Picture yourself standing in front of a giant wiener on a sweltering summer day in the middle of Times Square. Around you is a talent contest featuring a drag Melania Trump, a UPS worker delivering boxes of Epstein files, a “clay woman,” and Curtis Sliwa, serving as one of the jurors in his red beret. It sounds invented, but Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian witnessed the entirely real The Most American Pageant Ever!, and somehow it may be the most sensible spectacle you have seen lately.
Elsewhere in the strange choreography of America’s 250th anniversary, the quill on an 1834 statue of Thomas Jefferson snapped while the work was being moved inside a New York museum. In an opinion piece published today, scholar and activist Todd Fine urges Mayor Mamdani to take back the city-owned sculpture and turn it into a symbol of resistance to “MAGA and Silicon Valley authoritarianism.”
Enjoy reading, and Happy Friday!
—Hakim Bishara, editor-in-chief
