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Daily Bafflements

Vice's vices come to the fore

• Today in exploitation: Vice is reportedly “too cool” to respect freelancers and their labor. As one former associate producer on Vice’s HBO series told Columbia Journalism Review: 

“The organization runs on the notion that the people inside of it are the ‘coolest’ and most important people on the planet, so the very idea of feeling guilty about neglecting to pay an outsider like this would be preposterous to them.”

As Anne Elizabeth Moore wrote in Baffler no. 24, the company’s vileness runs deep in its veins. “For Vice Media, accountability takes a back seat to accounts payable,” she noted.

• How does it feel to have your writing co-opted by the Trump campaign? “Unsettling, and deeply, deeply bizarre,” writes Ryan Cooper at The Week. That’s the 2016 presidential race for you, folks!

• Trump’s visit to Mexico wasn’t on David Rees’s list, “The Only Shocking Things Donald Trump Has Yet to Do.” (Although if he’s traveling while listening to This American Life, that would count.) Regardless, count us as slightly stunned—albeit not at all shocked at the reaction he’s gotten from Mexicans

• “There’s nothing like being told precarity is actually your cool lifestyle choice.”