On last night's Saturday Night Live, we learned that time stops for nothing-not people and not language. Marcello Hernández, the cast member perhaps most likely to become SNL's next breakout star, dropped by the "Weekend Update" desk to inform the Millennial co-anchor Colin Jost-and, by proxy, many Millennial audience members-of the slang terms favored by Gen Z.
There was something different about this one, though. Something about how visible the whole act was. Something about this one coming so soon after the last one. Whatever it was, the Alex Pretti killing seemed to spark a different reaction online. Meanwhile, the counternarrative seemed to move just as quickly, and AI imagery became so ubiquitous that it might have been hard to trust your view of such a heavily documented event. How is anyone supposed to make sense of any of it?
In October, Oklahoma country music stadium draw Zach Bryan garnered attention at the highest levels of government when he posted a snippet of a track called "Bad News" in which he sings "ICE is gonna come bust down your door." By the end of the week, United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem rebuked him on conservative personality Benny Johnson's The Benny Show: "I hope he understands how completely disrespectful that song is, not just to law enforcement but to this country."