Chris Bray

To discuss David Brooks now is to discuss a psychological problem, not a political one. The most striking thing about Brooks’s “The Leaderless Doctrine,” his New York Times op-ed piece this week, isn’t what the columnist says; rather, it’s what he ...

In 1931, the English historian Herbert Butterfield published something in between a long essay and a short book, The Whig Interpretation of History. The spirit of the Whiggish historical narrative, Butterfield wrote, was “illustrated to perfection” by the words of a ...

It’s inevitable: people who steal secrets tend to wonder if someone else is stealing their secrets. Spies spy on spies to see if the spies are spying on them. And here we go again. Several reports this week described allegations that the CIA monitored the computers used by ...

Just in case it wasn’t clear that everything that can be commodified, will, domestic surveillance turns out to be just another product. And the customer thinks it’s, like, way overpriced. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on Monday against Sprint, ...

Everything is changing, so nothing is different. Trying to contain the excessive cost of American medicine, policymakers are hunting for alternative ways to deliver health care. In particular, nurse practitioners and physicians assistants are cheaper than doctors, so state ...

It’s always the apocalypse, for a while, until it’s meaningless. In 1977 a former CIA analyst named Frank Snepp published an unauthorized book on the American response to the collapse of South Vietnam. Snepp depicted a CIA that ran for the exits, abandoning local ...

The point of public schooling, H.L. Mencken wrote, “is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” That’s the attack, for those of you who are trying ...

You’ll be shocked to hear it, but Nicholas Kristof is missing the point (which your Baffler correspondents have been obliged to point out before). “When I was a kid,” Kristof said in a February 15 blog post, “the Kennedy administration had its ...