The Baffler

• The “Guignols de l’Info” is a subversive French TV puppet show that satirizes politicians and regularly presents president Hollande as a nebbishy coward. It has allegedly fallen foul of the industrialist that owns the channel—and ...

• A group of jumped-up, self-directed micro-entrepreneurs with the temerity to claim to be Uber employees, since Uber’s business model is predicated on their labor, have taken the company to court. They want benefits, they want reembursement, they might even want insurance. ...

• Today in Billionaires: Ty Warner, the “Beanie Baby billionaire” who admitted to hiding millions of dollars in Switzerland to evade tax, has been let off a jail term because, according to the judge, he demonstrated a “depth of humanity” that ...

• Oakland photographer Matt Takaichi was recently interviewed by Vice on his new project, “Developers,” which seeks to expose the more banal side of Silicon Valley, eschewing the usual neatly coiffed, bike-riding, HBO-ready programmers in favor of the “old ...

• A new report from the Urban Institute brings us the shocking news that “high wealth and income in big commuting zones do not trickle down,” analyzing the ways that exclusionary zoning turns urban neighborhoods and even entire towns into “private country ...

• The $5 iPhone cover that looks like a gun was unsurprisingly called “a terrible idea” by police, according to the the Times. High demand from nonetheless-undeterred consumers has led shipping to slow and developers to add more features to ...

• For havoc, bloodletting, and all things uncivilized, may we direct you to The Baffler no. 28—our longest yet! —which arrives on newsstands today. In it, we’ve salvos by David Graeber, Heather Havrilesky, and A. S. Hamrah to offer, as well as a ...

• The Greeks say, “two watermelons cannot fit under the same armpit” when someone bites off more than they can chew. For example, when Latvian “Mr Euro” Valdis Dombrovskis attempted to argue that the Greek referendum “neither legally nor ...