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Thought Leaders as Loss Leaders
December 02, 2015
The breathless, investor-beguiling fable that the next iteration of the Web has to be the smart one has been around long enough now to qualify as a touching millenarian faith, like the quadrennial fiction of a “deep” GOP presidential field, or the diehard belief that the ...

The Novel in Analog: Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers
July 22, 2015
Reviewers are having a hard time with Book of Numbers, the latest novel from the incorrigibly ambitious and graphomaniacal Joshua Cohen. Responses have ranged from dismissive to enraptured, with most both at once. The book is “a mess,” writes the New York ...

The Labradoodle Racket
February 23, 2015
Last week, a gorgeous black standard poodle named Flame came close to taking the “Best in Show” title at the annual Westminster Dog Show, but lost out at the last minute to the stunning beagle Miss P. Purebred dogs like these, not surprisingly, are costly companions. But ...

The Redrow Man and Dystopia’s Dark Appeal
January 08, 2015
Dystopian visions of a cold and emotionless future: so hot right now. In a bizarre commercial that, following criticism, has been pulled from circulation, luxury developer Redrow London boasted that its fashionable apartments would transport buyers into a totalitarian ...

The Baffler Guide to Gift Guides
December 24, 2014
Towards the end of every year, magazines and newspapers fill up their copy quotas—and woo their most lucrative advertisers—with the help of bright and shiny holiday gift guides. They are almost always at least a little absurd. This year, a thirty-second video ad that ...

Sandwich, Inc.
December 18, 2014
The noble British sandwich, the snack of earls, the midday dinner of office workers, the after-school treat of hungry munchkins creeping home from their classes, was the subject of furor in Northamptonshire, England the other week. The outcry wasn’t over the sandwiches ...

Runaway Pharma Marketing Gets “Normalized”
October 15, 2014
Last month, Dublin-based drugmaker Shire made headlines for its pending acquisition by AbbVie, a deal that many saw as a new data point in the growing trend of corporate tax inversions. On Tuesday, following news that the White House was cracking down on tax inversions, AbbVie ...

The Lives of Ours: Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour
October 14, 2014
What do an Iraqi doctor-politician, a reformed jihadist who was once Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard, and Edward Snowden all have in common? Right now, someone somewhere is saying about all three: They belong in a cage. But not Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker behind a ...

Harassment in the Online Workplace
September 26, 2014
As if we needed another, September kicked off with an acrid reminder that yes, all women—even the most privileged and powerful—are still subject to the cruel whims of anonymous men. On the great celebrity nude hack of 2014, Roxane Gay wrote in the Guardian, “What these ...

An Army of Eyeballs: The Rise of the Advertisee
September 12, 2014
During a blackout at the 2013 Super Bowl, a bright spark on Oreo’s marketing team had a brainstorm. With one tweet, the snappy insta-slogan “You can still dunk in the dark” inspired a tidal wave of shares amidst the snacking. It was the free publicity coup every brand ...

The Perpetual Sales Pitch
August 29, 2014
A farmer grows fruit, a carpenter builds a chair. The fruit is fresh or foul, the chair sturdy or flimsy. Either way, the marketplace decides. Relative quality is apparent: the slickest of salesmen will have trouble selling rotten apples if there is decent fruit to be had ...

Zombie Statistics on Sex Work
June 09, 2014
As a former escort, I can say with confidence that nearly everything you know, or think you know, about the money involved in sex work is wrong. And as a former statistician, I know the numbers definitely are. Last month the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) released ...