Daily Bafflements

• “Why are the Cambridge equivalent of rock stars coming out for the retirement party of a Harvard clerk—the guy who books rooms as a scheduling assistant for Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies?” asks Cambridge Day, at the news that Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Tom Frank, Rick Perlstein, and Nikil Saval are all paying tribute to our contributing editor. “Because it’s George Scialabba.” Do come along to give George three cheers!

• As Obama gets cozy with the rich and famous in the hope of raising funds for his presidential library, The Baffler no. 28 brings you Rick Perlstein on the rich tradition of presidential libraries: “There’s no reason to expect, either, that Obama’s library won’t, like those before it, become a partisan political clubhouse, deftly skirting the requirements of the 1939 Hatch Act that no politics take place on federal turf,” writes Rick.

• No one believes in austerity anymore, but politicians still enforce the policy worldwide. “The prevailing logic of debt, in which all the moral obligation lies with the debtor and none with the creditor, has been demolished by key figures such as David Graeber—and yet still forms so much of the basis for political arguments,” writes Zoe Williams.

• Why are millennials obsessed with survival? asks The Atlantic (I paraphrase), treating food as a fad that, too, shall pass.