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Author: Sam Kriss

Columns

Pissologies
January 17, 2017
Why didn’t Donald Trump just piss on the bed himself? Everything else about the story makes sense; it doesn’t really matter whether it’s accurate or not. The rest of the allegations against Trump—that he’s a long-standing Russian asset, that his entire campaign was run ...

Not Unwinnable
January 16, 2017
As a general rule, it’s wise to steer clear from analyzing memes that originate and evolve on the Twittersphere. Users wield the medium in different enough ways that Twitter is at best a fractured discourse, it moves too quickly to be relevant longer than a day, and the ...

Obama Out
January 13, 2017
This week, the country’s dominant mode of pop-cultural expression was the public speech—something of a throwback trend, given Americans’ patterns of media consumption nowadays. In the smartphone era, we tend not to gather around and listen to our leaders ...

Ungovernable
January 12, 2017
Once it was clear that he had won the Electoral College, he was going to be the next president of The United States, a point that I raised was “Now we need to prepare to be ungovernable.” That lingered in my head. It is a phrase that I remember picking up from my younger ...

Russia to Our Right
January 11, 2017
Russian interference in U.S. politics during the elections of 2016 and beyond is one big, fat, ugly squirrel. It commands attention but distracts from the related but more important matter of rising, Russian-supported far-right movements throughout the world, which support ...

Daily Bafflements
January 09, 2017
• Longtime Baffler hand Siddhartha Deb has a books column in 2017! In his first piece, today, he remembers John Berger, and his “principled opposition to the contemporary idea of the writer as entrepreneur.” • “There have always been crazy movements ...

A Tax on Shivering
January 09, 2017
If one of the functions of writing is to make the reader see, and see again, here is a brief list of what John Berger made visible. Paintings, photographs, advertisements, motorcycles, swimming pools, the aging body, migrating workers, and mass demonstrations; the intricate ...

Daily Bafflements
January 06, 2017
• Today in tech: Tristan Harris, a Silicon Valley stalwart with a résumé that includes the likes of Google and Apple, has begun running “digital detox experiments” designed to put an end to the practice of hacking human psychology. According to the Atlantic, Harris is ...

The Sad Taste of Success
January 06, 2017
“For a while,” the New York Times recently observed, “it seemed as if slapping the word ‘girl’ on a title virtually guaranteed best-seller status.” There were the mass-market paperbacks, like Gone Girl, as well as the more highbrow ...

Meltdown of the Phantom Snowflakes
January 04, 2017
“Are you a strong woman?” The camera crew wanted a snappy answer. We were filming a short news segment on the beach in Brighton, with a frigid wind gusting around the boom mic and seagulls circling overhead, screaming for chips. I didn’t know how to reply. The issue of ...

Keeping Up with the Deviants
January 04, 2017
You've touched on a curious new phenomenon I've been observing: I have recently noticed that more often than not, modern, culturally progressive young people no longer shamefully confess to me their perversions. It's sad, really—I live for prurient gossip, and there's no ...

Sad Dreams of a Sanitized Heaven
January 03, 2017
There are many horrors the incoming administration promises to impose on the disadvantaged in America, and one of the cruelest is a crackdown on a woman’s right to access abortion. It is all the more frightening for already being well underway. On December 12, ...