The Baffler

Robber barons of yesteryear: Vanderbilt, Field, andGould. / Illustration from Puck magazine, 1879. • Here’s Baffler co-founder Thomas Frank in Salon on Hillary Clinton’s calling our current economy “a throwback to the Gilded Age of the robber ...

Folks! Hawks and doves, boondogglers and Blackwaters, nannies and mommies, debtors and billionaires, indie rockers and Aussies, platforms, platishers, and public university administrators, let’s all take a look back together at the past week on the Baffler blog! • First, we ...

• Retail marketers are testing motion-sensing cameras that would record when people pick things up off the shelf, and how long they hold the things before putting them back down or deciding to buy. Digiday says that this information about how customers “interact with the ...

  • We already know that the emails we write and the phone calls we make aren’t private anymore. But snail mail? You too? • A psychological study has found that kids who have less structured time are more independent and are better at setting and reaching their own goals. ...

• Today in Billionaires: Chinese “recycling tycoon” Chen Guangbiao put ads in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal this week inviting 1,000 impoverished Americans to a free lunch in Central Park. Attendees will apparently receive both food and cash to spend on ...

• “Prison labor has gone artisanal,” reports Fortune. Inmates in Colorado, for instance, are working at a goat farm that sells cheese to Whole Foods. “Nationwide 63,032 inmates produce more than $2 billion worth of products a year, most of them sold to government ...

What’s next for Eric Cantor? After his surprise primary loss last week, we asked for your best guesses for #CantorsNextGig on Twitter and Facebook. The best or closest answer we get will win a free subscription to The Baffler. The only hint we’ve gotten so far from ...

• Ezra Klein declares, in a Vox article with the click-baitiest of headlines, that “The single most important fact about American politics” is that Democrats and Republicans [tell Pew pollsters that they] hate each other. Hm. We thought it was something like, dunno, ...