The Baffler

• The Griffith Review takes aim at the trend for mindlessly repeating that we live in “the golden age of storytelling,” making mention of Eugenia Williamson’s Baffler no. 20 salvo about This American Life, and the racket ...

• WikiLeaks praised David Graeber’s Baffler no. 28 salvo on bullying and warmaking. Writes Graeber, • Our friends over at Pacific Standard report that regardless of their crimes, defendants who cannot afford bail are four times more likely to be sentenced to ...

• In a wide-ranging conspiracy, a rogue USDA official and the American Egg Board were discovered to have launched a covert attack on the Silicon Valley startup responsible for a plant-based egg substitute and Just Mayo, which some argue just isn’t. More than one ...

• On the side effects of an addiction: “Coloring”—that’s right, coloring—“is not for cowards. Three months since Jones began, the calluses on her fingers are just the surface symptoms of her devotion to her hobby.” But fear ...

• In Baffler no. 24, Gene Seymour took an interest in—OK, a well-deserved swipe at—the “[Jeff] Bezos vanity project” that is “the construction of a mammoth timepiece that will tick off the next ten thousand years of life on this ...

• Stephen King opines that a novelist can be too prolific for critics, but—then again—that it’s suspicious if a novelist isn’t producing some excess work. Of the “recently retired” Philip Roth, King notes: “Our Gang was pretty ...

• Today in billionaires: Top-tier donor Dan Loeb gets caught in the Ashley Madison hackers’ net, and Matthew Yglesias posits that it’s not Trump’s antics that are making waves, it’s his policy positions, popular amongst the Republican rank and file, ...

• Facebook’s new tool, ominously called “M,” claims to differentiate Facebook Messenger from other chat apps by offering you a built-in personal assistant, powered—for now—by actual human beings. Facebook has avoided the slow advances in artificial ...