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Daily Bafflements

Identity, wish fulfilment, and relatable megalomaniacs

• “Which has been easier for you,” Baffler contributing editor Susan Faludi asked her father, “to be accepted as a woman after being born a man, or to be accepted as a Magyar after being born a Jew?” Faludi’s new book, In the Darkroom, is excerpted in the Guardian.

• “If you’re going to recreate the primitive church, how do you do it without saying ‘We’re communists’?” Baffler senior editor Chris Lehmann was on This Is Hell this weekend, talking about the particularly American ties between money and the Protestant church, as well as the magical thinking Donald Trump inspires. Listen here!

• On the Kim Kardashian emoji: “ becoming an emoji is a status symbol. It takes you from participating in something to being the something people are participating in.” Anne Helen Peterson wrote about the permeating ubiquity of Kim Kardashian, a so-called “relatable” businesswoman, on the Baffler blog.

• Tim Cook’s Twitter is so boring. It’s also really popular, which “proves that the democracy of Twitter is a sham,” writes Lucy Kellaway. “It is as much top down as everything else.”