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Daily Bafflements

• “Today we are seeing the effects of a relentless war against the very idea of working-class politics or working-class community,” writes Baffler contributing editor David Graeber. “That has left most working people with little way to express that care except to direct it towards some manufactured abstraction: ‘our grandchildren’; ‘the nation’; whether through jingoist patriotism or appeals to collective sacrifice.” As David contended in our current issue, until a recent spate of hope struck, the British working class “saw the hard times and rationing of World War II as the last time Britons had acted with a genuine common purpose.”

• The “platform” model beloved by startups, where sellers and buyers are connected by a powerful overseer who sets the rules, has an antecedent in twelfthcentury Champagne Fairs: “Getting booted out of the fair would be the equivalent of being blacklisted from Amazon in a world where that was the only way of reaching your customers, which isn’t that far from the circumstances businesses operate in today.” 

• Inside the slow and fishy death of a billionaire.