Perhaps the strangest thing about Pluribus—Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s lauded new Apple TV series about humanity becoming infected by an extraterrestrial virus and  mentally united into a permanent groupthink-like state—is what it reflects. Released in 2025, the year of the great backlash against large language models (LLMs), all that critics and viewers have been able to talk about is how the series’ brainwashed, mentally “joined” humans, who are uniformly literal-minded and perfunctory, talk and behave exactly like ChatGPT.

Contemporary commonsense says that the preservation of art — as art — is not a life and death situation, but consider the case of Andrew Cunanan.

The culture industry is running on a marathon of apologies. Miss Americana, the Taylor Swift biopic on Netflix, is a prime example of pop-culture apologia bound up in a coming-of-age tale.

How then, in 1994, did O.J. become the posterchild for “racial justice” against the LAPD? How did his acquittal convincingly offer any sense of hope to black people across America?