Daily Bafflements

• Say “hullo” to our thirtieth issue, a breezy look at the collective panic afflicting the nation in election year! As John Summers writes, “Sober pundits intone, how do we balance liberty and security, freedom and security? We? Balance?  The bywords of America in 2016 are more like plutocrats and jittery.” Today we roll out Kade Crockford’s salvo “Keep Fear Alive,” on the trillion-dollar business that is the national security state, and Corey Pein’s “Everybody Freeze,” which examines the craze for heads-on-ice that is sweeping Silicon Valley. Look out for salvos by David Graeber, Astra Taylor, Tom Frank, and Evgeny Morozov, among others, as well as liberating stories by Ottessa Moshfegh and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, poetry by Dulce María Loynaz, Edwin Muir, and Natalia Ginsburg, and more. And, after all that, why not subscribe?

• “For all the articles about Trump I had read in recent months,” writes Tom Frank in The Guardian, “I didn’t recall trade coming up very often. Trump is supposed to be on a one-note crusade for whiteness.”

• Who’d have thunk it? Dystopic people-rating tools are still in business.