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Daily Bafflements

Columns

Fresh Hell
April 14, 2023
The Fickle Pudding Fingers of Fate The tolling of each hour in this fetid garbage patch of a country summons a new atrocity to slouch across the cable news chyrons. Bad news: it’s a growth industry, one flourishing at such an apocalyptic pace that a comprehensive tally may ...

Fresh Hell
April 07, 2023
Babes in Oyland Life begins, language and memory dawn as the skull grows hard, and the digestion adapts to solids; the future is full of promise. But since disappointment, emotional scar tissue, and debt await you anyway, why not get the ball rolling and become traumatized ...

Fresh Hell
March 31, 2023
Meaty, Beaty, Big & Bouncy In a week that saw the historic indictment of a former president, the Senate overturning the Covid-19 emergency order, and a federal judge block coverage for preventative care and cancer screenings, the people can be forgiven for longing to ...

Fresh Hell
March 24, 2023
First, Do No Arm Take a walk, legs! See you later, head! Sayonara, belly button! After millennia in obscurity, arms are finally getting their due as the unsung body part: the torso’s twin protuberances are now the subject of an ode in Vogue by Ada Calhoun. Calhoun reports ...

Fresh Hell
March 17, 2023
Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash After the fanatical persecution of Oliver Cromwell, the great famine of 1845, and Margaret Thatcher’s horrific treatment of the Sinn Féin martyrs, Ireland has finally won a reprieve: the archdioces of Philidelphia, Trenton, and Wilmington have ...

Fresh Hell
March 10, 2023
Shilling Me Softly Celebrities: they’re just like us, finagling a 1990s career in radio-friendly hip hop into a second vocation meeting shady Chinese operatives at the Four Seasons to negotiate the release of American captives, only to be targeted by the FBI and linked to ...

Fresh Hell
March 03, 2023
Cowabungled In a hell week that was particularly dystopic, even for 2023, Tennessee banned drag shows, Florida mulled requiring bloggers who want to critique the governor to register with the state, and the New York Times profiled a man who doesn’t wear shoes as though he ...

Fresh Hell
February 24, 2023
Sphere is the Mind-Killer There seems to be no end to the ways that the formerly harmless old-timey knickknacks of a vanished Americana can harm us, with balloons peering down with sinister intent from the skies they once cluttered with box kites and fizzled fireworks, and ...

Fresh Hell
February 17, 2023
Écarté Derrière This week Germany continued to lead the world in modeling how an empire engages in civilized discourse when Marco Goecke, the director of the Hanover State Opera’s ballet company, smeared dog feces in the face of his critic, who had written of his ...

Fresh Hell
February 10, 2023
Two in the Bush In a week that saw America seized by spy-balloon fever, a toxic chemical cloud escape from a train to bedevil the residents of suburban Ohio, and the pre-Psychic Network song catalog of Dionne Warwick blast from car stereos in remembrance of Burt Bacharach, ...

Fresh Hell
February 03, 2023
The Importance of Being Concise After another cruel turn of the old Gregorian, we once again find ourselves stranded in the month of February, which is the official month of grapefruits, bird feeding, hot breakfast, snack foods, children’s dental health, embroidery, and ...

Fresh Hell
January 27, 2023
Robofop The tech world is already a burrow of shady borrowings, competing patents, and dodgy dot-com schemes, but these iniquities have so far been within the domain of the human. Enter CNET’s AI reporter, which has been found to have plagiarized the work of journalists at ...