October 6, 2025
Mar-a-Lago face is a plastic surgery and fashion trend among American conservative and Republican individuals such as excessive makeup, fake tans, fake eyelashes, dark smokey eyes, and full lips.
The trend has been described as a status symbol among Donald Trump’s inner circle, purportedly signaling wealth, privilege, and alignment with Trumpism. Some commentators and surgeons have described the look as engineered and overdone, and have linked it to the aesthetics and aspects of Trump-era politics. One cosmetic surgeon listed facial surgery, fillers, and cosmetic dental work among the procedures constituting the look.
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September 13, 2025
The Groypers, sometimes called the Groyper Army, are a group of alt-right, white nationalist, and Christian nationalist activists led by Nick Fuentes. Members of the group have attempted to introduce alt-right politics into mainstream conservatism in the United States and participated in the January 6 United States Capitol attack and the protests leading up to it. They have targeted other conservative groups and individuals whose agendas they view as too moderate and insufficiently nationalist.
The Groyper movement has been described as white nationalist, homophobic, nativist, fascist, sexist, antisemitic, and an attempt to rebrand the declining alt-right movement. Groypers are a loosely defined group of Fuentes’s followers and fans. After him, there is no clear second in the Groyper hierarchy. Groypers are named after a cartoon amphibian named ‘Groyper,’ a variant of the Internet meme Pepe the Frog.
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August 28, 2025
A data broker is an individual or company that specializes in collecting personal data (such as income, ethnicity, political beliefs, or geolocation data) or data about people, mostly from public records but sometimes sourced privately, and selling or licensing such information to third parties for a variety of uses.
Sources, usually Internet-based since the 1990s, may include census and electoral roll records, social networking sites, court reports and purchase histories. The information from data brokers may be used in background checks used by employers and housing.
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May 13, 2025
Zersetzung [zer-set-zung] (German for ‘decomposition’ and ‘disruption’) was a psychological warfare technique used by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) to repress political opponents in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. Zersetzung served to combat alleged and actual dissidents through covert means, using secret methods of abusive control and psychological manipulation to prevent anti-government activities.
Among the defining features of it was the widespread use of offensive counterespionage methods as a means of repression. People were commonly targeted on a preemptive and preventive basis, to limit or stop activities of political dissent and cultural incorrectness that they may have gone on to perform, and not on the basis of crimes they had actually committed. Zersetzung methods were designed to break down, undermine, and paralyze people behind ‘a facade of social normality’ in a form of ‘silent repression.’
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March 31, 2025
Steganography [steg-uh-nog-ruh-fee] is the practice of representing information within another message or physical object, in such a manner that the presence of the concealed information would not be evident to an unsuspecting person’s examination.
The word steganography comes from Greek words steganós (‘covered or concealed’) and graphia (‘writing’). The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by German Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography, disguised as a book on magic.
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March 19, 2025
A stele [stee-lee] or stela [stee-lah] is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected in the ancient world as a monument. The surface of the stele often has text, ornamentation, or both. These may be inscribed, carved in relief, or painted.
Steles have also been used to publish laws and decrees, to record a ruler’s exploits and honors, to mark sacred territories or mortgaged properties, as territorial markers, as the boundary steles of Akhenaton at Amarna, or to commemorate military victories. They were widely used in the ancient Near East, Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and, most likely independently, in China and elsewhere in the Far East, and, independently, by Mesoamerican civilizations, notably the Olmec and Maya.
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February 3, 2025
The phantom time conspiracy theory is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory first asserted by Heribert Illig in 1991. It hypothesizes a conspiracy by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and possibly the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, to fabricate the Anno Domini dating system retroactively, in order to place them at the special year of AD 1000, and to rewrite history to legitimize Otto’s claim to the Holy Roman Empire.
Illig suggested this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence. According to this scenario, the entire Carolingian period, including the figure of Charlemagne, is a fabrication, with a ‘phantom time’ of 297 years (614–911) added to the Early Middle Ages. Substantial evidence contradicts the hypothesis and it failed to gain the support of historians, and calendars in other European countries, most of Asia and parts of pre-Columbian America contradict this.
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January 7, 2025
The Outrage Industrial Complex (OIC) is a combination of forces including media outlets, social media influencers, political fundraising messaging, and individuals in media, political leadership or advocacy that in the late 20th and early 21st centuries exploited differences of opinion and what was termed a culture of contempt drawn along political and social lines, increasing distrust of institutions and society, to advance their own desires for fame, wealth, higher office, or for geopolitical reasons.
The OIC creates and distributes outrage media, digital or print content specifically intended to provoke anger or outrage among its consumers to increase engagement. The complex includes media outlets, social media influencers, political fundraising messaging, and individuals in media, political leadership or advocacy who call out ‘outrages,’ hoping to generate what Richard Thompson Ford, writing for ‘The American Interest,’ calls a sense of ‘righteous indignation’ and rage borne of frustration in their readers or listeners, often for their own purposes of attracting advertisers or fame or to intentionally cause social disruption in a country or region.
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December 2, 2024
Video nasty is a colloquial term popularized by the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVALA) in the United Kingdom to refer to a number of films, typically low-budget horror or exploitation films, distributed on video cassette in the early 1980s that were criticized by the press, social commentators, and various religious organisations for their violent content.
These video releases were not brought before the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) due to a loophole in film classification laws that allowed videos to bypass the review process. The resulting uncensored video releases led to public debate concerning the availability of these films to children due to the unregulated nature of the market.
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August 14, 2024
A reverse search warrant is a type of search warrant used in the U.S., in which law enforcement obtains a court order for information from technology companies to identify a group of people who may be suspects in a crime. They differ from traditional search warrants, which typically apply to specific individuals. Geofence warrants, which seek data on mobile phone users who were in a specific location at a given time, and keyword warrants, which request information on users who searched specific phrases, are two types of reverse search warrants.
Reverse location warrants were first used in 2016, and have become increasingly widely used by law enforcement. Google reported that it had received 982 reverse location warrants in 2018, 8,396 in 2019, and 11,554 in 2020. A 2021 transparency report showed that 25% of data requests from law enforcement to Google were geofence data requests. Google is the most common recipient of reverse location warrants and the main provider of such data, although companies including Apple, Snapchat, Lyft, and Uber have also received such warrants.
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June 25, 2024
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase found in the ‘Satires,’ a work of the 1st–2nd century Roman poet Juvenal. It may be translated as ‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’ or ‘Who will watch the watchmen?”.
The original context deals with the problem of ensuring marital fidelity, though the phrase is now commonly used more generally to refer to the problem of controlling the actions of persons in positions of power, an issue discussed by Plato in the ‘Republic.’ It is not clear whether the phrase was written by Juvenal, or whether the passage in which it appears was interpolated into his works.
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April 20, 2024
Killing baby Hitler is a thought experiment in ethics and theoretical physics which poses the question of using time travel to assassinate an infant Adolf Hitler. It presents an ethical dilemma in both the action and its consequences, as well as a temporal paradox in the logical consistency of time. Killing baby Hitler first became a literary trope of science fiction during World War II and has since been used to explore these ethical and metaphysical debates.
Public debate around the question of killing baby Hitler reached its height in late 2015, after ‘The New York Times’ published a poll asking its readers the question. 42% said they would kill baby Hitler, 30% said they would not and 28% were undecided. Advocates of killing baby Hitler included Florida governor Jeb Bush and film actor Tom Hanks, while comedian Stephen Colbert and pundit Ben Shapiro were counted among the opponents of the policy.
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