Photographs by Lawren Simmons

The U.S. capital has been outfitted of late with visual trappings that many associate with authoritarianism, such as banners depicting Donald Trump’s face and featuring his slogans. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before the president erected his own Potemkin village: the Great American State Fair, where almost nothing is what it pretends to be. 

Stretching across a large swath of the National Mall, the fair has dozens of pavilions for 56 states and territories and numerous executive-branch departments, in addition to a Ferris wheel, a rodeo, and other displays from companies and organizations, many of them Trump-aligned. It’s advertised by Freedom 250, the White House–created group behind many semiquincentennial events, as a “world-class exposition and modern-day World’s Fair.”

For a president enamored with the gilded and the grand, the exterior of this fair is surprisingly austere. Trompe l’oeil sheets cover slapdash structures lining both sides of the Mall with an illustration of architecture that is supposed to be beaux arts but is so stripped down that it makes the nearby brutalist buildings look practically baroque. A boxy model of Trump’s proposed triumphal arch in the center of the Mall appears as if it could have been designed in Minecraft and ordered from CVS for same-day pickup. 

Perhaps because of this aesthetic of illusions, the earnest state pride evident in some of the pavilions turns out to feel especially delightful. Consider: the Science Museum Oklahoma’s president going on about how hers is “the most surprising state you’ll ever experience,” or the Ohioan dispensing with midwestern cheer state-shaped tattoos and tokens for free Frosties through the end of the year. Here and there, the big, proud personalities of the states shine through (see: Idaho’s potato-sack dress). Together, they nearly instill an appreciation for this eclectic batch of states that have united into a country. But like any sense of patriotism these days, it’s complicated just as quickly. Right as I was about to crack open a bag of potato chips from Michigan, with “Take Me Home, Country Roads” stuck in my head from a karaoke video game in the West Virginia booth, I wandered into the State Department pavilion, where I was offered a paper replica of the limited-edition Trump passport. 

In a certain sense, the Great American State Fair bottles the central tension of federalism: a push and pull between irrepressible state personalities and the federal government. But it’s also not that academic. Put simply, the president is bringing down the mood.

Propaganda has a way of being blissfully unconcerned with material reality, and the state fair is no exception. When I arrived Thursday morning, workers were still assembling fencing, and I spotted bits of metal on the floor in Kentucky. North Carolina had no power. At one point in the afternoon, the “Faith & Family” pavilion—where the booths included the Museum of the Bible, Hillsdale College, and an evangelical-Christian stall labeled The Great Awakening—was entirely in the dark. 

Danny Villanueva, who had worked for a subcontractor on the site, told me while we were waiting in line that he enjoyed what he saw as being a part of history but that the exterior carpentry wasn’t very good. “I see the vision of how this should have been,” he said. 

Several states, including almost all of New England, did not officially show up, citing high costs and, in at least one case, the politicization of the affair, which opened Wednesday night with a Trump rally. Most absentee states received the same treatment: two chairs in front of a photo board showing state highlights, which gave dentist-waiting-room energy. Around midday, a group of disappointed Alaskans emerged from their state’s pavilion with exasperation. A teen named Emily told me that she would have liked to have seen “probably some representation of the nature, because we’re famous for it, and also maybe just, like, something in there, literally anything.” 

Some states that declined the invite had other organizations step in on their behalf. The potential perils of this were apparent in Delaware, where a Caesar Rodney impersonator was manning the booth (the Caesar Rodney Institute was the sponsor). A Founding Father who enslaved hundreds, Rodney has become something of a cause célèbre: His statue was pulled down in 2020 in Delaware, only for it to be remounted this year by the Trump administration in Washington, D.C.’s Freedom Plaza. The impersonator told me that he had come here because his state, in not participating, had politicized the event.

Maybe it was the dizzying experience of meeting the Rodney impersonator, seeing an Abraham Lincoln hologram (in the Illinois booth, run by a local museum), and encountering an AI-generated image of George Washington riding a roller coaster at a beach (in the New Jersey booth, run by Cape May County). Or maybe it was the dehydration (water is $5). But moving among tents in the scorching heat, you can sense your grip on reality starting to slip.  

The farm animals in the rodeo area? Those are real. The life-size cows in multiple state pavilions? Not so much, although you can “milk” at least two of them. In Montana, you can stand beneath an oversize faux-dinosaur rib cage and dig up fake fossils, and then, nearby, you can look at an actual Mesozoic fossil in North Dakota. The Department of Agriculture tent is giving out edible oranges—but Florida isn’t. No, those ones on its fake tree must be plastic. Ohio brought a real-life governor: Mike DeWine was there in the flesh. Alabama, meanwhile, had a printed cutout of its own chief executive, but if you spent enough time at the fair, you’d be forgiven for saying hello.

Trump’s renovation projects have chewed up Washington in recent weeks, but they’ve had the air of a publicity apparatus puttering out. It’s hard to spin a green Reflecting Pool. The fair, with its Trump trinkets and replica arch, is also what you see: a dollar-store version of the grandiosity that Trump hopes will be his legacy. 

 At its best moments, when the states have space to do their thing, the Great American State Fair feels a little like looking at a brochure inside a strip-mall travel agency: Suddenly, you want to get away to Arizona very badly. But you can’t tell whether it’s because the highly saturated photos are really that persuasive—or whether you’d just rather be anywhere else.  

Charity Majors, writing about how high-performing engineering teams are dealing with the transition from pre-AI to AI-native development: AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy.

This is not a situation where one side is right and the other is huffing paint. (O, that it were!) Each side is grappling with a real, alarming, escalating threat to the company’s existence, and the closer they look the more (again: real, alarming) evidence they find.

The enthusiasts are not wrong. We are starting to see real, non-imaginary, discontinuous leaps in capabilities from teams that lean in hard to working with AI. And this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust settles. That’s a real, existential threat.

The skeptics are also not wrong. When you ship code faster than engineers can read it, in domains where nobody has full context, you are making withdrawals from a trust account that took years to build. Reliability degrades, institutional knowledge evaporates. You end up with systems nobody understands, products burbling into incoherence, and on-call rotations that grind people up and spit them out. That is ALSO a real existential threat.

She goes on to say that “the wins and costs are happening to two different groups of people. There is no natural feedback loop.” Interesting read.

Tags: artificial intelligence · Charity Majors · programming

Like many other center-left parties across the Western world, the Democratic Party has experienced a significant decline in support among working-class voters over the past two decades or so—whether class is measured by household income, occupational status, or educational attainment. This trend has confronted Democrats with a particularly acute electoral challenge in parts of the country where blue-collar white citizens constitute a majority of the voting population, including much of the Midwest and interior West as well as small towns and rural areas across most of the nation.

This partisan realignment is primarily driven by the rising salience of cultural conflicts, Compared to citizens with socioeconomic advantage, working-class voters are more patriotic, nationalistic, traditionalist, and skeptical of social change; they also consistently hold more conservative preferences on subjects like abortion, LGBT rights, gun control, environmentalism, and immigration. As the public image of the Democratic Party has become more associated with cultural liberalism, it has lost its formerly durable popular reputation as primarily concerned with representing the political interests of the working class.

If winning a greater share of the working-class vote in the future requires the party to become more moderate on cultural issues, liberal Democrats would be forced into an unappetizing choice between ideological purity and electoral success. But if another path exists to reverse the party’s growing unpopularity among this key voting bloc, such a dilemma might be happily avoided. Thus an alternative hypothesis has attracted considerable acceptance among progressive activists and primary voters in recent years: Democrats can appeal to blue-collar Americans by nominating performatively “working-class” candidates who nonetheless champion progressive issue platforms.

This idea has a long history, but its most prominent recent manifestation was the Senate campaign of Pennsylvania lieutenant governor John Fetterman in 2022. Fetterman became nationally famous for dressing casually and speaking plainly, with his tattoos, hooded sweatshirts, and running shorts featuring prominently in press coverage of his candidacy as supposed authentication of his Everyman identity. To some observers, especially supporters on the left, Fetterman’s victory served as proof of concept for the claim that liberalism in a Carhartt wardrobe was a formula for success in a critical battleground state.

Unfortunately. it’s very difficult to analytically isolate Fetterman’s presentation of self from the other factors that might have contributed to his election in 2022; he faced a weak carpetbagging opponent, and Democrats nationwide performed better than the president’s party usually does in a midterm election (probably due to the Supreme Court’s unpopular Dobbs ruling issued that summer). But another test of the theory arrived two years later with Kamala Harris’s selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate. Democratic supporters and sympathetic media figures celebrated Walz as a “regular midwestern dad” who wore flannel shirts, went pheasant hunting, and had coached high school football, and was therefore an ideal ambassador to blue-collar and rural voters.

It didn’t work. The Harris-Walz team was the worst performing presidential ticket in rural America in modern history, receiving just 32 percent of the total vote in non-metropolitan counties nationwide. Vice presidential nominees usually don’t matter much to electoral outcomes, and this was likely true in 2024. But it’s fair to say that Walz did not electrify the campaign trail or dominate in his debate against J. D. Vance.

This year, Graham Platner is the leading test case for the dress-down-and-win hypothesis. Platner’s profile as a bearded and tattooed military veteran turned oyster farmer with a sharp-edged speaking style and strongly progressive political views attracted early support from Bernie Sanders and several labor unions. While his actual “blue-collar” credentials are somewhat arguable (he attended two private prep schools and has received regular financial assistance from his attorney father), Platner’s candidacy caught fire among Maine Democrats. He succeeded in driving Maine’s sitting governor Janet Mills from the primary race and now stands as the presumptive opponent to five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins. But the relative political novice has had some skeletons emerge from his closet since he declared his candidacy; even the tattoos turn out to be a bit of a problem.

While we wait to find out whether Platner’s flaws render him unacceptable to the Maine general electorate, it’s worth considering how much of the strategic argument for candidates like him is founded on assumptions that working-class voters respond very powerfully to superficial signals of “blue collar” identity (like personal appearance or language style), and that nominating candidates with these attributes is a more effective path than ideological repositioning on substantive policy matters to winning elections in competitive constituencies. After all, the most popular politician in our lifetimes among small-town Americans is a super-wealthy business tycoon from New York City who only takes off his neckties when he’s playing golf on the courses that he owns.

A common touch is surely an asset in politics; this is one reason why Elizabeth Warren underperforms other Democratic candidates in Massachusetts elections. But it’s not the only thing that’s important to voters, even those of modest social status. We should be suspicious of the implication that working-class citizens care more about vibes than policy, especially when such suggestions come from well-educated white-collar activists who themselves hold very strong ideological commitments. Whether or not it’s offensive condescension in the guise of sympathy, there’s just not much evidence that it’s true.

One person who has come to agree is John Fetterman himself. Fetterman has continued to insist on maintaining his casual fashion style while serving in the Senate, but he responded to Donald Trump’s 2024 victory in Pennsylvania by starting to break with other Democrats on multiple issues. His constituents have noticed, now perceiving him as significantly more moderate than the rest of his party. This reinvention may doom Fetterman in the 2028 primaries—if he indeed runs for a second term as a Democrat—but it’s a tried-and-true method for winning general elections in a competitive state. Just ask Susan Collins.

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Entertainment habits have changed dramatically over the past decade. What were once separate forms of media consumption, comedy specials, gaming sessions, livestreams, podcasts, sports broadcasts, and online communities, increasingly overlap within the same digital environments.

Modern audiences rarely focus on only one form of entertainment at a time. Many users now move fluidly between streaming clips, live gaming content, social media interaction, podcasts, and mobile entertainment throughout the day. Smartphones and faster internet infrastructure made this constant accessibility possible, while streaming culture helped normalize entertainment built around immediacy and continuous engagement.

As a result, online entertainment increasingly feels less like isolated activities and more like interconnected digital ecosystems shaped by convenience and interaction.

Streaming Culture Changed Audience Expectations

The rise of livestreaming platforms heavily influenced how people engage with entertainment more broadly. Audiences increasingly prefer experiences that feel active, responsive, and continuously updated rather than passive or heavily delayed.

This shift extends across comedy content, gaming communities, sports coverage, creator platforms, and live online entertainment environments. Real-time chat systems, instant reactions, audience participation, and livestream-style interfaces all contribute to stronger engagement across digital platforms.

Many entertainment businesses adapted quickly to these changing expectations by creating more interactive environments designed around mobile accessibility and continuous participation. Fast-paced content delivery, live notifications, and real-time interaction now shape much of modern entertainment culture.

The growing popularity of livestream comedy clips, reaction videos, creator collaborations, and live gaming streams reflects how audiences increasingly value entertainment that feels spontaneous and socially connected.

Gaming Platforms Became Part of Mainstream Entertainment Culture

Gaming itself also evolved significantly alongside these broader digital trends. What was once considered a niche hobby increasingly became integrated into mainstream entertainment culture through streaming platforms, creator communities, esports events, and interactive social spaces.

Today, gaming environments frequently overlap with comedy, livestreaming, influencer culture, and casual online interaction. Many users no longer separate gaming from the rest of their entertainment routines. Instead, gaming platforms often function as social environments where people watch content, interact with creators, communicate with friends, and engage with multiple forms of entertainment simultaneously.

This shift also influenced online casino and betting platforms that adapted to streaming-era audiences through live dealer systems, real-time gameplay, responsive mobile interfaces, and faster interaction models. Entertainment-focused environments such as betting on Mr Q alongside live roulette tables, blackjack streams, instant-play games, and mobile-friendly access increasingly reflect broader digital trends centered around accessibility and continuous engagement.

Rather than existing separately from mainstream entertainment culture, many gaming environments now operate within the same broader ecosystem as streaming media, creator content, and social interaction.

Comedy Content Adapted to Faster Digital Consumption

Comedy culture changed significantly as online platforms reshaped audience attention spans and viewing habits. Short-form clips, livestream appearances, reaction content, podcasts, and social media snippets increasingly became central parts of modern comedy distribution.

Comedians and entertainment creators now often rely on multiple digital channels simultaneously rather than traditional media formats alone. A stand-up clip might circulate across livestreams, social media platforms, podcasts, gaming streams, and meme pages within hours.

This faster content cycle changed how audiences discover and engage with comedy itself. Many viewers now consume humor in smaller but more frequent sessions integrated into broader online routines alongside gaming, streaming, and mobile entertainment.

At the same time, live interaction became increasingly valuable across entertainment formats. Audiences often prefer creators and platforms that encourage participation and feel more directly connected to viewers in real time.

Mobile Technology Accelerated Entertainment Overlap

The rapid expansion of smartphone usage played a major role in blending entertainment categories together. Consumers increasingly access entertainment throughout the day in shorter sessions rather than planning activities around fixed schedules or dedicated devices.

Streaming content, gaming apps, social media feeds, sports highlights, comedy clips, and livestreams now all compete within the same mobile ecosystems for user attention. This environment naturally encouraged platforms to become faster, more interactive, and easier to access.

Entertainment companies increasingly optimize around mobile-first behavior by simplifying interfaces, improving loading speeds, and prioritizing responsive design. Convenience now influences engagement nearly as much as the content itself.

Because audiences move quickly between different entertainment formats, businesses capable of maintaining smooth and immediate experiences often perform better in highly competitive digital markets.

Real-Time Interaction Continues Expanding Across Entertainment

Modern entertainment increasingly revolves around immediacy. Audiences often expect content to feel live, reactive, and continuously active rather than static or disconnected.

This trend can be seen across livestream comedy events, gaming broadcasts, sports commentary, creator communities, and interactive entertainment platforms. Real-time participation systems help create stronger engagement by making users feel directly involved rather than simply observing content passively.

Research and reporting published by The Verge continue highlighting how mobile technology, streaming infrastructure, and interactive digital culture are reshaping online entertainment habits across multiple industries.

Improvements in internet infrastructure and cloud-based systems also made these interactive environments significantly more accessible across smartphones and tablets over recent years.

Entertainment Culture Will Likely Continue Blending Together

The future of online entertainment will likely involve even greater overlap between comedy, gaming, livestreaming, creator culture, and interactive digital experiences. Artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure, and faster mobile connectivity are expected to continue accelerating these trends.

However, the main drivers behind this shift remain relatively straightforward. Consumers increasingly prefer entertainment that feels flexible, social, and easy to access from virtually anywhere.

As digital habits continue evolving, entertainment formats that once existed separately will likely become even more interconnected through streaming culture, mobile accessibility, and real-time interaction.

 

The post How Comedy, Streaming, Gaming, and Live Content Started Overlapping Online appeared first on The Interrobang.

photo by the author

First, the name is in accord with the Pilgrim Congregational tradition of Unitarianism; second, it is planned to keep the building open throughout the week for any activity that tends to improve the personality of man, woman, or child.  Religion embraces not only the worship of God, but also the service of man.

I’m not a fan of the first part of this music video (reminds me too much of dipshits I had to endure at school), but the single-take choreography from ~4:18 is great.