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Daily Bafflements

Presenting “The Virtue Cartel,” and Trump as “Person of the Year”

• Dear Bafflers, we offer you a new issue, “The Virtue Cartel.” This one’s dedicated to the virtuecrats—in the words of Chris Lehmann, these are the “policy big thinkersmilitary strategists, and neoliberal nudgers [who] have appointed themselves the permanent guardians of moral uplift and the public good.” It has salvos that run the gamut from virginity to smoking bans—via billionaires, empire, and Slack—as well as fiction, art, and poetry, not to mention a brand-new design. Not a subscriber? Head over to our subscription page to get your copy of issue no. 33 today!

• As Trump seizes TIME’s “Person of the Year” title, don’t go overboard on your Trump-Hitler comparisons. As Megan Carpentier reminded us at the Word Factory, “Americans’ obsession with whether various leaders are more or less like actual Nazi leaders speaks volumes about the failures of the American educational system.” We’d also add it shows a startling lack of imagination.

• “The mode of condemning legitimate political opinions as affronts to Judaism, which had grown familiar to the point of dreariness before the election, is freshly outrageous in the age of Trump.”