A recent hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship on the MV Hondius has generated global concern and alerts from health authorities. The hantavirus has already resulted in multiple deaths, and required quarantines of the remaining passengers. Not coincidentally, interest in a treatment for the disease has spiked, as have the prices of Moderna’s stock. During the Covid-19 Pandemic, Moderna, along with Pfizer and AstraZeneca rapidly developed vaccines using mRNA technology, the first of their kind in history. And these vaccines were widely distributed and used around the world, marketed as “safe and effective” by numerous health authorities. But an investigation into recent trends in public health suggests otherwise. It is common knowledge by now that Covid-19 is overwhelmingly fatal to the elderly; in contrast, it only produced marginal excess mortality for young adults and children. Thus, it can be ruled out as the cause for record excess deaths in the same demographic, which started only a year after the pandemic. Life insurance providers in the United States were some of the first to notice this trend of working-age adults in 2021. This phenomenon was especially pronounced in Northern and Western European countries, where Covid-19 vaccine uptakes were some of the highest in the world. And the effect of these vaccines on preventing the disease has been revealed to have been greatly exaggerated. What is the culprit of this spike in mortality? Looking at the side effects of these vaccines, conditions such as myocarditis, diabetes, bells palsy, and blood clots, have become far more frequent since 2021 in younger demographics. Given that these vaccines were developed and mass produced less than a year after the start of the global pandemic, their severe flaws should not have been surprising. Furthermore, Pfizer did not even test its vaccine before release, as part of its effort to deliver it so rapidly. Despite this, numerous people were censored by social media companies for disputing the claims made by Big Pharma, and millions of people across the world were forced to take the vaccines to keep their employment and avoid paying massive fines. What could be Big Pharma’s motive for selling such harmful medications? Looking at their finances, they have earned hundreds of billions of dollars from selling these vaccines, their highest profits in history. Furthermore, by creating a sicker and more medication dependent population that they can sell cures to, they essentially create their own customer base. And they are able to maintain their market power through their exploitation of patent laws on the drugs that they produce. As long as they face no competition, they will continue to be more concerned with their profits instead of the health of their customers. Not surprisingly, actual cures and medications against Covid-19 were discouraged or even banned by health authorities during the pandemic. Ivermectin and Vitamin D administration to covid patients was widely discouraged despite their actual effectiveness. Meanwhile, the lockdowns that shut down many businesses and cost trillions in lost income and employees failed to contain the spread of the disease. As it turns out, those who gave up their essential liberties for the illusion of security lost both in the long term.
By Edward Kim
“All it would take is to stand firm just once, and I can change my whole destiny in a single hour,” the protagonist in The Gambler says. Or something close to that, depending on the translation. The exact wording almost does not matter. What hits you is the feeling behind it: that small, tight twist in your chest, the quiet ash of recognition before you can even put it into words. These days, especially among young men, gambling is no longer just an activity. It has become something more like background noise in life, always present just beneath the surface. You do not even have to look for it. Scroll through your feed, watch a game, or stand in line with your mind half elsewhere, and there it is again: polished ads promising big winnings, instant cashouts, and Lamborghinis lined up next to roulette wheels that no longer need a real casino to exert their pull. What strikes me most is how little resistance so many of us seem to have developed. We grew up in a culture that does not simply value money. It treats money as the only real measure of anything that matters. Success, worth, even identity gets translated into dollars, credits, and glowing balances on a screen. Capital stopped being one way to keep score. It became the only scoreboard — the grammar through which everything else is understood. The only thing that still reliably answers. This whole thing feels like a worn-out, cracked copy of the American Dream. The outline remains, but the heart has been hollowed out. Happiness, love, peace of mind — they all get reduced to numbers you can chase. It is fabricated value chasing fabricated transcendence. And saying the word transcendence out loud these days can feel almost embarrassing unless you soften it with a joke. I have been noticing a quiet but real sorting happening among younger people. Nothing loud or dramatic. Just a slow drift in different directions. On one side are those who are beginning, sometimes cautiously, to turn toward things that cannot easily be priced: deep family ties, real community, faith, and acts of care that do not come with a receipt. On the other side are those who stay inside the loop — working, scrolling, betting, and chasing the next hit while something important inside quietly grows thinner. The numbers, messy as they often are, still point in the same direction. Research from the National Council on Problem Gambling shows that young men between 18 and 30 experience gambling-related problems at roughly three times the rate of the general population. Some estimates suggest that 8 to 10 percent fall into at-risk or problematic patterns. Globally, the National Institutes of Health and other public health sources estimate that somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of adolescents report having gambled in the past year. Here in the United States, younger generations are encountering sports betting and casino-style games much earlier and with far less friction than previous generations did — a shift reflected in behavioral data compiled by the Pew Research Center. Online sports betting did not create this problem, but it has intensified it dramatically. After the Supreme Court decision in Murphy v. NCAA, the apps made wagering continuous, portable, and almost completely frictionless. A large number of young and middle-aged men now keep active betting accounts, and the numbers continue climbing steadily. In several states, calls to gambling hotlines and requests for treatment have increased noticeably after legalization. Young men in particular tend to move fluidly between sports betting, online casinos, daily fantasy, and back again. Participation trends are tracked by Statista. The mental health consequences often stay hidden at rest, and that makes them even more dangerous. Gambling issues rarely travel alone. They tend to appear alongside depression, anxiety, substance use, and a significantly higher risk of suicide. Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Psychiatric Association have documented these connections clearly. Many people struggling with gambling disorder report ongoing depressive symptoms and persistent anxiety. Among adolescents, the effects often spill into school problems and difficult relationships — the kind of quiet distress that is easy to dismiss as something else. So what exactly are we chasing every time we tap “spin” or place a wager? A brief feeling of control? A short escape from whatever feels stuck in the rest of life? Or that very human hope — the one Fyodor Dostoevsky understood so well — that this time things will finally break in our favor? The platforms are engineered with remarkable precision to keep that hope alive through variable rewards, near misses, personalized prompts, and seamless integration with the sports you are already watching. At this point, it has gone far beyond simple entertainment. It has become a behavioral environment designed to keep you inside it. Fyodor Dostoevsky knew this world from painful personal experience. He fought a serious roulette addiction, lost heavily, and wrote The Gambler under intense pressure just to pay off his debts. The novel captures the psychology in a way that still feels disturbingly current: the clever rationalizations, the sudden rush of confidence, and the inevitable crash that follows. The core mechanics have not changed at all. What has changed is the accessibility. Your smartphone now places that same psychological trap in your pocket any time of day or night. The house edge stays exactly the same, but the human costs spread out quietly in the form of debt, distraction, and a persistent low-grade dissatisfaction that is difficult to shake. The result is a subtle cultural divide that many people feel even if they cannot always name it. Some are stepping away, or at least trying to, and searching for meaning in relationships, faith, or ways of living that exist outside the constant need to quantify everything. Others remain caught in the cycle, chasing wins that almost never come while slowly normalizing debt, distraction, and the nagging sense that something essential is missing. Overcoming
By Erol Yilmaz
American politics has since departed into the realm of personality politics. Increasingly, political figures are required not to advocate for policies or constitutional rights, but rather perform an identity in ways that are marketable and pocket-heavy. A facade that doesn’t have to earn respect, but earns a platform to influence. The emergence of figures like Erika Kirk illustrates how the face of politics is changing and personifies this shift with particular clarity. Erika Kirk is not significant because she represents coherent, revolutionary thought. Her platform was not bestowed upon her for anything remarkable, for she is just another conservative white woman proclaiming inequality. Instead, she embodies something larger than an easy jeer on social media. She displays, in full form, the transformation within American political culture: the gradual displacement of pragmatic politics to performative politics. She stands not as a policymaker, completely unassociated with legislation or prevalent in any category of defined intellectual, and yet she has a hand in Trump’s speeches and appears on every archaic conservative podcast. She is not, by any typical standard, a central figure in American political life. However, through her reach and platform, from which she spews her dated thoughts, she becomes a viral sensation almost weekly. It’s easy to blame technology. Political communication is no longer mediated primarily through filtered institutions like parties, unions or legacy media. Instead, it is disseminated through platforms that reward immediacy, polarisation and sensationalist mandates. Erika Kirk, even if not purposefully, ticks every box. Her views are widely humoured and disrespected by most of the digital sphere, and yet she persists in being circulated more as a laughing stock than a serious political voice. However, this is no reason to dismiss her influence as a mere source of humour. In this newly founded environment, influence doesn’t require institutional backing or even dignity. It requires visibility. According to research from the Pew Research Centre, a growing proportion of Americans get their news from social media platforms over traditional news outlets, something figures like Kirk are benefiting from. Circulation, in turn, rewards a recognisable identity and emotional resonance. But just visibility is not enough to cement your place next to the president at a rally. It must be attached to something recognisable, something savoury to the public. What, then, does Kirk offer that is so enticing? Part of the answer lies in her engagement with claims of “white male inequality”. At first glance, her framing appears to invert the established analyses of widespread inequality in the United States. Historically, this imbalance has been understood to cross racial and economic dimensions, heavily supported by empirical research and centuries of legislative disadvantage towards certain demographics. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve consistently paint a picture of immense disparities in wealth, income and job opportunities along racial lines, with Black and Hispanic households holding substantially less wealth than that of white ones. Given this, it’s shocking that one may ask why it is so blasphemous to speak of “white inequality”? Is it just an attempt to highlight genuine economic hardship among certain white populations? Or for a stab to bury the disadvantaged further out of public discussion? There is no debate that the majority of Americans are feeling the heat of inflation or the wrath of immigration wars. Further, there are demographics across all races who are suffering from wage stagnation and job losses. But Erika Kirk taps into this reality with a twisted conceptual shift. Instead of treating these conditions as primarily the outcomes of failing economic structures, she reframes them in racial terms. This is where her rhetoric becomes politically significant. By centring this shared experience of country-wide economic distress as a mantle that disproportionately affects white people, she utilises this racialised framework to push the tiresome conservative narrative that white families are the majority facing this consequence. That tension is what gives her claim traction, but also what makes it analytically unstable. Her rhetoric stands not to merely describe inequality but participates in an attempt to centralise it to a race that has and still does hold power over other minorities in government positions within America. This is where her influence becomes clearer. She is not powerful because she controls institutions. She is influential because she antagonises fact, something social media can’t get enough of. As Jürgen Habermas suggests, democratic discourse depends on shared standards of argument and evidence. When this discourse fragments across platforms and audiences, those standards are disputed and thus weakened. Under such conditions, figures like Kirk do not need to persuade everyone. She just has to resonate with specific communities and generate the tension required to thrust her digital image into circulation. She is not exceptional; she is indicative. For her, as much as any political figure or commentator, there is no such thing as bad press.
By Adia May
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