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Author: Laurie Penny

Columns

Fear of a Feminist Future
October 17, 2016
To imagine the future is a political practice, which means that it’s both strangely awful and awfully strange. In 1990, a team of scientists and researchers was given the task of mapping far-future scenarios for the disposal of nuclear waste. Their dilemma: how to design a ...

Beverly Hillbilly Elegy
October 14, 2016
Imagine if you discovered one day that your father was a closeted polygamist, that your brother secretly sold meth, or that your sister the schoolteacher had an affair with one of her fifth graders. A similarly dark family secret confronted me recently, when I learned that my ...

Battle of the Brands
October 13, 2016
So it’s come to this: the most potentially explosive revelations about America’s Fifth Avenue Mussolini, Donald Trump, are behind an entertainment-industry paywall, one that no mere journalistic enterprise has the power or (in all likelihood) the resources to scale. Reality ...

Friend, Swipe Your Trump Card!
October 12, 2016
Of course, the fact that the glorious Presidential Black Card can be “activated” for a piddling $35 belies the intimidation factor of its “none more black” aesthetic. It’s the equivalent of spray-painting a pile of spaghetti red and telling people it’s a Ferrari. But ...

Workaday Woes
October 11, 2016
In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell describes advertising firms as “the fungi . . . that sprout from a decaying capitalism.” The same might well be said for American equity funds, 90 percent of which underperformed the market last year. And yet, for most ...

The Trump Train Is Actually a Trump Plane
October 10, 2016
The condition of our nation’s airports seems to be an obsession of The Donald’s—a somewhat unlikely fixation, as many were quick to point out, for someone who refuses to fly commercial. Trump is currently in possession of a small fleet of aircrafts: a Cessna Citation X ...

Daily Bafflements
October 10, 2016
• Moscow is replacing Microsoft technologies with local alternatives. At the beginning of the year, Evgeny Morozov commented in The Baffler that: • Over at The New Republic, Chip Colwell mines the question of why corporations, but not natural features, have ...

The Death of the Autodidact
October 07, 2016
Harry S. Truman seems likely to be our last self-educated president. Currently we are on pace for five consecutive Ivy League-primed commanders-in-chief. Of the twenty-three cabinet or cabinet-rank members in the Obama Administration, thirteen graduated from either Harvard or ...

How to Radicalize Your NeoLizard Friend
October 05, 2016
This guy is deep down the right-libertarian rabbit hole, but he's also unsure enough that sometimes I think I could lead him down the right path. All I want to do is get him to channel that conspiratorial, paranoid energy into something resembling socialism, so that when he ...

The Snarxist Temptation
October 04, 2016
This is a letter to all those who, like me, have been foolish enough to spend this election season feeling something about it (hopeful, committed, angry, you name it). More than anything, though, it’s a letter to those—particularly those on the left—who chose ...

As We Saw Ourselves
October 04, 2016
On September 4, 1957, Carlotta Walls LaNier and eight other African American students tried to enter Central High School in Little Rock, but the students, who became known as the Little Rock Nine, were turned away by the Arkansas National Guard. The dress that LaNier wore that ...

Daily Bafflements
October 03, 2016
• The Hungarian referendum on whether to resettle refugees was botched; half the country didn’t vote at all and about 6 percent cast a spoilt ballot. Astra Taylor wrote in to us from Piraeus Port, Athens, on the day after the EU-Turkey deal on refugee ...