Skip to content

Author: The Baffler

Columns

Daily Bafflements
November 28, 2016
• Angela Nagle podcast alert: “Because all of this stuff is so steeped in irony,” she comments, drawing on her Baffler essay on 4chan, “it’s very hard to know what anyone actually means . . . So for example if you see a swastika being used ...

By What Authority?
November 23, 2016
The 1890 massacre of as many as 300 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, by a U.S. Army regiment was precipitated by a Ghost Dance. The dance was originally envisioned by a Paiute shaman in Nevada, a turning point in a prophesy of his in which Jesus ...

#RIPMyShillaries
November 22, 2016
Political candidacies are like jokes: if you need to explain them, there’s something wrong. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy launched an entire cottage industry of explanation. It’s been two weeks since election day and her supporters and surrogates are still ...

Daily Bafflements
November 21, 2016
• At the alt-right confab in DC last weekend, “while much of the discourse at the conference was overtly racist and demeaning toward minorities . . . the focus was on how whites were marginalized and beleaguered.” We know how this one goes. Susan Faludi ...

Begging Pardon
November 21, 2016
Edward Snowden himself has never directly asked for a pardon. The former NSA contractor and CIA employee-turned-whistleblower maintains that he would be willing to return home from Moscow to be judged by a jury of his peers, and even serve time in prison, if there were a chance ...

Daily Bafflements
November 18, 2016
• As news rolls in on the president-elect’s cabinet picks and White House staff, there’s not much to smile about. The selections have been described as a “team of racists,” “as bonkers as you thought,” and “a total sausagefest.” ...

The Sanders Strategy
November 18, 2016
Okay, folks. This is the game. Bernie Sanders is taking the line of resisting the intolerant, warmongering Trump & Co., while simultaneously challenging the president-elect to put real money into infrastructure and to write better trade deals, Trump’s signature ...

Against Bargaining
November 18, 2016
What does it mean to be mentally healthy in a world gone mad? Sirens are blaring, lights are flashing, and we have been whisked out of the territory of metaphor onto the hard ground of fact. The rise to power and election of Donald J. Trump is the sick recrimination of a society ...

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before
November 17, 2016
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but how could the American people have given their highest public office to a man who is so clearly an idiot? Not just any ordinary lunkhead, but someone who brutishly, bullishly, maddeningly inhabits his own stupidity, who practically ...

Poll Axed
November 17, 2016
As America’s diehard corps of data journalists and omni-explainers wail over the smoldering ruin of their shiny, digital forecasting models, the time seems ripe for the rest of us to ask why the activity of polling is tethered to the news business in the first place. Yes, ...

Advice for a Trumpland Thanksgiving
November 16, 2016
Conventional wisdom holds that “kitchen table activism” with kith and kin is somehow easier than talking to strangers, but I’ve never found that to be true. In my experience, people—especially conservative people—are more likely to accept disagreement from a stranger ...

Are Sex Offenders Human?
November 15, 2016
In July 16, 2015, Barack Obama visited a federal prison, the first sitting president ever to do so. It was a powerful statement of support for a broad movement—stretching from Black Lives Matter to Right on Crime—to reform the U.S. criminal justice system, one of the ...