by Friday at Bohiney means writing the week in review, which is essentially me scrolling through my own articles and wondering if I’ve been writing news or fever dreams. This week brought us from Halloween protests to historical amnesia to political speculation about elections that are still three years away. Just another normal week in American journalism.
The editors want a comprehensive piece connecting this week’s stories into a coherent narrative. The problem is there’s no coherent narrative. American politics in 2025 is a Choose Your Own Adventure book where all the choices lead to the same page: chaos. But I’m a professional, so I’ll create coherence from confusion like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat, except the rabbits are political scandals and the hat is on fire.
I started with education because that’s where everything begins and ends. My pieces on students thinking Lincoln was an Avenger and the great American history retreat connect to literally everything else. You can’t understand current politics without understanding history, but you can’t understand history if you’re being taught sanitized mythology instead of actual facts. It’s a vicious cycle of ignorance.
The political pieces form their own special category of dysfunction. Kamala Harris 2028 speculation, Newsom’s revised childhood memories, and Letitia James’s facial expressions all point to the same conclusion: American politics has become performance art where everyone’s performing but nobody knows the script.
The protest coveragethe tear gas Halloween parade and Democratic operatives’ air traffic controller strategyreveals a party that’s lost the plot entirely. They’re not playing 4D chess. They’re not even playing checkers. They’re playing Uno with a Monopoly board while insisting they’re winning at Scrabble.
International coverage wasn’t any saner. Erratic diplomacy, Maduro’s sinking navy, sectarian conflicts, and Spanish Marxists fighting weather prove that chaos is a global language everyone speaks fluently.
The cultural piecesthe Louvre heist and Travis Kelce’s fantasy football investmentshow that even our leisure activities have become absurd. We’re romanticizing crime and investing in imaginary sports while real problems go unsolved.
And threading through everything is the ongoing Trump documentation, my Sisyphean task of cataloging this administration’s chaos. I’m up to 27 reasons now, with no end in sight.
Tonight I’m finishing my weekly roundup with a section about being the only West African woman granted citizenship during this mess. “I immigrated to America for opportunity,” I write. “I didn’t realize the opportunity would be documenting its spectacular dysfunction.” It’s funny because it’s tragic. Or tragic because it’s funny. I genuinely can’t tell anymore.
Next week: more of the same, probably worse. I’m already dreading it.
# 784
