The Baffler

• Well, tomorrow is Independence Day, a day to celebrate our great nation with hotdogs and hangovers. Here’s something a little different: the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Washington, D.C., an actor will stage a reenactment of Douglass’s 1852 speech, ...

• Last week the Baffler blog discussed junket journalism—but what about junket policy-making? According to National Journal, new rules in the House mean that lawmakers no longer have to include all-expenses-paid trips they receive from lobbyists or others on their year-end ...

• Here’s Shane Bauer on the shadowy for-profit bail industry, or, “How $550 and a five-day class gets you the right to stalk, arrest, and shoot people.” • After yesterday’s SCOTUS decision giving Hobby Lobby the ability to deny female employees health coverage, as ...

• Wow, Googling “Facebook apologizes for . . .” sure brings up a lot of results! Here’s the latest, about secret mood-altering experiments conducted on Facebook users. We wonder if they have a full-time CAO (chief apology officer) on staff? • We’re watching SCOTUS ...

• A highlight this week on the blog was this illustrated excerpt of Michael Duffy’s book I Can’t Recall, about the campaign to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Duffy updated it for The Baffler with the recent allegations about Walker’s involvement in a “criminal ...

• Men’s Fashion Week is really something, isn’t it? (Via Noah Schactman.) • Today in Billionaires: venture capitalist Nick Hanauer writes an open letter to his “fellow zillionaires” in Politico, warning them that “the pitchforks are coming for us plutocrats . . . ...

• Speaking at Google’s I/O conference on Wednesday, futurist Ray Kurzweil shared his prediction that, in ten years, we’ll all be able to download designs and then 3D-print our own open source clothes for just cents. (Kurzweil claims a 75 percent accuracy for his ...

• In case you missed it yesterday, David Leonhardt at the New York Times wrote about a Brookings Institution study that declared that the student debt crisis in America was not actually that bad, so stop whining. Mike Konczal at The New Republic argued that the long-term ...