The Baffler

• If you passed by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on Monday, you likely would have heard the clamor of protestors raising a fuss about the long-dead French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Donning signs reading “God Hates Renoir” and Treacle ...

• “I’m sorry I can’t spin right now. I’ve won the Nobel Prize,” and other homely reminiscences of genius, lovingly collected by the Times, remind us of Tom Frank’s piece about the “Parable of the Phone Call,” ...

• Today in billionaires: well, they’re in your presidential races, your global financial markets, your social media—and now even your lighthearted prime-time procedurals. Fox has announced its plans to produce “a comedic procedural about a socially inept ...

• Our friends at Pacific Standard question the ethics of sending manned missions to Mars. In light of our responsibility for climate change, “our tendency to plunder frontiers to destruction,” and our historical callousness toward the folks we send hurtling ...

• “The twenty-first-century university is a super freak, in fact—the kind you don’t take home to mother,” Siva Vaidhyanathan noted in our latest issue, no. 28. If that’s the case, then the for-profit university system is a super freak that would bamboozle ...

• Of “secular Satanism,” the “Dark Enlightenment squid monster,” and anti-democratic techies, Park MacDougald has this to say on The Awl: Corey Pein wrote about the fascism swirling around our islands of libertarian ...

• Over at The Atlantic, Scott Beauchamp contests the idea that experience on the battlefield can help you in the boardroom—and why should it? “Simply put, military service is one of the few remaining social experiences one can have where the goal isn’t to ...

• “Your Selfie Sticks Can Go To Hell,” proclaims The Gothamist. They’re not joking. On the eve of Pope Francis’ U.S. visit, the Secret Service offered up their own sermon of sorts—a list of banned items at all papal appearances. Among the ...