Daily Bafflements

• Pro Publica delves into a case in Washington, where a young woman recanted a true story of being raped by a man who turned out to be a serial offender. The inconsistencies in her story and seemingly odd behavior—both of which are fairly normal in such cases—led to massive procedural missteps on the part of the detectives and prosecutors involved. In what now feels like a rarity, the department actually takes steps to remedy their own mistakes and implement regulations to make sure their error (hopefully) doesn’t happen again.

• Are you mad online? Have you used any of these delightful comebacks as a result? Please, block us (@thebafflermag) on Twitter immediately if that’s the case.

• These are all the great things you didn’t know about the amazing country of Kazakhstan. (No, we’re not linking to Borat clips there—give us some damn credit.) 

• We’re pleased to see that Longreads agrees with us that David Graeber’s “The Bully’s Pulpit” was one of the best essays of 2015! “His essay mostly considers the relationship between the logic of the schoolyard and the logic of military conflict,” Longreads writes, “but the clarity of that central concept—reaction as justification for the action that provoked it—read also as a precise accounting of the theatrics of brutality and backlash that would occur in Paris and beyond after the essay was published.”

• Yahoo’s experiment as a newsroom was, and continues to be, a massive failure—and we’d like to think Baffler senior editor Chris Lehmann made the right decision to get the fuck out of there. “Between its tales of revolving-door management, lack of focus, and directives caked in buzzwords, the piece may be the most valuable article about what not to do you may read this year,” Mark Athitakis wrote of Lehmann’s “Purple Reign.” We couldn’t agree more.