Zombie companies are firms that do not make enough revenue and have to borrow to stay alive. Cash flows for those companies go down due to increases in prices of commodities, rises in interest rates and occurrence of supply shocks like the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the 2008 global financial crisis.

In the United States, between 5%-10% of all companies are zombie companies. This percentage has been rising because of the pandemic and higher inflation and interest rates (a change in financial pressure) – by the end of 2020, nonfarm employment declined by about 9.5 million jobs and the pandemic had driven social and behavioral changes and government restrictions on business activity. In the last two years, inflation reached about 9% compared to less than 2% before the pandemic struck, which had caused the Federal Reserve and the White House to pursue expansionary monetary and fiscal policies , respectively, to counter the economic and social impacts of the pandemic on people and businesses.

Most of the zombie companies belong to the smaller size firm category because they do not have a well-established technology and a strong source of revenue. They are more in the retail and manufacturing sectors of the economy. Examples of zombie companies include WeWork; which is a provider of coworking spaces and had a good business before the pandemic, cruise lines like Carnival Cruise Line, and GameStop which is the world’s largest retail gaming and trade-in destination for Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo games, etc., among others.

Many zombie companies have changed their behavior since the 2008 global financial crisis. They have doubled down on their non profitable assets compared to non-zombie companies. They have also been helped by weak banks to stay afloat because when their balance sheets are compromised, those banks have the incentives to roll over their loans rather than writing them off. Low financial pressure in the form of low interest rates in the last two decades have helped the zombies to entrench their feet and cling longer to their unprofitable assets.

Zombie companies drag the national economy into debt. They negatively affect productivity, which is one of the three basic sources of economic growth. They divert funds from more productive companies engaged in producing new technologies and more promising businesses such as green energy into non-viable companies. In other words, they lock down resources, which is known as the “congestion effect.”

It is difficult to get rid of zombies because of their failure due to corporate restructuring, but new investments may increase this profitability over time. Economists wait for 10 years before they classify a company as a zombie. Thus, a zombie can come back to live as circumstances change. Other zombie companies may die on their own, as has happened since the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to “The rise of zombie firms: causes and consequences” by Ryan Banerjee and Boris Hoffman at the Bank for International Settlements, “the probability of a zombie remaining a zombie in the following year rose from 60% in the late 1980s to 85% in 2016” as evaluated by some financial measures. These numbers may be higher after the COVID-19 pandemic.

In terms of the implication for monetary policy, low interest rates stimulate aggregate demand and increase investment, and consequently economic growth. On the other hand, low interest rates increase the incidence of zombies and encourage them to drown in more debt. Thus, we have a tradeoff between “zombiness” and interest rates. Financial literature has not resolved this tradeoff one way or another.

In conclusion, we may not be able to rid the economy of zombies, and thus we have to live with them.

Shawkat Hammoudeh, Ph.D.

Professor of Economics and International Business

Drexel University

Cheating is as old as the story of Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25). It is also as old as the university. Therefore, there’s certainly nothing new about ChatGPT, the new recipe for the oldest scam, except for its greater efficiency, easy portability, and its complete absence of mental activity – the activity that supposedly defines the business of the university.

ChatGPT, the brand name for the artificial intelligence gadget that writes term papers, solves math problems and in general smoothes the student consumer’s way to their higher education degree of choice, has nothing to do with intelligence (nor do other similar devices), and of course nothing to do with an education except not getting one. It is a means of queueing algorithms to respond to input prompts (“Who was Julius Caesar?”) and producing a reasonable facsimile of an academic requirement. This is not a mentality. Mind requires consciousness, inquiry, value and choice. All of this necessitates trial and error; it is this process that produces learning. True, neurons in the human brain perform functions analogous to algorithms, but neurons have to perform work. Algorithms merely function. There is nothing in the slightest intelligent about an algorithm, only in the mind of the programmer who writes its code. However complex, it is anti-intelligent, and its product is an anti-education.

Again, this is nothing particularly new; it is simply the mechanization of cheating. When I faced my first chalkboard, the easy method of producing a term paper was to buy it from a ghost writer who would craft it to order. This was a perennial problem for faculty. I didn’t have much problem spotting fakes, though. One constraint on cheating was cost, and so the weaker students turned more readily to it. If I had a prior sample of the student’s work it was generally obvious within a couple of sentences whether the paper had been store-bought. Yet written work and essay exams declined for a number of reasons – as did general literacy. I found it not only tedious but increasingly risky to confront cheaters. My bloodhound’s nose could pick them off well, but to prove cheating was an elaborate process, and as grade inflation subverted class evaluation and students, redefined as customers, became clients to be humored for administrators, faculty became increasingly educators pretending to teach to students pretending to learn.

At this point, students crack the whip in higher education, or have it cracked in their names. Recently, a nationally renowned chemist, Maitland Jones, Jr., was fired from his position at New York University when students signed a petition protesting that the class he taught was too hard. The students didn’t call for his firing, but they got it anyway from administrators fearful of losing business. Dr. Jones was an emeritus professor, teaching his course for the love of it, but also without the protections of tenure he had enjoyed for decades at the New York University and Princeton University, and thus liable to summary dismissal. This is by no means unusual nowadays. A colleague of mine at Drexel, long tenured, was suspended from teaching last year in mid-quarter at or on the pretext of a student complaint, barred from campus for months, and remains subject to ongoing administrative harassment and abuse. Of course, a majority of university faculty now teach on term or adjunct contracts, at borderline pay and little to no job security. Maintaining academic standards in these circumstances does not come with a survival kit.

On the other side of the fence, the pressure on students to get good grades at competitive schools is great. The costs of a college education can easily approach, if not exceed, six figures, creating a debtor class trapped before it even enters the job market. For such students, every notch on a grade point average can shape a career from first paycheck to last, and their primary goal, not learning but earning, makes higher education a transactional experience. The pressure on faculty to keep their jobs by pleasing their students is thus mirrored by that on students to avoid the prospect of bankruptcy by finding them. What gets lost? Education.

This is where ChatGPT comes in. Cheating is not only the logical extension of the transactional classroom, but virtually an imperative. If the goal of the classroom is the grade, whatever furthers its pursuit is not only the smart but the indicated thing to do. It is smart because the student gets to feel he’s pulling the wool over his teacher’s eyes, although the wise teacher actually has them closed to begin with. If you catch a student or two cheating, you can think you’re upholding standards for everyone else. If everyone is doing it, the penalty is yours. And ChatGPT makes it easier to cheat across more kinds of testing, and more brazenly. If you don’t join the crowd, you’re only the dumb one in class.

The end result of all this is an educational system that is cynical and corrupt; that is, one that cheats everybody. The present-day American university is an institution that ranks right up (or down) there with Congress, and justifiably so. But Congress is not corrupt without a reason, or a goodly number of them: moneyed interests and their lobbyists; dark money elections; revolving doors between public and private interests. For the George Santoses of the world, the sheer smirk of the liar and cheat. For the university, it is its happy bedding with corporate and military-industrial complexes; the tax-free privileges that lead it into commercial ventures far from the purposes that purportedly justified them; an administrative super-hierarchy that drains and distorts its educational mission; and much more. 

These interlocked interests used to be called, in now-defunct times, the System. The new wrinkle in it is social media, which invites its user-victims to cheat themselves. It is so easy now to access chatbots that going to school itself seems a pointless diversion to many. Yes, it used to be a dreary process to call the class roll. Now, it is a pointless one. For many professors a cursory glance will tell them that half their students haven’t shown up. Does it matter, at a certain point, who they are? If you want to flunk half the class, you are the one who will be flunked. Some teachers may be bad. Some are good. Maitland Jones was a good one. It got him a pink slip. 

You do not even need to actually cheat anymore to get the work credential a degree supposedly confers. George Santos simply lied about having graduated from Baruch University and NYU, even supplying his nonexistent grade point averages and class ranking. He lied about the big firms he had not worked for. He lied about having starred in volleyball. He lied about being descended from a Holocaust survivor. He denied only one activity he could honestly have claimed, being a drag queen. He sits in Congress, representing New York’s Third Congressional District — having, of course, used a false name.

Is there no social institution, then, that seeks the truth? There is only the university — but truth has been commoditized there too.

M. Night Shyamalan has always been a controversial filmmaker. Not in the sense that his movies have been polarizing—it is pretty cut-and-dry which ones are bad and which ones are good—but for such a good director, he can be a truly awful writer sometimes.

“Knock at the Cabin”, co-written by Steve Desmond, Michael Sherman and Shyamalan himself, is the Philadelphia filmmaker’s latest psychological horror film and his second since 2021’s “Old.” Personally, I did not like “Old,” I did not like “Glass” (2019), I did not like “Split” (2016) and I thought “The Visit” (2015) was profoundly okay.

Maybe the difference was that all of those movies were solely written by Shyamalan.

“Knock” is truly (stunningly) an enjoyable movie. With the exception of a couple clunky lines and odd deliveries in the first twenty minutes, I found myself actually having a good time in a Shyamalan movie for what felt like the first time in forever.

The film’s highlight is without a doubt its cast. Dave Bautista continues to define himself as a serious actor; his capacity to lead a movie of this tone only expands with each one he stars in. He is impressive for the entirety of his prodigious screen time. Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge deliver intense, emotional performances that are well-balanced by the rest of the cast without drowning the movie in melodrama; Nikki Amuka-Bird is both convincingly haunting and haunted; and Rupert Grint was somehow intimidating even while standing next to the six-foot-three Bautista holding a pitchfork. Kristen Cui had one or two weak lines, but otherwise did a very good job for the whole hour and forty minute runtime; a positive big-screen debut for the extremely young actress.

Abby Quinn’s performance as the wired, anxious Adriane was a bit underwhelming, unfortunately. Yet I felt that it did not detract too much from the experience. Further criticism could be leveled at the film’s constant use of extreme close-ups and the fact that a character outright explains the meaning of the story to you, but again, these peccadilloes were insignificant to my overall enjoyment.

This is also not a scary movie. It’s “psychological horror” on the same level as “American Psycho,” which is not necessarily a bad thing — just don’t expect to be sleeping with the lights on afterwards.

What I was most afraid of going into the movie was whether or not it would be satisfying. I spent the last five minutes dreading that there was going to be some stupid “gotcha!” moment that pulled the rug out from under the whole thing, but Shyamalan, Desmond and Sherman wrote an intelligent plot that builds to a resolution that makes sense for both the characters and the audience. (Is it embarrassing that such a famous director has set such a low bar for his movies?)

The important question: is “Knock at the Cabin” worth your time and money?

I’d say yes. In terms of the last Shyamalan film I watched (“Old”) and the last Bautista film I watched (Zack Snyder’s truly awful “Army of the Dead”), “Knock at the Cabin” is head-and-shoulders above the crowd. My estimate is a 70-80% audience enjoyment.

Was it enough to get me to pay for Apple TV+ to watch Shyamalan’s “Servant?”

God, no—but I don’t think any movie could get me to do that.

A mother, Laura Stack, from Colorado tells a story involving drugs and her late son Johnny. Ms. Stack talks about how when she first discovered Johnny smoking weed. She thought, “Oh well, it’s just weed. Thank God it wasn’t cocaine.” She had used it back when she was in high school, so she was merely concerned. However, after slipping into using high potency products frequently throughout the day, she says Johnny became “completely delusional.” Fast forward to college and Johnny has been through “various addiction programs,” eventually becoming convinced in his paranoia that “the mob was after him and his college was a base for the F.B.I.” Johnny, who had no mental problems earlier in his life, was being prescribed antipsychotics. In 2019, Johnny Stack fatally jumped from a six-story building. Laura Stack says that a few days prior, Johnny called her and “apologized to her, saying that weed had ruined his mind and his life, adding, ‘I’m sorry, and I love you.’”

Had I not known the title of this article, I would have thought Johnny’s story was that of a severe meth or heroin addiction, or symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. In high school, if you had mentioned psychosis and weed in the same sentence, I would have laughed you off. However, this is the reality of the weed products that are easiest to obtain for those underage—mostly oil concentrates which bear little resemblance to the plant from which they are derived. One likely reason Ms. Stack wasn’t initially alarmed by her son’s smoking is that modern weed is starkly different from the weed of a few decades ago that she would’ve smoked. This is partly due to THC percentages. 

As the New York Times article “Psychosis, Addiction, Vomiting: As Weed Becomes More Potent, Teens Are Getting Sick” says, “In 1995, the average concentration of THC in cannabis samples seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration was about 4 percent. By 2017, it was 17 percent.” By June 2022, when this article was written, products with over 95% THC were being advertised. Another reason weed is affecting people more severely now is how little people know about the relationship between CBD and THC. I certainly didn’t know or care in high school. The percentage that isn’t THC (CBD) has gone down by as much as THC has gone up. In high school, friends and I used to think that CBD was lame; the more THC, the better. Turns out that CBD wasn’t solely the boring part of weed that didn’t get you high enough; it was actually tied to “relief from seizures, pain, anxiety and inflammation.” The studies cited in the article suggest that the less CBD is present, the higher the probability that the product will be addictive. One thing I didn’t know was that increased doses of THC are more likely to give one anxiety, agitation, paranoia, and psychosis. People who were born without any preexisting mental health issues could now acquire permanent ones.

When I was in high school, I had no idea that I was smoking too much weed, that it was all in the form of concentrates, or what it was doing to me. At the end of the day, I just thought I had overly protective parents who would never give me a break. I’ll start by saying that there’s a common concept in addiction referred to as the “I have arrived” moment. Mostly having to do with the alleviation of social anxiety, this moment follows one’s first experience with drugs and alcohol and becomes the feeling one chases during the rest of their time on these substances. Any sort of otherness or separation one feels from those around them seems to go away. Any sort of repression or self-dislike becomes a thing of the past.

For me, this moment occurred when I was a freshman in high school playing hockey. I had kids who bullied me-–I just thought that was part of the deal of being a freshman. They would call me names I’d rather not repeat. When I first smoked with them, I felt at home. I felt like they actually liked me. It may be pertinent to mention that on top of a still-developing brain, I also had mental disorders I was being treated for with medication; on these medications you are really not able to drink or smoke. I was not ready to go off medication, nor was I ready to give up my new love of smoking, so I ended up compounding what were already some severe mental health issues.

My usual defense was that weed is not addictive. Like Johnny’s mother, I thought weed was more tame and less malicious than other drugs. One thing that the mixed high school crowd seemed to agree on was that smoking a bunch of weed was far less ugly than being an alcoholic. It was sort of unacknowledged when one of the fellow heavy pot smokers would miss a lot of school, or take a lot of time off to go away somewhere that we never talked about. As you can probably tell, given that my defense of weed was that weed was not addictive, I definitely hadn’t heard of the stat that the article cites from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration: “Youths are also more likely to become addicted when they start using marijuana before the age of 18.” Once a fifteen-year-old who bellowed that you could not get addicted to weed, here I am almost seven years later being treated for addiction issues.

The good news is that I lived to tell the tale with at least some of my marbles left intact. A lot of people who went through these trials didn’t make it out . As I’ve said, I was a teen who believed the more THC was in my diet, the higher I’d get. That wasn’t necessarily false, but I didn’t realize that another truth was that the more THC there was, the more likely I was to experience addiction and psychotic symptoms. One measure the article mentions is if avoiding drug use isn’t a possibility, using products that are mostly CBD would be advisable. In a perfect world, one wouldn’t touch these products before their brain starts developing because there really is no safe limit.” Another measure that’s advised is open conversations between kids and their parents, “educating them about the dangers of high potency cannabis products compared to those that are mostly made of CBD.”

Believe me, having an open conversation with my parents is probably the last thing I would’ve done in high school. To me, my parents were the enemy, people who didn’t understand me and wouldn’t let me live my life. They had never smoked weed, so I perceived any of their reasoning as misinformed despite all the research they broke their backs doing. It also didn’t occur to me that I also had two other sisters they were sort of required to look after as well. I perceived my parents to be too large advocates of the tough love approach so anything they were saying must be untrue and a result of them being out to get me, but at the end of the day they just wanted me to be healthy. It didn’t seem worthy of acknowledgement to me that I was always paranoid and that all of my relationships seemed to have a shelf life. Maybe I just didn’t want to acknowledge it because it was them pointing it out. Part of the reason I would advise setting a precedent of open conversation between parents and child is because in doing so you could be preventing another half decade (or lifetime) of severe drug issues, scary mental symptoms, and continually degraded relationships. I would beg personally that no matter how old you are you be honest with your parents, and most importantly, accept help where you can get it. If you still have a chance to prevent years of mental hardship for yourself and your loved ones, why wouldn’t you?

I turned 18 this summer, which means that I was able to vote for the first time this year—right in time for the midterm elections. I’m sure we have all seen the headlines, but for those who avoid any mention of politics like the plague, the Pennsylvania midterms were extremely, extremely important to the nation this year, which was rather daunting as a first time voter. Nevertheless, on the fateful day of Nov. 8, I found myself in my hometown going to the voting center (held in a suspiciously random building I swear I have never seen before) with my mother. I was a girl on a mission—I was going to contribute to our democracy, and I was going to get a sticker. What could go wrong, right?

Well, obviously I would have nothing to write about if it had all been smooth sailing. As a first-time voter, I needed to present my ID in order to get my ballot. I brought my (completely valid, recently renewed) passport to do so. 

However, when I showed my passport to my local poll workers, they refused to accept it because it did not have my address on it. They asked to see my drivers license instead, and I had to explain I do not have a driver’s license or permit. The dilemma went through multiple poll workers, all of whom decided that my passport did not count as proper ID for a valid vote.

Concerningly, they even offhandedly shared that there was a girl who “had the same problem”earlier, and she was unable to properly vote—her ballot was made provisional, which basically means it is up to the discretion of the county board. They offered to allow me to vote provisionally with my passport as well, but could not guarantee my vote would count.

Luckily for me, my mother was there with me, and was able to help me contact my father, who sent a photograph of my voting confirmation (which did have my address on it). I then showed this and was able to get my ballot and vote. Also, I did in fact get my sticker, which is now proudly displayed on my phone case.

When we got home, my mother did a quick internet search to confirm what we already knew: A passport is a perfectly valid ID to show as a first-time voter, address or not. In fact, you don’t even have to own a photo I.D. to vote. There is a list of eligible forms of identification which I will link below, ranging from a Student I.D. (which would also not have an address) to a current utility bill. Not only was I given a hard time and incorrect information, but the other girl who experienced the same thing as I did could have her vote deemed invalid for this election when she did nothing wrong.

In my situation, this issue was frustrating but completely fixable. Still, it can be a bit scary to think about how if the stars had aligned in a perfectly wrong way, my ability to vote in this election could have been somehow compromised—or, at the very least, been made much more difficult. The fact of the matter is, regardless of how minor the mistakes are, voting should not be made unnecessarily difficult for anyone, least of all those who just gained the right and are undoubtedly nervous about the responsibility. It’s concerning to me that the poll workers did not even know the simplest of state laws, and it is even more concerning that this lack of knowledge almost prevented me from having a say in this election, which I cared very deeply about the results of.

There is so much talk about how our generation does not vote, and then the system turns around and makes it more difficult for us. As the years go past, the number of young people getting their driver’s permits and licenses has been steadily declining. The numbers clearly show it. Poll workers don’t even have to adapt to this change; they simply have to understand the rules in place and there should not be any problem with other forms of identification listed as eligible.

The right to vote is ours. However, we should have the knowledge we need to stand up for ourselves in the face of unnecessary conflict. I wish I had felt confident enough in my knowledge to argue more for my own right, even if they had refused to listen. It takes practically no time to read up on voting requirements in your state, whether it be PA or elsewhere, and I would encourage any voter to do so before the next election; for example, try Pennsylvania’s approved forms of identification for first time voters. Knowing your rights makes it much harder for others to infringe upon them, even if they try, so please give yourself an understanding so that you may have the voice that you deserve.

No one likes to lose. Losing, however, is part of life. Part of the joy of winning is knowing that you put all your effort into something and were rewarded with the outcome you wanted. Traditionally, the world of politics has followed this principle. Many people have put everything on the line for a chance to be part of one of the most important institutions in America—the government. Unfortunately, that critical principle that we once learned when we were kids is slowly fading away. No longer do we congratulate the winners for their victory and accept our loss as an opportunity to come back stronger next time. Instead, many people in this country have made the claim that the only way the other person could win is if they cheated.

The critical flaw with this belief is that a competition that can’t be won doesn’t need to take place at all. If you believe in your heart that your challenger is rigging the system to win every time, then why would you choose to participate in the first place? The answer if that were true is simple—you wouldn’t. A never-ending stream of evidence has proven that voter fraud is not a real issue in this country. A lot of people who run for public office know this, but they choose to lie about it anyway after losing by claiming their opponent cheated. Most cases of voter fraud were due to honest mistakes made by people who genuinely thought they were doing the right thing.

There are countless examples of politicians losing a race only to make a comeback the following year. Beto O’Rourke lost a senate race in 2018, a presidential race in 2020 and decided to run for governor of Texas. Tim Ryan failed in his run for president in 2020 only to become the Democratic senate candidate in Ohio this year. George H.W. Bush failed to defeat Ronald Reagan in the 1980 Republican nominating contest, only to be elected president in 1988. President Grover Cleveland lost his reelection bid in 1888 and in a comeback election won a second term in 1892.

People with an interest in politics have always had more than one opportunity to run. It is unfortunate that we have become a country of sore losers because losing doesn’t have to mean total defeat. Comeback stories can be found at all corners of the earth. That’s true in politics, sports and just about everything else. There are people who have lost everything and their comeback stories inspire us. Our country needs a serious wakeup call, because strong people don’t make up stories for why they lost. They accept their defeat for the moment and they come back stronger than ever in the future.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly referred to as COP27, convened November 8th in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. Among other things, this conference aims to fulfill the Paris Accords’ goal of aligning “the finance flows with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate resilience development”. The world is showing more interest in the environment and in controlling greenhouse emissions than ever before.

Here in the United States, our mindset concerning environmental regulation has improved recently. The gist is this: you attract more bees with honey than with vinegar. Treasury Secretary Jane Allen had previously proposed a carbon tax to combat greenhouse gas emissions, but this policy failed because it would have made what we do more expensive. It would have used vinegar to make other countries go along. Therefore, this policy was divisive and was vehemently opposed by conservatives, dying on the vine and never coming to fruition.

Policies to combat greenhouse gas emissions come mainly in three categories: carbon tax, cap and trade, and green energy subsidies. The first policy proposes imposing a dollar tax per unit of pollutants such as carbon dioxide (CO2). As I mentioned. It has been controversial and has not made real progress.

Cap and trade allows companies that pollute less than the permitted amount to sell their remaining permits, while companies that pollute more than their permitted amount are allowed to buy these permits. There is a market for cap and trade in the European Union like our market for stocks, commodities, etc. In the US, the House of Representatives passed a bill for cap and trade, but the Senate rejected it.

Energy subsidies give an incentive to produce renewable energy that emits less carbon. This makes activity less expensive, in contrast to the tax policy. Tech companies have aided and abided by this policy. During the last decade, the cost of solar energy has dropped significantly, and is now equivalent to the cost of wind energy in terms of dollars per one million kiloWatt hours—lower than the cost of natural gas. Moreover, electric cars have become more acceptable as more charging stations are being built. This has helped renewable energy become more acceptable. 

The impact of the third policy will become obvious as the Reduction Indication Act (IRA) of 2022, a $750 billion health care, tax and climate law, starts taking effect over time. We can conclude that, after all this time, the controversial Green New Deal in the U.S. has not died.

Shawkat Hammoudeh, Ph.D.

Professor of Economics and International Business

Drexel University

Donald J. Trump is the Sigmund Freud of U.S. politics. Whether you like it or not, he can and will show up in any conversation, any debate, any think piece about the government, especially when it shouldn’t have anything to do with him. He’s like the flu, or your boss’s Ivy League son; no, he’s not relevant right now, but you better stay on your toes or he’s damn well gonna be.Donald J. Trump is the Sigmund Freud of U.S. politics. Whether you like it or not, he can and will show up in any conversation, any debate, any think piece about the government, especially when it shouldn’t have anything to do with him.

His role as the bogeyman of national policy is, of course, in no small part thanks to the news. Trump and the media were a codependent relationship back in his campaigns and presidency, a feedback loop of absurd tweets, hate clicks, advertising revenue and primetime spotlights that made his miasmic presence fill every corner of the country. American politics was, in most cases, boring. Trump was very, very entertaining.

What Trump wasn’t, however, was a politician. One could convincingly claim, for example, that the media feeding his appetite for attention caused damage to our political system by prioritizing sensational headlines to get clicks rather than attempting to focus on the more moderate, if boring, politicians in the race. This is a totally rational conclusion that I absolutely, one hundred percent disagree with.

Sensationalist media outlets have existed for as long as the concept of news has. Before we had clickbait we had guys on street corners hawking the headlines to passersby. We as a species have been terrible gossips throughout every era of history. Twitter users getting Adam Levine to the top of the trending list because he cheated on his wife isn’t a disregard for political awareness—it’s human nature. 

The only thing that changed with the advent of the digital age is the sheer speed at which information travels. Back in the day, you had to wait for the morning paper to hear about the crazy s**t Nixon said that week. Today every major news development has a shorter lifespan, not because we as a society care less, but because we can hear about another equally important thing faster than ever before. It’s hard for a story to stay relevant when every major world event is being beamed to our pockets from space. 

This, in my opinion, is a good thing. The rate at which we hear about current events is extraordinarily, exhaustingly fast. All the different platforms and organizations fighting desperately for every shred of your attention span and  the variety of topics one can hear about in a day are staggering — but this means that a lot more gets noticed. Take, for example, the recent home invasion and ensuing attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi in their California home. This was an attack on the spouse of a representative, across the country, during the middle of an election cycle for Pennsylvania’s Senator and Governor positions while the Phillies were playing in the World Series and Elon Musk ascended to CEO of Twitter.

It was a damning indicator of division in this country that happened during an unusually active news cycle. But you heard about it anyway.

We can’t expect the media to slow down, and they by all rights shouldn’t attempt to. John Fetterman’s shaky performance in his Oct.  25 debate against Dr. Mehmet Oz was widely discussed in the context of his recent stroke and is now, a week and a half later, so old as to be almost completely useless as a news story. The public has moved on. 

The reality is that for a news story to be successful, it has to catch your attention instantly and make you drop everything to read it. No room for error. No second chances. Clickbait, while prioritizing less-than-significant headlines in favor of whatever gets you in the door, has the fundamentally important role of getting you in the door. There’s a reason why Buzzfeed, a particularly notorious manufacturer of these kinds of articles, shares a name with Buzzfeed News, the three-time finalist and one-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Journalism. Before Buzzfeed News moved to its own website seven years after launching, it was a division of Buzzfeed.com and would have directly benefited from the traffic generated by those clickbait articles. Without sensationalist headlines, and the advertising revenue generated by it, I believe Buzzfeed News would not exist as it does today.

In recent years the political landscape of the country has seen a dramatic shift towards amateur politicians having a real shot at major public office positions. Is this because of independent news outlets giving them attention, or is it a sign of general discontent with the establishment as a whole? Someone with absolutely no prior experience winning the presidency—it’s ridiculous, it’s dangerous and it’s a damn good story. You would have heard about it anyway.