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Author: The Baffler

Columns

Daily Bafflements
November 14, 2016
• And so it begins. Over the weekend Mr. Trump, when asked how many immigrants he wanted to deport (or jail), threw out a cool three million figure. He gave a top job to Steve Bannon, a man who makes your common-or-garden spin doctor look quaint. We suggest you do not ...

Crash of the Pop-Culture Party
November 14, 2016
To hear some pundits insist, with perfect seriousness, that it was important for Taylor Swift to speak out on Hillary Clinton's behalf ahead of the election was to realize how celebritized our virtue-signaling politics has become. When disappointed liberals quote The Hunger ...

Show Me Where It Hurts
November 11, 2016
History hurts. That is how we know it. That is how we must understand our place in it. It may not hurt for everyone all the time, but that doesn’t mean the bones aren’t broken under the skin. Too often we may not feel it, and that is probably by design. Because so ...

The New Hampshire Special
November 09, 2016
After two days of door-knocking for Hillary Clinton in southern New Hampshire, my girlfriend and I decided to stop off at Manchester’s Red Arrow Diner before driving back to Brooklyn. It had come highly recommended (the diner, that is, not the door-knocking, which I knew ...

Daily Bafflements
November 07, 2016
• On purges, cigarette-pack warnings, and projectile vomiting: Baffler contributing editor Barbara Ehrenreich provides a medical perspective on the U.S. election. (Thanks, The Guardian!) • Fresh from a Trump rally, Baffler contributing editor Astra Taylor enters a ...

Born and Bred
November 07, 2016
This election cycle has been rife with punditry on the anger of the white working class, supposedly fueling Donald Trump’s rise to prominence. But like many of the overblown narratives rounding out the cable news cycle in this bizarre election, it’s not quite true. In White ...

Daily Bafflements
November 04, 2016
• Has cryonics taken a great leap forward in Russia? Forgive us for being a bit skeptical, after Corey Pein’s dive into American transhumanism back in issue 30. As Bloomberg Businessweek cheerily summarizes, • If you believe everything you read, time may be running ...

Hill, No? — Round 2
November 03, 2016
Update, November 3: We’re pleased to provide second installment in our hypothetical debate on what a blowout win for Hillary Clinton might mean for her critics on the left. Read Tuesday’s opening arguments (parts 1 and 2), and today’s closing exchange (parts 3 ...

Con Air
November 03, 2016
It seems entirely fitting that in the final stretch of a presidential campaign militantly indifferent to a host of policy crises, from climate change to wealth inequality, from antitrust prosecutions to affordable housing, the American public is left to gnaw maliciously on a ...

Daily Bafflements
November 02, 2016
• The pipeline protests in North Dakota illustrate how difficult it is for communities to agitate successfully against corporations, which the law regards as people, when corporations want to take over the nature they value. Would granting legal ...

2016: A Liberal Odyssey
October 31, 2016
In a heart-wrenching letter published in the New York Times, U.S.-born journalist Michael Luo described his family’s recent encounter with the kind of bigoted outburst—culminating with the admonition that Luo’s family should “go back to China”—that, sadly, is quite ...