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Daily Bafflements

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Fresh Hell
February 16, 2018
What If You Could Get Your Own Immigrant? From the ivy-clad brain trust of our elite universities comes an innovative proposition: the Visas Between Individuals Program, in which Americans can sponsor an immigrant in order to extract their labor at below minimum wage rates, ...

Fresh Hell
February 09, 2018
We love picking, make no mistake about it. For the “oddly satisfying” video enthusiast in your life, Billy and Summer Pierce present the Next Big Thing: Pop it Pal™, “the novelty pimple popping toy you just can’t get enough of.” For $19.99, you’ll get a slab ...

Fresh Hell
February 02, 2018
From Tween to Tycoon and You Can, Too! Dream big and learn fast coos Teen Bo$$, the latest in required reading for tweens and teens baptized in the entrepreneurial waters of the free market and ready to build a personal brand. Brought into the world last summer and targeting the ...

Fresh Hell
January 26, 2018
Pass Go, Collect $2.8 billion. This week, Amazon inched us further into our nightmarish future with the opening of Amazon Go: a grocery store without checkout lines or cashiers but chock full of cameras that sense, record, and charge you automatically for every impulse ...

Fresh Hell
January 19, 2018
Now Entering: The Comfort ZoneTM Is the integrity of your spiritual being under assault in this frightful epoch of data mining and climate degradation? Do you wish you could attain, if only for a fleeting moment, a sense of mindfulness in the midst of this unending horror show? ...

Fresh Hell
January 12, 2018
Oprah Winfrey 4 Prez. Proving that the United States has learned almost nothing from electing a garbage bag full of shit and Filet-o-Fish  to its highest office, calls for talk show queen Oprah to seek the White House in 2020 started trending on Twitter before she’d even ...

Fresh Hell
January 05, 2018
From the folks who brought you Juicero. After unsuccessfully trying to foist a $400 juice-pouch-squeezing machine on the masses, Silicon Valley luminary Doug Evans took some time to ponder the Next Big Thing. He found it in water—raw, unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized ...

Fresh Hell
December 15, 2017
“The following racial slurs are allowed and advisable.” The Daily Stormer’s style guide leaked to the public this week and includes helpful hints to keep the blatant racism light and playful: “dehumanization is extremely important, but it must be done within the ...

Fresh Hell
December 08, 2017
Hire an “ambiance and atmosphere model” for your office holiday party. Attractive men and women—but mostly women—are being hired in droves to pretend they’re guests at Silicon Valley holiday parties. You know, to lend an air of fun! Totally casual, ...

Fresh Hell
December 01, 2017
This motherfucker’s name is CHAZ. Novelist Emma Cline has a shitty ex-boyfriend who puts our shitty ex-boyfriends to shame. This shitty ex-boyfriend hired a shitty lawyer to do incredibly shitty things. Hopefully both the shitty ex and the shitty lawyer get ...

Fresh Hell
November 17, 2017
BAN PRISONS. This entire “Ban Week” series over at Splinter is worth your time, but this installment on prison abolition, and what it means to reimagine the justice system, is excellent.   Vanity Fair seems fun. The magazine just appointed a new editor—the incredibly ...

Weekly Bafflements
November 10, 2017
Online is extremely fucked up. Here’s a truly wild look at the world of Kid’s YouTube, where algorithmically-driven content production is creating some really weird shit.   “Tell me about a complicated man.” The New York Times Magazine has a great profile of ...