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Introduction

Some memes are profane. Some are upsetting, depressing, aggressive, dehumanizing, controversial, divisive, tasteless, hyperbolic, uncomfortable, or maddening. While the Retro meme archive series is never going to include memes of the sort you would see at 4chan or in certain far-right Trumpist digital toilet bowls—memes that are racist disinformation, for instance, of the sort Twitter capo Elon Musk posts on his feed to hundreds of millions of people every day—America has certainly reached the point at which it’s appropriate for this series to publish some slightly edgier memes than has been the case in the past.

And that’s particularly appropriate when the subject of today’s archive is a POTUS falsely—and rather dangerously—declaring Canada’s portion of Lake Ontario an American “asset” and signing an executive order that purports to have the authority to rename all of Lake Ontario… including Canada’s 53% of it. The order also prohibits federal employees from acknowledging the existence of a “Lake Ontario,” including in any contract or other legal instrument—meaning that diplomacy over a critical body of water, indeed one that America relies upon significantly in its import-export trade, is dead for now (a fact the White House declared along with its new order).

Anger is a perfectly reasonable response to all of this.

So are memes.

As ever, my hope is that readers will use these memes to cut short interactions with those online who aren’t deserving of your attention. It’s difficult, sometimes even impossible, to leave a troll “un-re-trolled,” so the memes below may help you do that without expending any more precious words or energy than is strictly necessary.

Most Retro readers know that I’ve written many articles about memes on Substack—e.g., this one over at Proof—and Retro of course has the Memes section you’re reading right now in which I discuss the subject, so this series probably needs little additional introduction. It’s exactly what it says it is: a series of archives of memes from different categories that are eminently usable by anyone who likes to instrumentalize memes as part of their discourse practice.

And candidly, we should all do so: memes are a shorthand for dealing with the many idiosyncratic situations we encounter online—situations which often become, sans memes, far more arduous to navigate. In other words, high-quality memes save time.

In a politically fraught era like this one, memes can also summarize our values and make complex declarations of where we stand on matters of great import seem a less daunting task than they would otherwise be.

And that’s necessary at a time of great exhaustion and deep anxiety over current events.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the Retro Meme Archive

• Volume 1: Trump, Musk, and Putin

• Volume 2: TV, Film, and Culture

• Volume 3: Responding to Posts on Social Media

• Volume 4: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 5: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 6: Political Deep Cuts

• Volume 7: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 8: Pre-Election Political Cartoons

• Volume 9: Pre-Election Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 10: A Farewell to Twitter

• Volume 11: Inaugural Edition

• Volume 12: Time to Fight Fascism

• Volume 13: Our Largest Meme Archive Ever

• Volume 14: Trump-Musk Civil War Edition

• Volume 15: No Kings Day Edition

• Volume 16: The Iran War Edition

• Volume 17: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition, Part 1

• Volume 18: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition, Part 2

• Volume 19: ICE Edition

• Volume 20: Hardcore Memes

• Volume 21: Hardcore Memes II

• Volume 22: Operation Orange Chicken

• Volume 23: Lake America (see below)

I studied and taught memes when I was a professor at University of New Hampshire—yes, really!—so I curate an archive series like this one very mindfully. The very best memes, whatever their general theme, are ones that have high production values, are easy to read and understand, and make a point that one doesn’t need much or perhaps even any specialized knowledge to empathize with. They act as effective vehicles for trolling and pleasing and commiserating in equal measure, and moreover offer the sort of iconic visual aesthetic that allows them to be instantly recognizable every time they appear anywhere (and, just as importantly, be readily remembered). A meme is far more likely to be used and responded to if it’s one an internet user has seen before (up to a point, of course; the “law of diminishing returns” does also apply here).

With all this in mind, I hope you the enjoy the 55+ piping hot memes compiled below.

The Memes You Need, Vol. 23: Lake America

Read more

The G6 Top 25 College Football Rankings

Methodology: Teams from the college football Group of Six (“G6”) receive one vote for each vote they receive in the Associated Press Poll and USA Today Coaches Poll. The CBS Sports Ranking of all FBS programs determines the order of the remaining Top 25 teams. The curator of these rankings, Seth Abramson, does not vote; he was a I-AA (“FCS”) college football reporter at the nation’s oldest college newspaper, The Daily Dartmouth, in the 1990s, and in the 2010s covered the FBS with SB Nation. His rooting interests are the Wisconsin Badgers (Power 4) and UMass Minutemen (G6).

This new ranking exists because the advent of NIL in college football has made it less reasonable than ever to measure “P4” schools and G6 programs in the same rankings. No team that does not appear in Division I’s Top 100 can be ranked in these rankings.

Boise State Broncos, Pac-12, 0-0 (67 votes)

UNLV Rebels, Mountain West, 0-0 (21 votes)

Navy Midshipmen, American, 0-0 (13 votes)

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To access 300 more Retro articles for a week, try Retro for free! Just click the red button below.

Get 7 day free trial

Introduction

Some memes are profane. Some are upsetting, depressing, aggressive, dehumanizing, controversial, divisive, tasteless, hyperbolic, uncomfortable, or maddening. While the Retro meme archive series is never going to include memes of the sort you would see at 4chan or in certain far-right Trumpist digital toilet bowls—memes that are racist disinformation, for instance, of the sort Twitter capo Elon Musk posts on his feed to hundreds of millions of people every day—America has certainly reached the point at which it’s appropriate for this series to publish some slightly edgier memes than has been the case in the past.

So that’s the “theme” of this entry in one of the longest-running series at Retro.

As ever, my hope is that readers will use these memes to cut short interactions with those online who aren’t deserving of your attention. It’s difficult, sometimes even impossible, to leave a troll “un-re-trolled,” so the memes below may help you do that without expending any more precious words or energy than is strictly necessary.

Most Retro readers know that I’ve written many articles about memes on Substack—e.g., this one over at Proof—and Retro of course has the Memes section you’re reading right now in which I discuss the subject, so this series probably needs little additional introduction. It’s exactly what it says it is: a series of archives of memes from different categories that are eminently usable by anyone who likes to instrumentalize memes as part of their discourse practice.

And candidly, we should all do so: memes are a shorthand for dealing with the many idiosyncratic situations we encounter online—situations which often become, sans memes, far more arduous to navigate. In other words, high-quality memes save time.

In a politically fraught era like this one, memes can also summarize our values and make complex declarations of where we stand on matters of great import seem a less daunting task than they would otherwise be.

And that’s necessary at a time of great exhaustion and deep anxiety over current events.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the Retro Meme Archive

• Volume 1: Trump, Musk, and Putin

• Volume 2: TV, Film, and Culture

• Volume 3: Responding to Posts on Social Media

• Volume 4: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 5: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 6: Political Deep Cuts

• Volume 7: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 8: Pre-Election Political Cartoons

• Volume 9: Pre-Election Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 10: A Farewell to Twitter

• Volume 11: Inaugural Edition

• Volume 12: Time to Fight Fascism

• Volume 13: Our Largest Meme Archive Ever

• Volume 14: Trump-Musk Civil War Edition

• Volume 15: No Kings Day Edition

• Volume 16: The Iran War Edition

• Volume 17: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition, Part 1

• Volume 18: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition, Part 2

• Volume 19: ICE Edition

• Volume 20: Hardcore Memes

• Volume 21: Hardcore Memes II

• Volume 22: Operation Orange Chicken (see below)

I studied and taught memes when I was a professor at University of New Hampshire—yes, really!—so I curate an archive series like this one very mindfully. The very best memes, whatever their general theme, are ones that have high production values, are easy to read and understand, and make a point that one doesn’t need much or perhaps even any specialized knowledge to empathize with. They act as effective vehicles for trolling and pleasing and commiserating in equal measure, and moreover offer the sort of iconic visual aesthetic that allows them to be instantly recognizable every time they appear anywhere (and, just as importantly, be readily remembered). A meme is far more likely to be used and responded to if it’s one an internet user has seen before (up to a point, of course; the “law of diminishing returns” does also apply here).

With all this in mind, I hope you the enjoy the 50+ piping hot memes compiled below.

The Memes You Need, Vol. 22: Operation Orange Chicken

Read more

To access 300 more Retro articles for a week, try Retro for free! Just click the red button below.

Get 7 day free trial

The Retro Global Amusement Park: Roller Coaster Edition

Countries Represented (27):

🇺🇸 🇨🇳 🇫🇷 🇵🇱 🇯🇵 🇳🇴 🇩🇪 🇳🇱 🇸🇪 🇦🇺 🇹🇷 🇦🇪 🇬🇧 🇧🇪 🇪🇸 🇸🇦 🇫🇮 🇰🇷 🇮🇹 🇩🇰 🇲🇽 🇨🇦 🇹🇼 🇮🇪🇨🇭🇦🇩 🇨🇷

Introduction

As a child, I was fascinated by roller coasters. But I also loathed the sight of them.

Due to issues with motion sickness and vertigo I’ve had as long as I can remember, I’ve only ever ridden two roller coasters: the Yankee Cannonball, a now 92-year-old wooden coaster at Canobie Lake Park in Salem, New Hampshire—where my family used to go every summer in the 1980s because Digital Equipment Corporation, the then-employer of my late father, Robert Abramson, held its annual family day there—and another less daunting but still exhilarating ride at the same amusement park, an SDC Galaxi coaster retired in 2004 that records say was called Rockin’ Rider but I think had a different name (either Galaxi or Mouse Trap) when I rode it in the 1980s (see the “Special Citations” section, below, for a great video of an identical coaster).

In 1984, my dad had a heart attack which he survived, though heart problems would cause his death in 2020 36 years later. From the day—when I was eight years old—that paramedics and firemen filled our small condo’s top floor to help my father down to a waiting ambulance, I was certain I would one day die of a heart attack and even had a particular belief that events like roller coaster rides were just waiting to do me in. By the beginning of the 1990s, I was determined to never ride a roller coaster again.

When my dad passed away early on in the pandemic—again, not of COVID-19, but still under circumstances that made those who loved him well aware that he’d been hospitalized in the midst of a once-in-a-century international event—I found myself more nostalgic for the past than I’d ever been at any other point in my adult life. I began playing Nintendo and Super Nintendo video games again (as subscribers to Retro won’t be at all surprised to hear, given the size and scope of this publication’s Video Games section) and even found myself watching roller coaster videos online.

It was nice. Watching POV roller-coaster rides at home caused me little vertigo and, while I certainly didn’t get the same sense of speed and danger as I would’ve actually gotten being on a ride, I found that knowing a bit about what that experience would be like scratched a palpable itch for me—while not causing me any trauma-born anxiety.

Only recently did I learn that roller coaster POV videos are becoming a very big deal, and not just because they help people who do ride actual roller coasters decide which ones they want to ride (it may not surprise you that some adventuresome souls travel the world trying to ride all of the best roller coasters, which are helpfully ranked—on an annual basis—here and here and here). It seems that there are many people who do not want to go to amusement parks regularly, if at all, but who do want just a taste of what the experience is like.

Minus the high ticket prices, long lines, overpriced food, and pushy crowds, of course.

Virtual Coaster Riding

It probably also won’t surprise anyone to learn that virtual roller coaster riders—those who watch roller coaster POV videos with the lights off, the sound up, and on the best television screen they can find—judge rides a little differently than they would if they were riding a coaster “live.” The value of certain components of roller coaster riding is lessened if a) you’re watching video of it at home and b) you’re partly doing so because you experience motion sickness or other issues when or if you ride roller coasters on-site. (I should note that some people who do love riding roller coasters at amusement parks also like watching videos of coasters due to nostalgia, a logistical inability to get to certain locations, the cost of traveling to such parks, and/or concerns about being in extremely crowded places in the aftermath of a years-long international pandemic).

With virtual coaster riding, you might find yourself considering much more than usual the following aspects of the roller coaster-riding experience:

• The aesthetics of the structure;

• the smoothness of the track and the camera work;

• the duration of the ride;

• the pacing and length of the lift hill;

• the terrain over which the ride has been built;

• the availability of surprising vistas;

• the presence of interesting optical illusions;

• the sonics of the ride;

• the presence or absence of unwanted distractions;

• the ride’s sense of speed and airtime;

• any conceptual setpieces; and

• any unusual track features.

Some virtual riders find—I know I do—that, with occasional exceptions, lift hills and inversions and corkscrews aren’t actually that fun to watch, whereas the sound of a wooden roller coaster creaking in what feels like a dangerous way may be even more central to a virtual experience than it already is to a live one. Even ride components that virtual and live riders are likely to equally enjoy, for instance the speed of the ride, register differently at home versus a park; on video, a slightly slower ride may well feel faster because of something as esoteric as the shape and spacing of the crossbars on the track or the recorded audio’s sensitivity to ambient wind during the recording.

In other words, divining which virtual roller coaster experiences are the “best” is as much an art as a science, depends heavily on individual “riders’” idiosyncratic bases for nostalgia, and draws sufficiently from ideas about visual and multimedia literacy that it’s the perfect subject for a ranking on a website like this one (that is, one whose author is a former professor of digital studies). I expect to make further updates to this ranking as I try out more tracks—I’ve seen, I think, nearly a hundred by now—and do even more to hone my sense, as a cultural critic, of what makes a great virtual coaster-riding experience.

I hope you’ll take a “ride” on these coasters and let me know what you think of them!

Key

🇺🇸: Location (Nation)
⏱️: Duration of Ride
🆕: New Addition to Ranking
📓: Multiple Launches
📹: Multiple Video Perspectives
🧑🏽‍🤝‍🧑🏻: Dueling Coaster
🏆: Record-Setting Ride
📔: Wooden Coaster
📕: Trackless Coaster
📗: Flying Coaster
📘: Water Coaster
⛰️: Alpine Coaster
🛷: Bobsled Coaster
🪽: Wing Coaster

The Top 100 Best Virtual Roller Coaster Rides in the World

1 | Falcon’s Flight (🇸🇦) 🆕

Six Flags Qiddiya City in Qiddiya City, Riyadh Province, Saudi Arabia

⏱️: 2:50

🏆:

• Fastest Coaster

• Longest Coaster

• Tallest Coaster

📓: Triple Launch

2 | Steel Vengeance (🇺🇸)

Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio

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To access 300 more Retro articles for a week, try Retro for free! Just click the red button below.

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Introduction

Some memes are profane. Some are upsetting, depressing, aggressive, dehumanizing, controversial, divisive, tasteless, hyperbolic, uncomfortable, or maddening. While the Retro meme archive series is never going to include memes of the sort you would see at 4chan or in certain far-right Trumpist digital toilet bowls—memes that are racist disinformation, for instance, of the sort Twitter capo Elon Musk posts on his feed to hundreds of millions of people every day—America has certainly reached the point at which it’s appropriate for this series to publish some slightly edgier memes than has been the case in the past.

So that’s the “theme” of this entry in one of the longest-running series at Retro.

As ever, my hope is that readers will use these memes to cut short interactions with those online who aren’t deserving of your attention. It’s difficult, sometimes even impossible, to leave a troll “un-re-trolled,” so the memes below may help you do that without expending any more precious words or energy than is strictly necessary.

Most Retro readers know that I’ve written many articles about memes on Substack—e.g., this one over at Proof—and Retro of course has the Memes section you’re reading right now in which I discuss the subject, so this series probably needs little additional introduction. It’s exactly what it says it is: a series of archives of memes from different categories that are eminently usable by anyone who likes to instrumentalize memes as part of their discourse practice.

And candidly, we should all do so: memes are a shorthand for dealing with the many idiosyncratic situations we encounter online—situations which often become, sans memes, far more arduous to navigate. In other words, high-quality memes save time.

In a politically fraught era like this one, memes can also summarize our values and make complex declarations of where we stand on matters of great import seem a less daunting task than they would otherwise be.

And that’s necessary at a time of great exhaustion and deep anxiety over current events.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the Retro Meme Archive

• Volume 1: Trump, Musk, and Putin

• Volume 2: TV, Film, and Culture

• Volume 3: Responding to Posts on Social Media

• Volume 4: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 5: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 6: Political Deep Cuts

• Volume 7: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 8: Pre-Election Political Cartoons

• Volume 9: Pre-Election Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 10: A Farewell to Twitter

• Volume 11: Inaugural Edition

• Volume 12: Time to Fight Fascism

• Volume 13: Our Largest Meme Archive Ever

• Volume 14: Trump-Musk Civil War Edition

• Volume 15: No Kings Day Edition

• Volume 16: The Iran War Edition

• Volume 17: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition, Part 1

• Volume 18: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition, Part 2

• Volume 19: ICE Edition

• Volume 20: Hardcore Memes

• Volume 21: Hardcore Memes II (see below)

I studied and taught memes when I was a professor at University of New Hampshire—yes, really!—so I curate an archive series like this one very mindfully. The very best memes, whatever their general theme, are ones that have high production values, are easy to read and understand, and make a point that one doesn’t need much or perhaps even any specialized knowledge to empathize with. They act as effective vehicles for trolling and pleasing and commiserating in equal measure, and moreover offer the sort of iconic visual aesthetic that allows them to be instantly recognizable every time they appear anywhere (and, just as importantly, be readily remembered). A meme is far more likely to be used and responded to if it’s one an internet user has seen before (up to a point, of course; the “law of diminishing returns” does also apply here).

With all this in mind, I hope you the enjoy the 50+ piping hot memes compiled below.

The Memes You Need, Vol. 21: Hardcore Memes II

Read more

To access 300 more Retro articles for a week, try Retro for free! Just click the red button below.

Get 7 day free trial

Introduction

Some memes are profane. Some are upsetting, depressing, aggressive, dehumanizing, controversial, divisive, tasteless, hyperbolic, uncomfortable, or maddening. While the Retro meme archive series is never going to include memes of the sort you would see at 4chan or in certain far-right Trumpist digital toilet bowls—memes that are racist disinformation, for instance, of the sort Twitter capo Elon Musk posts on his feed to hundreds of millions of people every day—America has certainly reached the point at which it’s appropriate for this series to publish some slightly edgier memes than has been the case in the past.

So that’s the “theme” of this entry in one of the longest-running series at Retro.

As ever, my hope is that readers will use these memes to cut short interactions with those online who aren’t deserving of your attention. It’s difficult, sometimes even impossible, to leave a troll “un-re-trolled,” so the memes below may help you do that without expending any more precious words or energy than is strictly necessary.

Most Retro readers know that I’ve written many articles about memes on Substack—e.g., this one over at Proof—and Retro of course has the Memes section you’re reading right now in which I discuss the subject, so this series probably needs little additional introduction. It’s exactly what it says it is: a series of archives of memes from different categories that are eminently usable by anyone who likes to instrumentalize memes as part of their discourse practice.

And candidly, we should all do so: memes are a shorthand for dealing with the many idiosyncratic situations we encounter online—situations which often become, sans memes, far more arduous to navigate. In other words, high-quality memes save time.

In a politically fraught era like this one, memes can also summarize our values and make complex declarations of where we stand on matters of great import seem a less daunting task than they would otherwise be.

And that’s necessary at a time of great exhaustion and deep anxiety over current events.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the Retro Meme Archive

• Volume 1: Trump, Musk, and Putin

• Volume 2: TV, Film, and Culture

• Volume 3: Responding to Posts on Social Media

• Volume 4: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 5: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 6: Political Deep Cuts

• Volume 7: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 8: Pre-Election Political Cartoons

• Volume 9: Pre-Election Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 10: A Farewell to Twitter

• Volume 11: Inaugural Edition

• Volume 12: Time to Fight Fascism

• Volume 13: Our Largest Meme Archive Ever

• Volume 14: Trump-Musk Civil War Edition

• Volume 15: No Kings Day Edition

• Volume 16: The Iran War Edition

• Volume 17: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition, Part 1

• Volume 18: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition, Part 2

• Volume 19: ICE Edition

• Volume 20: Hardcore Memes (see below)

I studied and taught memes when I was a professor at University of New Hampshire—yes, really!—so I curate an archive series like this one very mindfully. The very best memes, whatever their general theme, are ones that have high production values, are easy to read and understand, and make a point that one doesn’t need much or perhaps even any specialized knowledge to empathize with. They act as effective vehicles for trolling and pleasing and commiserating in equal measure, and moreover offer the sort of iconic visual aesthetic that allows them to be instantly recognizable every time they appear anywhere (and, just as importantly, be readily remembered). A meme is far more likely to be used and responded to if it’s one an internet user has seen before (up to a point, of course; the “law of diminishing returns” certainly does also apply here).

With all this in mind, I do hope you the enjoy the piping hot memes compiled below.

The Memes You Need, Vol. 20: Hardcore Memes

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To access 300 more Retro articles for a week—over 12 sections of content—try Retro for free!

Get 7 day free trial

{Note: The NMDP offers exclusive playlists of contemporary music to help those too busy to track down great new music on their own find amazing new sounds. Retro-recommended songs first released in the 1970s appear in Retro’s “Singular Songs of the Seventies” series, instead, whereas songs from the 1960s appear in the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series. I have eclectic taste in music, so I hope you’ll enjoy journeying through the past fifty years of music with me!}

While my expertise when I was a disc jockey was in American and British psychedelic music released between 1965 and 1972, I have been thrilled to have the opportunity to use Twitter, Threads, and other social media platforms to share the hundreds and hundreds of remarkable songs of more recent vintage I discovered in my decades of collecting LPs (and the countless hours I spent hanging out at a college radio station).

I hope these playlists will launch new conversations—including giving members of the Retro community a chance to share your own favorite songs.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the New Music Discovery Project

• Volume 1

• Volume 2

• Volume 3

• Volume 4

• Volume 5

• Volume 6

• Volume 7

• Volume 8

• Volume 9

• Volume 10

• Volume 11

• Volume 12

• Volume 13

• Volume 14

• Volume 15

• Volume 16

• Volume 17

• Volume 18

• Volume 19

• Volume 20

• Volume 21

• Volume 22

• Volume 23

• Volume 24

• Volume 25 (below)

If you’re a subscriber to Retro, feel free to let everyone know your favorite song(s) from among the ones below in the comments—and post your own favorite songs, too! I do take suggestions, so you may well see a song you’ve recommended in a future NMDP.

🎵 | New Music Discovery Project, Vol. 25 Playlist

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To access 300 more Retro articles for a week, try Retro for free! Just click the red button below.

Get 7 day free trial

Introduction

As most Retro readers know, I’ve written many articles about memes on Substack—e.g., this one over at Proof—and Retro of course has the Memes section you’re reading right now in which I discuss the subject, so this series probably needs little additional introduction. It’s exactly what it says it is: a series of archives of memes from different categories that are eminently usable by anyone who likes to instrumentalize memes as part of their discourse practice.

And candidly, we should all do so: memes are a shorthand for dealing with the many idiosyncratic situations we encounter online—situations which often become, sans memes, far more arduous to navigate. In other words, high-quality memes save time.

In a politically fraught era like this one, memes can also summarize our values and make complex declarations of where we stand on matters of great import seem a less daunting task than they would otherwise be.

And that’s necessary at a time of great exhaustion and deep anxiety over current events.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the Retro Meme Archive

• Volume 1: Trump, Musk, and Putin

• Volume 2: TV, Film, and Culture

• Volume 3: Responding to Posts on Social Media

• Volume 4: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 5: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 6: Political Deep Cuts

• Volume 7: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 8: Pre-Election Political Cartoons

• Volume 9: Pre-Election Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 10: A Farewell to Twitter

• Volume 11: Inaugural Edition

• Volume 12: Time to Fight Fascism

• Volume 13: Our Largest Meme Archive Ever

• Volume 14: Trump-Musk Civil War Edition

• Volume 15: No Kings Day Edition

• Volume 16: The Iran War Edition

• Volume 17: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition, Part 1

• Volume 18: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition, Part 2

• Volume 19: ICE Edition (see below)

I studied and taught memes when I was a professor at University of New Hampshire—yes, really!—so I curate an archive series like this one very mindfully. The very best memes, whatever their general theme, are ones that have high production values, are easy to read and understand, and make a point that one doesn’t need much or perhaps even any specialized knowledge to empathize with. They act as effective vehicles for trolling and pleasing and commiserating in equal measure, and moreover offer the sort of iconic visual aesthetic that allows them to be instantly recognizable every time they appear anywhere (and, just as importantly, be readily remembered). A meme is far more likely to be used and responded to if it’s one an internet user has seen before (up to a point, of course; the “law of diminishing returns” certainly does also apply here).

With all this in mind, I do hope you the enjoy the piping hot memes compiled below.

The Memes You Need, Vol. 19: ICE Edition

Read more

To access 300 more Retro articles for a week, try Retro for free! Just click the red button below.

Get 7 day free trial

Introduction

As most Retro readers know, I’ve written many articles about memes on Substack—e.g., this one over at Proof—and Retro of course has the Memes section you’re reading right now in which I discuss the subject, so this series probably needs little additional introduction. It’s exactly what it says it is: a series of archives of memes from different categories that are eminently usable by anyone who likes to instrumentalize memes as part of their discourse practice.

And candidly, we should all do so: memes are a shorthand for dealing with the many idiosyncratic situations we encounter online—situations which often become, sans memes, far more arduous to navigate. In other words, high-quality memes save time.

In a politically fraught era like this one, memes can also summarize our values and make complex declarations of where we stand on matters of great import seem a less daunting task than they would otherwise be.

And that’s necessary at a time of great exhaustion and deep anxiety over current events.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the Retro Meme Archive

• Volume 1: Trump, Musk, and Putin

• Volume 2: TV, Film, and Culture

• Volume 3: Responding to Posts on Social Media

• Volume 4: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 5: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 6: Political Deep Cuts

• Volume 7: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 8: Pre-Election Political Cartoons

• Volume 9: Pre-Election Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 10: A Farewell to Twitter

• Volume 11: Inaugural Edition

• Volume 12: Time to Fight Fascism

• Volume 13: Our Largest Meme Archive Ever

• Volume 14: Trump-Musk Civil War Edition

• Volume 15: No Kings Day Edition

• Volume 16: The Iran War Edition

• Volume 17: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition, Part 1

• Volume 18: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition, Part 2 (see below)

I studied and taught memes when I was a professor at University of New Hampshire—yes, really!—so I curate an archive series like this one very mindfully. The very best memes, whatever their general theme, are ones that have high production values, are easy to read and understand, and make a point that one doesn’t need much or perhaps even any specialized knowledge to empathize with. They act as effective vehicles for trolling and pleasing and commiserating in equal measure, and moreover offer the sort of iconic visual aesthetic that allows them to be instantly recognizable every time they appear anywhere (and, just as importantly, be readily remembered). A meme is far more likely to be used and responded to if it’s one an internet user has seen before (up to a point, of course; the “law of diminishing returns” certainly does also apply here).

With all this in mind, I do hope you the enjoy the piping hot memes compiled below.

The Memes You Need, Vol. 18: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition, Part 2

Read more

To access 300 more Retro articles for a week, try Retro for free! Just click the red button below.

Get 7 day free trial

Introduction

As most Retro readers know, I’ve written many articles about memes on Substack—e.g., this one over at Proof—and Retro of course has the Memes section you’re reading right now in which I discuss the subject, so this series probably needs little additional introduction. It’s exactly what it says it is: a series of archives of memes from different categories that are eminently usable by anyone who likes to instrumentalize memes as part of their discourse practice.

And candidly, we should all do so: memes are a shorthand for dealing with the many idiosyncratic situations we encounter online—situations which often become, sans memes, far more arduous to navigate. In other words, high-quality memes save time.

In a politically fraught era like this one, memes can also summarize our values and make complex declarations of where we stand on matters of great import seem a less daunting task than they would otherwise be.

And that’s necessary at a time of great exhaustion and deep anxiety over current events.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the Retro Meme Archive

• Volume 1: Trump, Musk, and Putin

• Volume 2: TV, Film, and Culture

• Volume 3: Responding to Posts on Social Media

• Volume 4: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 5: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 6: Political Deep Cuts

• Volume 7: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 8: Pre-Election Political Cartoons

• Volume 9: Pre-Election Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 10: A Farewell to Twitter

• Volume 11: Inaugural Edition

• Volume 12: Time to Fight Fascism

• Volume 13: Our Largest Meme Archive Ever

• Volume 14: Trump-Musk Civil War Edition

• Volume 15: No Kings Day Edition

• Volume 16: The Iran War Edition

• Volume 17: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition (see below)

I studied and taught memes when I was a professor at University of New Hampshire—yes, really!—so I curate an archive series like this one very mindfully. The very best memes, whatever their general theme, are ones that have high production values, are easy to read and understand, and make a point that one doesn’t need much or perhaps even any specialized knowledge to empathize with. They act as effective vehicles for trolling and pleasing and commiserating in equal measure, and moreover offer the sort of iconic visual aesthetic that allows them to be instantly recognizable every time they appear anywhere (and, just as importantly, be readily remembered). A meme is far more likely to be used and responded to if it’s one an internet user has seen before (up to a point, of course; the “law of diminishing returns” certainly does also apply here).

With all this in mind, I do hope you the enjoy the piping hot memes compiled below.

The Memes You Need, Vol. 17: The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Edition

Read more

The first sections of this lengthy Retro report are free. To get a week of free access to the whole report, as well as 275+ Retro reports across a dozen sections of content, click the button below.

Get 7 day free trial

Introduction

{Note: Listings are alphabetical by category. All the shows below are worthwhile, but tastes do vary—caveat lector, cave videntium, and caveat emptor. Starred shows (⭐) are “the best of the best of the best.” You can watch the Top 50 Television Opening Credits of This Century here.}

For years I was a professional reviewer of television shows, films, graphic novels, video games, poetry collections and more at Indiewire and The Huffington Post. I retain “legacy critic” status at Rotten Tomatoes to this day, in fact.

Then I entered academia, where I became a tenure-track assistant professor and began teaching courses at University of New Hampshire on the above (and other) genres and media. I mention my background—which you can read more about here—to offer a sense of where I’m coming from with my recommendations in this series, and moreover of the professional consideration behind them. I suspect that if you try some of my picks out, you’ll start to get a good sense of my preferred aesthetics and poetics. And if these match yours, I have no doubt you’ll find some new gems below.

The Ground Rules

(1) Most shows have stronger and weaker seasons, but I haven’t included shows with seasons I consider unwatchable. It’s one reason The Simpsons isn’t listed here; many seasons of it are, sadly, disposable. Of course, it’s also fair to note that under this rule Sons of Anarchy, Billions, and The OA barely made the lists below, even as Prison Break, Heroes and Hanna didn’t make them at all. And some shows are wildly uneven at the episode level, like Who Is America?, Little Britain or other sketch comedies; these don’t appear here either. I realize this seems to penalize long-running shows, but I look at it this way: the point of lists like this is to answer the question, “Would you recommend this?” If the answer is, “Yes, but only six seasons of 25,” that’s too conditional a reply to consider it an answer in the affirmative. By comparison, a show with four seasons, three of which are well worth watching and the fourth of which is decent, is one you can recommend happily. We all know, in any case, that early Simpsons is classic TV.

(2) With a list like this one there has to be, and here there is, a temporal cutoff. If I even open this list up to the last century, it swells markedly, with the addition of acknowledged classics such as Seinfeld, Friends, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Freaks and Geeks, Quantum Leap, Frasier, Twin Peaks, and The Wonder Years among others far older like All in the Family and a contingent of borderline misses like Cheers, Family Ties, Taxi, Golden Girls, NewsRadio, and Picket Fences. And of course the older a show is, the better the chance the intervening years have made selecting it problematic. (Consider, for instance, The Cosby Show or—to a somewhat lesser degree—Roseanne.)

(3) One can enjoy a series without feeling comfortable putting it on lists like these. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, for instance. I was even sucked into Poldark and Outlander, though in my defense, so were many. But as the primary goal of these lists is to distinguish transient pleasure from lasting value, guilty pleasures are avoided here.

Happy reading—and even more so, happy disagreeing! I invite your comments below!

Key

🔷 = New to the list
🔶 = Recently reevaluated
⭐ = Best of the best

⬜️ = Apple TV
🟥 = Netflix
🟧 = Peacock
🟨 = Disney Plus
🟩 = Hulu
🟦 = Amazon Prime
🟪 = Max
⬛️ = Paramount+ / Showtime
🟫 = AMC+
🔲 = YouTube / Starz
❌ = Currently unavailable in the United States
🇦🇷 = Country of origin by flag (non-English programs)

{Note: Many shows can be watched on multiple streaming platforms. To the best of my ability, I have listed below the streaming platform considered each show’s current “home” platform.}

Index

The Best of the Best TV Programs

• Animated and Puppetry

• Comedy

• Crime

• Documentary

• Drama

• Dramedy

• Dystopian

• Experimental

• Fantasy

• Food

• Horror

• Mystery

• Political

• Pulp

• Reality

• Science Fiction

• Sports

• Superhero

• Thriller

• War

• Western

Notable Programs That Missed the Cut

Selected Planned Future Viewing

The Best of the Best TV Programs

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To access 300 more Retro articles for a week, try Retro for free! Just click the red button below.

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Introduction

As most Retro readers know, I’ve written many articles about memes on Substack—e.g., this one over at Proof—and Retro of course has the Memes section you’re reading right now in which I discuss the subject, so this series probably needs little additional introduction. It’s exactly what it says it is: a series of archives of memes from different categories that are eminently usable by anyone who likes to instrumentalize memes as part of their discourse practice.

And candidly, we should all do so: memes are a shorthand for dealing with the many idiosyncratic situations we encounter online—situations which often become, sans memes, far more arduous to navigate. In other words, high-quality memes save time.

In a politically fraught era like this one, memes can also summarize our values and make complex declarations of where we stand on matters of great import seem a less daunting task than they would otherwise be.

And that’s necessary at a time of great exhaustion and deep anxiety over current events.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the Retro Meme Archive

• Volume 1: Trump, Musk, and Putin

• Volume 2: TV, Film, and Culture

• Volume 3: Responding to Posts on Social Media

• Volume 4: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 5: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 6: Political Deep Cuts

• Volume 7: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 8: Pre-Election Political Cartoons

• Volume 9: Pre-Election Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 10: A Farewell to Twitter

• Volume 11: Inaugural Edition

• Volume 12: Time to Fight Fascism

• Volume 13: Our Largest Meme Archive Ever

• Volume 14: Trump-Musk Civil War Edition

• Volume 15: No Kings Day Edition

• Volume 16: The Iran War Edition (below)

I studied and taught memes when I was a professor at University of New Hampshire—yes, really!—so I curate an archive series like this one very mindfully. The very best memes, whatever their general theme, are ones that have high production values, are easy to read and understand, and make a point that one doesn’t need much or perhaps even any specialized knowledge to empathize with. They act as effective vehicles for trolling and pleasing and commiserating in equal measure, and moreover offer the sort of iconic visual aesthetic that allows them to be instantly recognizable every time they appear anywhere (and, just as importantly, be readily remembered). A meme is far more likely to be used and responded to if it’s one an internet user has seen before (up to a point, of course; the “law of diminishing returns” certainly does also apply here).

With all this in mind, I do hope you the enjoy the piping hot memes compiled below.

The Memes You Need, Vol. 16: The Iran War Edition

Read more

To access 300 more Retro articles for a week, try Retro for free! Just click the red button below. For the largest collection of No Kings Day photos online, see the Proof archive on Substack.

Get 7 day free trial

Introduction

As most Retro readers know, I’ve written many articles about memes on Substack—e.g., this one over at Proof—and Retro of course has the Memes section you’re reading right now in which I discuss the subject, so this series probably needs little additional introduction. It’s exactly what it says it is: a series of archives of memes from different categories that are eminently usable by anyone who likes to instrumentalize memes as part of their discourse practice.

And candidly, we should all do so: memes are a shorthand for dealing with the many idiosyncratic situations we encounter online—situations which often become, sans memes, far more arduous to navigate. In other words, high-quality memes save time.

In a politically fraught era like this one, memes can also summarize our values and make complex declarations of where we stand on matters of great import seem a less daunting task than they would otherwise be.

And that’s necessary at a time of great exhaustion and deep anxiety over current events.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the Retro Meme Archive

• Volume 1: Trump, Musk, and Putin

• Volume 2: TV, Film, and Culture

• Volume 3: Responding to Posts on Social Media

• Volume 4: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 5: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 6: Political Deep Cuts

• Volume 7: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 8: Pre-Election Political Cartoons

• Volume 9: Pre-Election Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 10: A Farewell to Twitter

• Volume 11: Inaugural Edition

• Volume 12: Time to Fight Fascism

• Volume 13: Our Largest Meme Archive Ever

• Volume 14: Trump-Musk Civil War Edition

• Volume 15: No Kings Day Edition (below)

I studied and taught memes when I was a professor at University of New Hampshire—yes, really!—so I curate an archive series like this one very mindfully. The very best memes, whatever their general theme, are ones that have high production values, are easy to read and understand, and make a point that one doesn’t need much or perhaps even any specialized knowledge to empathize with. They act as effective vehicles for trolling and pleasing and commiserating in equal measure, and moreover offer the sort of iconic visual aesthetic that allows them to be instantly recognizable every time they appear anywhere (and, just as importantly, be readily remembered). A meme is far more likely to be used and responded to if it’s one an internet user has seen before (up to a point, of course; the “law of diminishing returns” certainly does also apply here).

With all this in mind, I do hope you the enjoy the piping hot memes compiled below.

The Memes You Need, Vol. 15: No Kings Day Edition

Read more

To access 275+ more Retro articles for a week—over 12 sections of content—try Retro for free!

Get 7 day free trial

Introduction

This is a dark time in U.S. history. Retro is actively looking for stories that inspire.

Some of the very best ones come—per usual—from the world of American sports.

Act I

There are two ball players named Max Muncy in Major League Baseball.

One of them has been named an All-Star multiple times, has finished in the Top 15 for League MVP three times, and plays for one of the best teams—and, candidly, one of the very best franchises—in all of professional baseball: the Los Angeles Dodgers.

This article is not about that Max Muncy.

The other Max Muncy is a utility middle infielder who plays for what’s almost certainly the worst franchise in all of professional baseball—a team so bad that not only does it no longer have a home city, but it doesn’t even have a city’s name in its team name and is instead just known as The Athletics.

Yes, really.

This story is about that Max Muncy.

Read more

To access 300 more Retro articles for a week, try Retro for free! Just click the red button below.

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Introduction

As most Retro readers know, I’ve written many articles about memes on Substack—e.g., this one over at Proof—and Retro of course has the Memes section you’re reading right now in which I discuss the subject, so this series probably needs little additional introduction. It’s exactly what it says it is: a series of archives of memes from different categories that are eminently usable by anyone who likes to instrumentalize memes as part of their discourse practice.

And candidly, we should all do so: memes are a shorthand for dealing with the many idiosyncratic situations we encounter online—situations which often become, sans memes, far more arduous to navigate. In other words, high-quality memes save time.

In a politically fraught era like this one, memes can also summarize our values and make complex declarations of where we stand on matters of great import seem a less daunting task than they would otherwise be.

And that’s necessary at a time of great exhaustion and deep anxiety over current events.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the Retro Meme Archive

• Volume 1: Trump, Musk, and Putin

• Volume 2: TV, Film, and Culture

• Volume 3: Responding to Posts on Social Media

• Volume 4: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 5: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 6: Political Deep Cuts

• Volume 7: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 8: Pre-Election Political Cartoons

• Volume 9: Pre-Election Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 10: A Farewell to Twitter

• Volume 11: Inaugural Edition

• Volume 12: Time to Fight Fascism

• Volume 13: Our Largest Meme Archive Ever

• Volume 14: Trump-Musk Civil War Edition (below)

I studied and taught memes when I was a professor at University of New Hampshire—yes, really!—so I curate an archive series like this one very mindfully. The very best memes, whatever their general theme, are ones that have high production values, are easy to read and understand, and make a point that one doesn’t need much or perhaps even any specialized knowledge to empathize with. They act as effective vehicles for trolling and pleasing and commiserating in equal measure, and moreover offer the sort of iconic visual aesthetic that allows them to be instantly recognizable every time they appear anywhere (and, just as importantly, be readily remembered). A meme is far more likely to be used and responded to if it’s one an internet user has seen before (up to a point, of course; the “law of diminishing returns” certainly does also apply here).

With all this in mind, I do hope you the enjoy the piping hot memes compiled below.

The Memes You Need, Vol. 14: The Trump-Musk Civil War Edition

Read more

To access 275+ more Retro articles for a week—over 12 sections of content—try Retro for free!

Get 7 day free trial

{Note: The NMDP offers exclusive playlists of contemporary music to help those too busy to track down great new music on their own find amazing new sounds. Retro-recommended songs first released in the 1970s appear in Retro’s “Singular Songs of the Seventies” series, instead, whereas songs from the 1960s appear in the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series. I have eclectic taste in music, so I hope you’ll enjoy journeying through the past fifty years of music with me!}

While my expertise when I was a disc jockey was in American and British psychedelic music released between 1965 and 1972, I have been thrilled to have the opportunity to use Twitter, Threads, and other social media platforms to share the hundreds and hundreds of remarkable songs of more recent vintage I discovered in my decades of collecting LPs (and the countless hours I spent hanging out at a college radio station).

I hope these playlists will launch new conversations—including giving members of the Retro community a chance to share your own favorite songs.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the New Music Discovery Project

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To access this and 300+ more Retro articles for a full week, try Retro for free! Just click below.

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Introduction

Anyone who tells you that the fight against fascism in America will be waged in just one way is lying to you. Is it useful to amplify breaking news stories on social media that reveal the nefarious intentions of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions?

Of course.

But no one claims doing so comprises even 2% of the fight ahead.

Just so, as MSNBC declared in a report earlier this week, “Resistance to the second Trump administration appears to be leaning more heavily on humor than it did in his first term. For now, at least, humor may be their most effective tactic. While the ‘resistance’ to the first Trump administration was centered on massive rallies, knitted hats, and threads [by Twitter user Eric Garland] about ‘game theory,’ the current one is more about biting wheatpaste posters and goofy internet humor.”

All this is true, though that “for now” is doing some heavy lifting for MSNBC, here.

Retweets and reposts are useful, but are not an answer. Memes and jokes are useful, but likewise are not an answer. And yes, mass protests, general strikes, nationwide civil litigation, market blackouts, boycotts, sit-ins, slowdowns, impeachments, recalls, and various forms of civil disobedience—for instance, it remains to be see if there’ll be a mass tax protest this year—are all useful, as is donating to entities that fight Trumpist totalitarianism and preparing yourself and your family and friends for what certainly looks like a coming massive economic collapse and perhaps even a potential civil war (though it wouldn’t look like the first one, but more like this one).

But no one form of what journalists cynically and scornfully call resistance is enough.

Fighting for democracy in an era of authoritarianism is always going to be an “all of the above” effort, and anyone—including cranks on the left of American politics—who chooses to spend this moment erecting straw men (e.g., by falsely claiming that anyone who memes during Trump and Musk’s hostile takeover of America’s government must implicitly being contending that that’s all one can or should do in this moment) is no friend of democracy.

Either one accepts that an all-of-the-above effort is what’s required now—accepting, too, that certain people will be more expert at and impactful with certain forms of pushback than others are—or one fails to appreciate the enormity of the task before Americans who love democracy, which is the largest we’ve faced as a country since World War II.

Retro is, for all that, not suddenly going to become a political publication. This outlet focuses on music, memes, the visual arts, video games, cultural theory, TV, film, and much more that broadly falls under the Substack categories of History and Culture.

There’s a reason this substack became a Top 40 History publication worldwide, and it’s not because it’s focused on political analyses; that difficult work occurs at its sister publication, Proof. Indeed, what’s been going on in politics in America has made it harder than ever before for Retro to see its way clear to keep publishing on anodyne topics like roller coasters, mobile video games, contemporary music, contemporary television, comic books, sports multimedia, retro homebrews and the dozens of other esoteric but beloved topics that this publication has covered for nearly four years now.

That coverage will continue; those reports are being worked on right now. But it is true that, for the moment, of all the evergreen reporting Retro does on History and Culture, the most relevant subfield it can look at right now is the political meme and the political cartoon, as these are, indeed, key tools for those pushing back on fascism in America.

As most Retro readers know, I’ve written many articles about memes on Substack—e.g., this one over at Proof—and Retro of course has the Memes section you’re reading right now in which I discuss the subject, so this series probably needs little additional introduction. It’s exactly what it says it is: a series of archives of memes from different categories that are eminently usable by anyone who likes to instrumentalize memes as part of their discourse practice.

And candidly, we should all do so: memes are a shorthand for dealing with the many idiosyncratic situations we encounter online—situations which often become, sans memes, far more arduous to navigate. In other words, high-quality memes save time.

In a politically fraught era like this one, memes can also summarize our values and make complex declarations of where we stand on matters of great import seem a less daunting task than they would otherwise be.

And that’s necessary at a time of great exhaustion and deep anxiety over current events.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the Retro Meme Archive

• Volume 1: Trump, Musk, and Putin

• Volume 2: TV, Film, and Culture

• Volume 3: Responding to Posts on Social Media

• Volume 4: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 5: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 6: Political Deep Cuts

• Volume 7: Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 8: Pre-Election Political Cartoons

• Volume 9: Pre-Election Meme-o-Rama

• Volume 10: A Farewell to Twitter

• Volume 11: Inaugural Edition

• Volume 12: Time to Fight Fascism (see below)

I studied and taught memes when I was a professor at University of New Hampshire—yes, really!—so I curate an archive series like this one very mindfully. The very best memes, whatever their general theme, are ones that have high production values, are easy to read and understand, and make a point that one doesn’t need much or perhaps even any specialized knowledge to empathize with. They act as effective vehicles for trolling and pleasing and commiserating in equal measure, and moreover offer the sort of iconic visual aesthetic that allows them to be instantly recognizable every time they appear anywhere (and, just as importantly, be readily remembered). A meme is far more likely to be used and responded to if it’s one an internet user has seen before (up to a point, of course; the “law of diminishing returns” certainly does also apply here).

With all this in mind, I do hope you the enjoy the piping hot memes compiled below.

The Memes You Need, Vol. 12: Time to Fight Back Against Fascism