Jim Newell

Good for Nate Silver, finally getting his own fiefdom for “data journalism” at the new FiveThirtyEight.com, under the auspices of the Walt Disney Corporation. He’s famous. He deserves it! I, for one, don’t really care about a statistical breakdown of lines ...

The free market is a cruel beast, which is something the book publishing industry has been made acutely aware of in the past decade or two. But now, even in one arena where that industry had traditionally been doing well, right-wing conservative political books—as in, books ...

The daily life of the ultra-rich man in 2014 has taken a strange turn. For millennia, the routine was thus: wake up, eat ten of the finest beefsteaks, whip poor people, count money, bed one million prostitutes, return to slumber. Well, what was wrong with that ennobling and ...

The NRA is back in the ring, baby, and ready for a fight. And it’s not just blocking every little gun-related bill or appointment that goes through Congress—obviously it’s still doing that. But now it’s blocking nominees for any appointment position if those ...

The Democrats seem to be absolutely obsessed with those evil brothers Koch. Charles and David Koch are the “industrial tycoons” who, through their advocacy group Americans for Prosperity and other networks, are throwing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into ...

It is time, once again, for the Baffler blog to consider what other people consider about the millennials. What do they think? What unseen forces move these mysterious creatures? The Baffler blog has previously considered various political appeals to the Millennial Generation, ...

The College Board has announced that it’s making big changes to the SAT. By eliminating it altogether, for the sake of humanity and higher education, you ask? Sadly, no. By simply scoring the exam on a curve, based on everyone’s parents’ net worth? No, that would probably ...

White working-class men don’t vote for Democrats anymore, and the New York Times is on it. According to this week’s fast-breaking news analysis, these voters are “the ones who got away.” It’s true. White working-class men, and white men, and men in general, ...