Skip to content

Author: Amber A’Lee Frost

Columns

Office-Droned Out
January 26, 2017
It can be difficult to balance what you can live with and what you can live on. It usually takes experimentation, trial and error. That’s a luxury most people don't have these precarious days, but creativity helps, and you have a good sense of what will grind your psyche into ...

The Festival of Compromise
January 25, 2017
If, in some counterfactual universe, the Maharajah of Jaipur had married the Queen of England and sent their progeny to study at Harvard, the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, which ran over the weekend, is exactly the sort of cultural jamboree you’d expect the multicultural ...

Justice for Janitors
January 24, 2017
If workers don’t work, our economy doesn’t work, their communities don’t work, and it begins to break down for the corporations. I think the strike is such a critical tool because it really is a tremendous amount of power that workers have. The bosses spend hours and hours ...

Dynasties of Neoliberalism
January 24, 2017
Always a spouse, never the president might be how we end up remembering Hillary Clinton, whose near-thirty-year career ended, dramatically punctuated with a period, at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Her appearance was everything we expected: the tight, frozen smile, the deep ...

Daily Bafflements
January 23, 2017
• Harrisburg “mayor for life” Stephen Reed has pleaded guilty to stealing city artifacts. David Gambacorta followed the case for his Baffler no. 33 report, and he’ll be on call on the Baffler Twitter account tomorrow to answer your burning ...

Chelsea Manning’s Existential Threat to American Innocence
January 23, 2017
You know the story: a court-martialed soldier of an unpopular war granted clemency as the very last act of a U.S. president amid great public controversy. I refer, of course, to Lt. William Calley, the soldier of the Vietnam War who on March 16, 1968 led the systematic slaughter ...

Daily Bafflements
January 20, 2017
• Today in presidential aesthetics: commentators weigh in on Trump’s selection of (two!) bibles for his swearing-in and an oil painting takes aim at Obama in a bizarre echo of Trump’s promise that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be ...

Beyond the March
January 20, 2017
We need things, like national free childcare, paid parental leave like they have in other countries. Two years in these other countries! A minimum fifteen dollars an hour for all women, no exceptions, all sectors of the workforce. We want to save Medicare and expand it to ...

Too Many, Too Many
January 20, 2017
The “European Project”, like the United States, is in need of a regime change. It will be vulnerable to populist condemnation and counteraction until it scraps the elite designs at its origin. In a time when pseudo-revolutions have brought pseudo-regime-change around ...

Trump Interruption
January 19, 2017
We are doing a lot of non-violent direct action trainings. Then, on Wednesday, we are doing a queer dance party at Mike Pence’s house. Thursday there is an action at an Alt-Right Trump inaugural ball called the Deploraball, trying to shut that down. Then, starting on Friday ...

When Uber Bares Its Hoard
January 18, 2017
Uber executives are not just giving over the data, as if it were a peace offering born of their largesse. The data is not just an olive branch; it is bait that lures cities into partnerships formed on Uber’s own terms. The company has dabbled in outreach in recent years and ...

Daily Bafflements
January 17, 2017
• Amid mounting pressure on Obama to pardon whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden this week (update: Manning will be freed in May!) it’s worth revisiting Astra Taylor’s salvo on presidential pardons, and their shady, unofficial ...