ArcaMax

Nobody in their right mind wants to test positive for COVID-19. If you’re the mayor of Chicago and you just resolved a tense standoff with the Chicago Teachers Union that kept kids out of public schools and drew national attention, you DEFINITELY don’t want to test positive for COVID-19.

But viruses don’t much care what anybody wants. So ...Read more

The current Chicago Public Schools mess is a perfect microcosm of this country’s increasingly boneheaded handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

I’ll put it in the form of a parable: A group of people see a bear charging toward them. They’ve dealt with a similar bear before and know what needs to be done to minimize the impending mauling. ...Read more

As we mark the first anniversary of the domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol, you’ll read much about how it was one of America’s darkest days.

That’s accurate, of course. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it was also one of America’s dumbest days: A violent pack of conspiracy-addled mopes, following the lead of a ...Read more

Hello, beloved humans, and welcome to the seventh-annual edition of Rex Huppke’s Guaranteed-Accurate-Never-Wrong-Grade-A-New Year’s Predictions, an annual event cherished by 10s of people.

As regular readers know, I once walked through a mysterious mist in a field outside an Indiana hog farm and emerged smelling terrible but also possessing...Read more

Amid the upcoming holiday cheer, I hope you’ll all take a moment — or better yet, several moments — to worry about democracy.

Ours is presently unraveling like an old yarn Christmas ornament, the kind you don’t notice is in trouble until it’s too far gone to save.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 ...Read more

Hi, everybody! I’m the coup former President Donald Trump and his lackeys attempted to pull off in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.

BOO! Hah, did I scare you? Probably not. None of you seem all that scared by me, which would be a real kick in the pants if I had legs and a butt and wore pants.

No, it seems most of you don’t know ...Read more

In the weekly deluge of news, you may have missed this: A towering Christmas tree in Chicago’s Washington Park neighborhood was torched by some ungrateful wretch just hours after a crowd of about 200 kids and adults lit the tree and enjoyed a night of caroling in the grassy median at Martin Luther King Drive and Garfield Boulevard.

This is ...Read more

Through some well-placed sources in the virus community, I was given a missive penned by the newly discovered omicron coronavirus variant. Apparently it had some things it wanted to get off its outer protein coating.

Here is the text of omicron’s letter:

FOUL HUMANS, I AM THE OMICRON VARIANT OF THE CORONAVIRUS AND I AM HERE TO STAKE MY CLAIM...Read more

We Americans seem to live, more and more, in the narrow spaces between acts of unconscionable violence.

When one erupts, as it did late Sunday at a Christmas parade in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, we stop living our lives. We grimace, watch the inevitable video — horrifying, soul-quaking — read about the number of dead and injured — ...Read more

During closing arguments in Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial Monday, the Kenosha County prosecutor said this: “I think we can all agree we shouldn’t have 17-year-olds running around the street with AR-15s, because this is what happens.”

Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger was, of course, referencing the two men shot and killed by ...Read more

Green Bay Packers quarterback and State Farm Insurance spokes-man-bun Aaron Rodgers has been widely pilloried for first lying about whether he received the COVID-19 vaccination, then getting COVID-19, then babbling a slew of vaccine disinformation during a radio interview, then going back on the same radio show Tuesday and offering a limp-noodle...Read more

For President Joe Biden to get his outrageous, socialist, communist, Maoist (and probably Satanist) $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill passed, he had to pull off the most devious act of his administration: tricking 13 Republicans in the U.S. House into governing.

I don’t know if he used big-tech-facilitated mind control or some form of sleepy ...Read more

The CEO of McDonald’s is rightfully getting his McNuggets deep fried over a text message he sent to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

The text, sent in April, was in response to the separate shooting deaths of two Chicago children earlier this year. It parroted an oft-spewed bit of victim-blaming: “With both, the parents failed those kids which...Read more

There’s a scene we should keep in the forefront of our minds as Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial begins:

On a chaotic August night in Kenosha, a white 17-year-old who had just shot and killed two people and wounded a third approaches police with an AR-15 style rifle slung across his chest, a rifle he was too young to carry in Wisconsin. His ...Read more

The judge in Kyle Rittenhouse’s upcoming murder trial has laid out some early ground rules for attorneys, and they make perfect sense, as long as you’re a member of one of the militias or neo-fascist groups that support the 18-year-old defendant.

On Monday, Kenosha County Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder ruled that the two men Rittenhouse shot...Read more