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Daily Bafflements

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Fresh Hell
April 15, 2022
A Shot in the Dark The vaunted, cash-bloated ranks of the New York Police Department, sworn to protect and serve and etc., sauntered onto the national stage this week when they allowed an out-of-shape, neon-clad boomer to escape after shooting ten people on a subway car. ...

Fresh Hell
April 08, 2022
Daddy Starbucks Howard Schultz, back for a third tour as the chief executive of Starbucks, this time to save the nation’s preeminent purveyor of sugared jet fuel from its employees—or “partners,” as the company misleadingly calls them—appeared at a corporate town ...

Fresh Hell
April 01, 2022
Semiotics of the Slap Last Sunday evening, Hollywood’s Best and Brightest—swaddled in Versace, dripping in diamonds—gathered once more in the Dolby Theatre to memorialize the bloated, festering corpse of cinema. In hopes of livening up the solemnities, Oscar statuettes ...

Fresh Hell
March 25, 2022
Riders on the Storm Text messages between conservative activist Virginia Thomas and Donald Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, obtained through Congress’s investigation into the January 6 Capitol riot, reveal that the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence ...

Fresh Hell
March 18, 2022
James Bond: The Origin Story: The Movie: The Series On Thursday afternoon, Amazon closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM, less than twenty-four hours after Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill that would—were it to go absolutely anywhere in a Democrat-controlled ...

Fresh Hell
March 11, 2022
It’s a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad World!Last Wednesday, the U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield took to the floor of the United Nations to emphatically condemn Russia’s use of cluster munitions in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, arguing that they, among other vicious weapons, ...

Fresh Hell
March 04, 2022
Fantastic Beasts As Russia’s war against Ukraine barrels heedlessly, disastrously onward, the international community has come together to make one point exceedingly clear: if Russia’s going to fuck with the selectively applied “rules-based order,” we will respond in ...

Fresh Hell
February 25, 2022
Better, Faster, Stronger, Richer Well, it’s finally happened: Russian president Vladimir Putin, a keen observer of the West’s expeditious decline, has gone and pulped the post-Cold War consensus by invading Ukraine, a sovereign nation that, in Putin’s telling, ...

Fresh Hell
February 18, 2022
Get the Band Back Together For weeks now, we, the doomscrolling public, have been trapped in the tenacious drum circle of Western media, which, having grown bored of the plenitude of other crises besieging our species, seem hellbent on summoning the hallucinatory fog of war ...

Fresh Hell
February 11, 2022
Motherfucking Crocodile of Wall Street! Earlier this week, in a perfect illustration of the shady dealings, probable personality disorders, and desperate #grindset influencers propping up the cryptocurrency boom, Manhattan couple Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan were ...

Fresh Hell
February 04, 2022
The Good, The Bad, and The Cuddly Over the years, ABC’s Dancing with the Stars has proven itself a dependable laundromat for the sullied images of cretins like Rick Perry, Tucker Carlson, Geraldo Rivera, and, perhaps most famously, former White House press secretary Sean ...

Fresh Hell
January 28, 2022
Bridge to NowhereIn the early hours of Friday morning, a major bridge crossing through Pittsburgh’s Frick Park, which connects the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill with downtown, collapsed under a blanket of heavy snow, bringing with it several cars and a bus, injuring ...