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Over the past two decades, the housing market has emerged as a powerful means by which capitalism can exploit the working class. At our workplaces, capitalists profit from their ability to control our labor; and then we go home, where we are exploited by the landlords who profit from their control over housing. And if the answer to our oppression in the workplace is labor unions, the answer to our oppression in our homes is tenant unions.

From early 2022 to early 2024, I was involved with a tenant union campaign at a large apartment complex in north-west San Antonio, via the now-dormant Tenant Union San Antonio (TUSA). While the campaign failed in its overall goal – to organize the tenants of the complex into a self-sustaining, democratic, and militant union – the efforts nonetheless secured some improvements for tenants, and provided organizers with an important and fulfilling learning experience.

The past week has presented an upsetting montage of what happens when an authoritarian executive, motivated by naked racism and nativism, activates a highly militarized “unitary executive police force” across the country to storm into apartments and restaurants, throw kids onto the ground, and whisk people away with their kids still in the car.

Why would local police support ICE operations that appear violent and unjustified?

ICE and the immigrant criminalization system, to a large extent, do not operate the way most local criminal legal systems do. Warrants don’t require the same scrutiny to be actionable. The burden of proof is different. There is no real “statute of limitations” – you can be deported for something that happened decades ago or deported before you are convicted. People facing deportation and detention are not guaranteed defense attorneys. And, as we now have seen so clearly, ICE is not required to say who they have detained or why (although they are supposed to post who is being held in ICE detention). Thus, we have an immigrant criminalization system that is perfectly designed to disappear people in a horrific way, that leaves loved ones in confusion and dismay, that criminalizes people for movement.

Democrat John Ewing unseated Republican Mayor Jean Stothert in Tuesday's officially nonpartisan election to lead Omaha, a victory that ends the GOP's 12-year hold on Nebraska's largest city.

Stothert conceded the race after 9 PM local time with Ewing ahead 54-46, though more votes remained to be counted.

Ewing, who will be Omaha's first Black mayor, overcame a large fundraising disadvantage in his campaign to deny Stothert what would have been an unprecedented fourth term.

But Ewing, who serves as Douglas County treasurer, benefited from voters' unhappiness with the incumbent. The challenger argued Stothert had failed to solve the city's transportation problems and strengthen the police force during her long tenure.

Ewing also sought to tie the mayor to Donald Trump, whom Stothert has tried to avoid associating with during her time leading this Democratic-leaning city. Ewing additionally enjoyed the support of former state Sen. Mike McDonnell, a Democrat-turned-Republican who came in third during the first round of voting.

Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other.

But our modern knowledge tells us the basic difference between an atom of lead and an atom of gold: the lead atom contains exactly three more protons. So can we create a gold atom by simply pulling three protons out of a lead atom?

As it turns out, we can. But it’s not easy.

While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold. Extremely small amounts, in fact: a total of some 29 trillionths of a gram.

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In August, Warner Bros. announced it was taking a $9.1 billion charge, writing down the value of its traditional TV networks, which include, along with the Discovery Channel and Cartoon Network, the Food Network, TBS and TNT. Warner Bros. doesn't break out the individual financial performance of each channel, but Cartoon Network's struggles have certainly contributed to the downturn. According to estimates from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the annual advertising revenue for Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, its spinoff animation brand for grown-ups, plummeted from $668.3 million in 2014 to $133.7 million last year. > The viability of the Cartoon Network brand in streaming doesn't look much more promising. A few years ago, network executives were touting Max as the next natural step in Cartoon Network's evolution. But since its debut five years ago, a string of programming misfires and increased competition from YouTube have meant that Max has largely failed to emerge as a go-to destination for young viewers. According to data from PreciseTV, a video advertising firm, only 13% of 10- to 12-year-old viewers have recently watched programming on Max, versus 32% for Hulu, 57% for Disney+ and 72% for Netflix. Among preschool audiences, the numbers for Max are even worse. The company recently decided that children's programming is no longer a core part of Max's strategy, further clouding Cartoon Network's prospects.

Cartoon Network’s struggles have been playing out at a time when animation at large has arguably never been more popular. From Dog Man and Inside Out 2 to The Super Mario Bros. Movie, animated features continue to rule the box office. Bluey—a cartoon series from Australia that Cartoon Network executives once unsuccessfully sought to license—has been a huge hit for Disney+. And animated shows such as Peppa Pig and CoComelon regularly attract big audiences of youngsters on Netflix. The global anime market is projected to grow from $34.2 billion in 2024 to $60.1 billion by 2030, according to research by Jefferies Financial Group Inc. Surely, many animation fans still hope, there is room for the Cartoon Network brand to flourish once again.

In the spring of 2020, when AT&T finally rolled out HBO Max (later rechristened Max), sign-ups were sluggish. “Pricing is high, the buzz is not there,” industry analyst Michael Nathanson said a few days after the app appeared, noting that his own children were totally indifferent to it. Somehow a company with three celebrated animation studios and one of the world’s largest collections of cartoons had failed to generate much interest from young viewers. “Nobody came to me yesterday and said, ‘We should get HBO Max now, Dad.’ ”

Zaslav, now dealing with his new company’s ballooning costs and vaporized cash flow, implemented a multibillion-dollar cost-cutting plan that touched every part of Warner Bros.’ business. It particularly irked creatives, including cartoonists who felt they were even more vulnerable to the scythe-swinging than their peers in live action. When cuts hit Turner Classic Movies, for example, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese jumped on a Zoom with Zaslav and ultimately won some concessions for the cherished classic-film channel. Who would ride to Cartoon Network’s rescue?

The animation industry’s stars weren’t famous actors or silver-tongued directors; they were fictional characters—by and large a bunch of anthropomorphic animals and bug-eyed misfits with nebulous executive function skills. Samurai Jack and Gumball couldn’t exactly roll up to the boss’ mansion and sweet-talk budget protections over cocktails and sign autographs for the nephews. Quite possibly, the cartoonists were screwed.

In 2023, Warner Bros. revealed that it would be shutting down Cartoon Network Studios’ home in Burbank and moving the remaining staffers into the “Iceberg,” the company’s glistening, Frank Gehry-designed offices a few miles away. What little remained of the network’s prized independence was over. Workers came in, painted over the treasured mural of graffiti on the stairwell walls and pried the Cartoon Network logo off the building’s facade. Van Partible, the creator of Johnny Bravo, went back for one final, dispiriting look around. “It was just really sad,” he says.

Last fall, Cartoon Network began airing Barney’s World, a sugary-sweet reformulation of PBS’s onetime live-action show, starring the soft purple dinosaur. In the decade and a half since the original series went off the air, the toymaker Mattel Inc. had snapped up the Barney IP and concocted a plan to revive it for the benefit of toddlers and shareholders. “It’s exactly the kind of thing that people at Cartoon Network would have once made fun of,” says Simensky, the former Cartoon Network executive.

If there remains a source of hope for Cartoon Network’s more disillusioned fans and alumni, it exists some 2,000 miles away in Atlanta, where the Adult Swim team still resides. On a Tuesday morning in February, Michael Ouweleen, president of Cartoon Network and head of Adult Swim, strolled through the hallways at the Williams Street studio. If you squinted, it almost felt like the heady days of Peak Cartoon. Ouweleen went past a gaggle of young art-school grads in training and a room with a guy animating a scene of a tree falling on a screaming character. He walked into a windowless room where, amid a smattering of tripods, cameras and papier-mâché, workers were preparing an elaborate April Fools’ stunt for the amusement of the network’s fans. (Several weeks later, on April 1, Adult Swim would broadcast a half-hour special of its hit show Rick and Morty reimagined as live-action theater sketches.)

Ouweleen, who helped to start Adult Swim more than two decades ago and has worked in almost every aspect of animation series creation, from programming to marketing, says its mission essentially remains the same: Find talented artists with a unique point of view and help them realize their vision. He points out that it still maintains a shorts program to act as a pipeline for new talent. Under the current iteration, artists can get between $6,000 and $8,000 to develop brief videos—roughly 50 of which are presented on Adult Swim’s YouTube channel every year.

Ouweleen isn’t worried about the future of animation at Warner Bros. and beyond. The entire history of cartoons, he points out, has been marked by almost nonstop technological disruption. “Animation is amazing at adapting to a different economic reality or a different consumption habit,” he says. Even so, Adult Swim will have to continue to grapple with the same downward viewership pressure that is affecting all of cable TV. According to Variety’s yearend analysis of Nielsen ratings data, in 2014 Adult Swim averaged 1.3 million total viewers in prime time. By last year that figure had dropped to 210,000.

Fortunately, Adult Swim’s shows tend to live easily these days alongside the kind of prestige HBO dramas, edgy comedies and indie A24 movies that have come to largely define Max’s core offerings. In February, Adult Swim began airing Common Side Effects, a comedy caper about an amateur scientist who discovers in the mountains of Peru magic mushrooms capable of healing just about every human ailment and is subsequently hunted down by a shadowy cabal of big pharma execs. The bloody, paranoid gonzo show seems perfectly engineered for the current “Make America Healthy Again” moment. It’s the output of an impressive creative pedigree that includes a former writer for Veep, the co-creator of Scavengers Reign and Mike Judge, from King of the Hill and Beavis and Butt-Head.

Following its debut, Common Side Effects regularly appeared in the top 10 most popular series on Max, and among critics it has received the kind of effusive praise often reserved for auteur-driven serialized dramas. In March, Warner Bros. announced it was re-upping the show for a second season—a rare bit of good news amid the broader funk hanging over the industry.

Hasan Piker, the biggest progressive political streamer in America, was detained by Customs and Border Protection for hours of questioning upon returning to the U.S. from a trip to France this weekend. Piker posted about the incident on X and later talked about it on stream.

He was detained in Chicago and questioned for two hours about protected journalistic activities like who he’s interviewed and his political beliefs. He was asked whether or not he’d interviewed Hamas, Houthis, or Hezbollah members. He was questioned about his opinions on Trump and Israel and asked about his history of bans on Twitch. His phone and laptop were not confiscated.

"They straight up tried to get something out of me that I think they could use to basically detain me permanently,” Piker said on stream following the incident. “… [the agent] kept saying stuff like, do you like Hamas? Do you support Hamas? Do you think Hamas is a terror group or a resistance group?”

“I kept repeating the same statement over and over again,” Piker said. “I kept saying... I'm on the side of civilians. I want the endless bloodshed to end. I am a pacifist. I want wars to end… which is insane because up until this moment. If you were to say as an American citizen, you stand 10 toes down with Hamas, or you stand 10 toes down with the Houthis, they can’t deny you entry into the country for that shit.”

“DHS flagging and detaining one of the U.S.’s largest left-wing voices for their political opinions while the Trump admin suggests they might suspend habeas corpus does not portend well for the future,” said lawyer and content creator Alex Peter.

In 2004, AbleGamers was established as a nonprofit dedicated to elevating disabled voices and improving accessibility in the gaming industry. For approximately 20 years, the organization has presented talks across industry events, raised millions through annual charity events, and acted as a consistent resource for developers and players alike. Throughout its existence, video game accessibility and AbleGamers became synonymous, and reporters, developers, and the public viewed them as an integral source of advancing accessibility.

Founded by Mark Barlet, the organization worked with studios like Xbox to create the Xbox Adaptive Controller, PlayStation to create the Access Controller, and even paired with Bungie for exclusive merchandise. Aside from industry partnerships, AbleGamers purports to act as consultants with developers to teach about the implementation of accessibility options in games.

However, roughly 20 years after its founding, new reports from former employees and members of the accessibility community describe abuse, financial mismanagement from leadership, and a board that failed to protect its employees.

According to the corroborated account of a former employee who wished to remain anonymous, Barlet's behavior became concerning a few years after the employee joined the organization. Throughout their approximately 10 year employment with the charity, the source describes several instances of sexist and emotionally abusive comments directed toward them.

"He kept telling me I was HR for the charity because I'm a woman," the source said. "At this time, I was the only woman in the charity. He then sent me to work on a literal HR case that I now know was really illegal of me because I didn't have those credentials."

The source claims that Barlet occasionally made light of the aforementioned HR case for several weeks, causing numerous employees to feel uncomfortable. According to the source, Barlet would periodically tell the source she was HR because she "was the woman of the group."

They described incidents including overhearing racist remarks about other employees, a time when they felt they had to verbally break up a conflict between Barlet and another coworker, and witnessing a number of inappropriate comments from Barlet such as, "We need to get the most f***ed up disabled person to be on our marketing, the one with real multiple disabilities." The source notes that in this particular instance, Barlet proceeded to make obscene gestures, mocking individuals with physical disabilities.

"During an all-hands internal meeting, I was two months postpartum, and before the meeting, everyone was either in call or in the conference room physically, and he said my jugs had gotten so big that he wouldn't know how to handle them," the source said. "About a week later, we were walking past each other, and he went up to me with his hands outstretched hovering over my [chest] and said 'Haha, they're so big, I wouldn't know how to handle them because I'm gay.'"

Releasing in 2026, "'Spider-Noir' tells the story of an aging and down on his luck private investigator (Cage) in 1930s New York, who is forced to grapple with his past life as the city's one and only superhero." The show will be available in both black-and-white and color.

"Spider-Noir" will debut domestically on MGM+'s linear channel, then arrive globally on Prime video the next day.

Evidence has mounted that the program so far is achieving its two main goals — reducing congestion and raising revenue for transit improvements — even as the federal government has ramped up pressure to halt it. In March, the tolls raised $45 million in net revenue, putting the program on track to generate roughly $500 million in its first year.

Congestion pricing was designed to finance more than $15 billion in critical transit upgrades. Those investments will take years. But the parallel changes at street level are already apparent.

A Kurdish militia group that has waged a bloody insurgency against the Turkish state for four decades said on Monday that it would lay down its arms and disband, a decision that could reshape Turkish politics and reverberate in neighboring countries.

The announcement by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its Kurdish acronym, P.K.K., came a few months after its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, urged the group to disarm and disband. In his February message, he said the group’s armed struggle had outlived its initial purpose and that further progress in the struggle for Kurdish rights could be achieved through politics.

The P.K.K. began as a secessionist group that sought to create an independent state for Turkey’s Kurdish minority. More recently, it has said that it sought greater rights for Kurds inside Turkey. It is classified as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and other countries.

In a statement on Monday, the group echoed Mr. Ocalan’s call, saying that it had “carried the Kurdish issue to a level where it can be solved by democratic politics, and the P.K.K. has completed its mission in that sense.”

A recent congress by the group’s leaders in northern Iraq had decided to end “the work under the name of P.K.K.’’

Bolts this week talked to Judith Brett, an emeritus professor of politics at Melbourne’s La Trobe University and the author of From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting, a book that retraces the history and aftermath of her country’s adoption of compulsory voting.

Australia’s system, Brett tells Bolts, emerged out of a commitment to majoritarian democracy that was stronger in Australia in the 1920s than in the United Kingdom and other former British colonies like the United States. Since then, she says, it has exerted an “egalitarian pressure on our politicians.”

Some other countries have also adopted compulsory voting, many of them in South America. To U.S. voters, though, it may certainly seem an unusual practice. Here, proposals that the state merely register people to vote automatically, let alone require them to actually cast a ballot, already sparks controversy, as critics of automatic registration say individuals should be the ones to decide whether they want their names added to voter rolls.

In Australia, which has required that people register since 1911, compulsory voting has remained fairly uncontroversial, which Brett says has helped develop a strong culture around voting. “The parties don’t have to mobilize the vote,” she told Bolts. “The state, the government, gets the vote out for them.”

Still, that “egalitarian pressure” is felt very unevenly. For one, Indigenous Australians were largely excluded from the 1902 electoral act that gave other Australian men and women the right to vote, and they did not gain full voting rights until the 1960s. Today, turnout is lower in predominantly Indigenous areas; in the Northern Territory, it stood at 73 percent in 2022, well under all other Australian states. WBEZ reported last year from the Northern Territory on the mix of political distrust and socioeconomic difficulties that fuels that gap.

Citizens who are at least 18 are eligible to vote in federal elections, with the exception of people who are presently serving a prison sentence of more than 3 years. But incarcerated Australians who are eligible to vote experience immense logistical barriers to actually casting ballots.

It is likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again—which is, likely, a very good thing. But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image. Everything—from X to Facebook to YouTube—now sort of feels like 4chan. Which makes you wonder why it even needed to still exist.

"The novelty of a website devoted to shock and gore, and the rebelliousness inherent in it, dies when your opinions become the official policy of the world's five or so richest people and the government of the United States," the Onion CEO and former extremism reporter Ben Collins tells WIRED. “Like any ostensibly nihilist cultural phenomenon, it inherently dies if that phenomenon itself becomes The Man.”

My first experience with the more toxic side of the site came several years after my LOLcat all-nighter, when I was in college. I was a big Tumblr user—all my friends were on there—and for about a year or so, our corner of the platform felt like an extension of the house parties we would throw. That cozy vibe came crashing down for me when I got doxed the summer going into my senior year. Someone made a “hate blog” for me—one of the first times I felt the dark presence of an anonymous stranger’s digital ire, and posted my phone number on 4chan.

They played a prank that was popular on the site at the time, writing in a thread that my phone number was for a GameStop store that had a copy of the ultra-rare video game Battletoads. I received no less than 250 phone calls over the next 48 hours asking if I had a copy of the game.

Collins, like me, closely followed 4chan's rise in the 2010s from internet backwater to unofficial propaganda organ of the Trump administration. As he sees it, once Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 there was really no point to 4chan anymore. Why hide behind anonymity if a billionaire lets you post the same kind of extremist content under your real name and even pays you for it?

4chan’s “user base just moved into a bigger ballpark and started immediately impacting American life and policy," Collins says. "Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government. Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter, then six months later out of the mouths of an administration official."

But understanding how 4chan went from the home of cat memes to a true internet bogeyman requires an understanding of how the site actually worked. Its features were often overlooked amid all the conversations about the site's political influence, but I'd argue they were equally, if not more, important.