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Author: The Baffler

Columns

Daily Bafflements
January 03, 2017
• Forget about the United States for a moment. France has accorded its workers “the right to disconnect,” that is, French companies of a certain size have to negotiate a protocol with employees, so that work does not habitually spill over into free time. In The ...

Humane Billboards
December 30, 2016
Ever pass through a city and feel punched in the face by adverts? Descending into London’s tube network it can seem like I’m the product, one unit among thousands dropping down a human conveyor belt. Here I am presented to corporation after corporation, then a break, and the ...

Your Political Correctness Is Showing, Conservatives
December 29, 2016
President-elect Donald Trump and his chief strategist Steve Bannon keep confirming an argument I’ve been making for a while: conservatives are just as “politically correct” as they claim liberals and the left are. They’re just as touchy about it, too—in fact, they ...

Who Says That Next Year Can’t Be Worse?
December 28, 2016
Even at the end of certifiably non-dismal years, the exercise of compiling a “Best of the Fast-Receding Year” roster of stories, posts, and outbursts always reeks with a bit of unseemly self-congratulation. And make no mistake: 2016 is a colossal fucking bummer of a year, ...

Be Afraid
December 23, 2016
In the final minutes of Doomocracy—a piece of immersive theater styled after a haunted house that ran in Brooklyn during the month leading up to Election Day—audience members were confronted with three doors. One was labeled “Clinton,” one ...

The Ass and the Lap Dogs
December 22, 2016
Like any well-trained lap dog, our national political press is rallying to the unique challenge of covering an incoming American president who is a notoriously truth-averse merchant of social-media make believe by performing the one trick it knows how to do when a new master’s ...

Decent Drapery
December 20, 2016
The first time it happened was a sunny afternoon early in the spring just after Barack Obama’s inauguration. I was fetching my mail from the post office, located in the wing of a house in the center of the village, right across the road from the town green. I was standing ...

Daily Bafflements
December 19, 2016
• Was the Trump campaign’s decision to spend 3.2 million on badly-designed hats between July 2015 and September 2016 a good one? Over at the Fast Company, Baffler art director Lindsay Ballant gives an insight into why it was indeed. ...

Breadwinners, Breadlosers
December 19, 2016
Like a malevolent Mr. Magoo, Donald Trump continues to barrel incompetently, obtusely, and conveniently into economic windfalls. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently reported the lowest unemployment rate since 2007. At 4.6 percent, the American economy is ...

Tech Meets Trump
December 16, 2016
It’s clarifying to see the oligarchy assemble itself in the open. President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet selection show has offered a murderer’s row of venal billionaires, spousal abusers, wild-eyed ex-generals, Christian fundamentalists, racists, and the ...

New American Feud
December 16, 2016
The 1980s in America meant saying tata to Watergate salads and letting a bit more of the world into our national cuisine. Then, in a 1998 restaurant review in New York magazine, Hal Rubenstein recorded a plot twist in New York’s—and, by domino effect, America’s—culinary ...

Comedy Gold, Man!
December 15, 2016
How does a decades-old plutocratic convergence of power look to the hometown paper of America’s public-sector ruling class? Why, like a puckish plotline in a high-living thirties comedy of manners, or as fodder for a campy sci-fi horror punchline, that’s how! Here, for your ...