The Baffler

• 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 ...

• There’s something familiar about the new features that Uber is rolling out—“pre-determined routes with fixed pickup points and continuous passenger pickups—it sounds remarkably like a gently optimized version of currently existing mass ...

• “Now we finally know who John Galt is,” Slavoj Žižek writes of Ayn Rand’s individualist, “the idiot responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown and, consequentially, for the threat of the shutdown of state apparatuses.” Remember, ...

• Banksy has opened a “Bemusement Park” called Dismaland, replete with a water-cannon fountain, a castle with a dead Princess Diana inside, and two rounds of security (one real, one joke). It falls flat. “All the graffiti in Dismaland is official ...

• Today in billionaires: over $1.6 billion has been promised for unbuilt apartments at 220 Central Park South, a building that’s been nicknamed the “Billionaire’s Bunker.” One of these apartments might set you back anywhere from $30 million to $160 ...

• Today in plutocrat interior design: one British property developer is under fire for decorating a historic Welsh mansion with the one-hundred-fifty-year-old gravestones of small children, culled from a nearby cemetery. Kim Davies faces fines of up to £300,000 for ...

• This year, a slew of white, male, right-wing writers have been nominated for the World Science Fiction Society’s prestigious Hugo awards—and they’re complaining that in recent years the Hugos have become “an affirmative action ...

• Is it time to close the Vatican bank, whose ATMs flash options at users in Latin? And that’s the least of its problems: “Much of the money is sent covertly to churches and voluntary groups in poor countries and failed states without functioning ...