isn't theology; it's that mainline churches stopped doing the institutional work that keeps people connected.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
Jennifer Lawrence called it in April 2026: celebrities don't move votes. The 72% indifference number from Pew backs her up. The real question is why anyone keeps funding the strategy anyway.
By Zara Mitchell · 3 min read
Cabaret turns 60 this year and it still does not need a warning label. The dread is built into the chord changes, the emcee's grin, the structure of the thing. What classic musicals need is not disclaimers or rewrites. They need directors willing to do the actual work.
By Jules Fontaine · 3 min read
Season 5 of Hacks arrives with Emmys, Variety covers, and the kind of cultural goodwill that makes honest evaluation feel ungrateful. The show earns most of it. It also spends some of it flattering itself, and there is a real difference between depicting a problem and solving one.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
Malta's government celebrated the 2026 Michelin results louder than any chef did. That tells you something. The guide still has power, but it has quietly changed what it is actually for.
By Lena Paige · 3 min read
A Harry Styles presale seat hit $1,000 in January 2026, and legislators want to ban the pricing algorithm that produced it. They are targeting the symptom while the actual extraction machine, Live Nation's control of venues, ticketing, and promotion, keeps running.
By Zara Mitchell · 3 min read
