Daily Bafflements

Heads in jars, Trump-branded tequila, and John Podesta's creamy risotto

Dinner at John Podesta's, perhaps with a chaser of anti-Trump Tecate. / Alpha

• Has cryonics taken a great leap forward in Russia? Forgive us for being a bit skeptical, after Corey Pein’s dive into American transhumanism back in issue 30. As Bloomberg Businessweek cheerily summarizes,

Generally speaking, transhumanists believe that technology is advancing at an exponential rate and that sometime in the future, death will be overcome. They like to speak of aging as a disease that can be cured, and depending on the transhumanist you’re speaking with, she probably believes either that new bodies will be engineered and hooked up to our heads or that our minds and memories will live forever inside a machine.

• If you believe everything you read, time may be running out to get your “Trump Is An Asshole”-branded mezcal before our new president outlaws it.

• What’s for dinner? asks Columbia Journalism Review. For reporters covering Hillary Clinton via power broker John Podesta, it was a chummy brand of access journalism—oh yeah, and free risotto.

Hey, one last thing.

In a media environment that tolerates tail-chasing, gutlessness, and all kinds of ratfuckery, The Baffler is a rare publication willing to shake the pundit class free of their own worst impulses. We can’t help it. We’re humanitarians at heart.

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