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Hocus Pocus

Columns

On “Density,” the Most Slippery Word in Urban Planning
May 22, 2014
Have you heard? Millennials are moving back to cities, and the New York Times is on it. In fact, the Times was so on it that it was on it twice in the same day last month, in two different sections of the paper. Plenty of folks have been hoping this day would come—from Grist, ...

Daily Bafflements
May 22, 2014
• Fact: every single time you put the word “bespoke” into a Google News search you will be rewarded with something ridiculous. Today in Bespoke: this press release-as-news-article, headlined “Hope of Rolls Royce to make a bespoke picnic basket.” • Trickster James ...

The Last Days of Abercrombie & Fitch
May 20, 2014
A flagship Abercrombie & Fitch store had its grand opening in Shanghai last month, one of one hundred Abercrombie stores set to open in China in the coming decade, according to AdAge. As befitting such an event, young men with the half the clothing and twice the lean muscle ...

Ask Uncle Ralph
May 20, 2014
Whenever someone buttonholes me and demands to know my position on tort reform, corporate governance, campaign finance, regulatory enforcement, citizen utility boards, or reductions in the defense budget, I just reply: “Ask Uncle Ralph. He has all the details.” He does, ...

Daily Bafflements
May 20, 2014
• Here are some highly enjoyable illustrated Martin Luther insults by Peter Mann, including such timeless classics as, “You stink like devilish filth flung into Germany” and “You are like mouse-droppings in the pepper.” • WBEZ reported earlier this month that ...

Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich
May 19, 2014
One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows: This could easily be written off as stunt, a flamboyant act of ...

Protests Against Commencement Speakers: Hard-won But Hollow
May 19, 2014
Are we seeing the emergence of a new “anti-liberal” left? That’s what The Nation’s Michelle Goldberg argued recently. She was writing about the #CancelColbert Twitter campaign, but she and others have also called attention to the other manifestations of the phenomenon, ...

Daily Bafflements
May 19, 2014
• Calling all of you “Millennial Marxists” looking for love—there’s an online dating site just for you. Presenting the radical left’s answer to OkCupid, via Critical Theory: OkComrade. • David Cole reviews Robert A. Ferguson’s new book Inferno, on the “anatomy ...

The Baffler’s Week That Was
May 16, 2014
Illustration by Mark S. Fisher, from Issue 24 This week! On The Baffler online! We reached peaks of excitement, and depths of dread! Let’s look, shall we? • From our current issue, we put up Gene Seymour’s salvo on the political implications of science ...

“Dilbert” and Dissent in the Workplace
May 16, 2014
Jill Lepore’s brief history of office life, appearing in last week’s The New Yorker on the occasion of Nikil Saval’s new book Cubed, takes the reader on a textual tour of “The Office Through the Ages.” Her tour begins with a mid-nineteenth-century ...

The Stats and Stories of American Healthcare
May 16, 2014
For far too long in America, health care policy has been diagnosed by the numbers alone. Politicians and the media alike have subtracted narrative thinking from the national debate. Most media outlets will report on the latest public approval ratings of the Affordable Care Act, ...

Daily Bafflements
May 16, 2014
• Yesterday, while commentators and critics were trading financial analysis of whether abruptly-ousted New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson’s salary of $525,000 a year was more or less than her predecessor’s salary, thousands of fast-food workers across the ...