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Author: Chris Lehmann

Columns

Shillable Hours
September 01, 2016
In a development that has surprised no one, it appears that Corey Lewandowski—the former head of the Trump campaign who was cashiered at the insistence of the candidate’s children earlier this summer—remains a paid consultant of the rampaging bigoted ego atop ...

Gone with the Winds
August 29, 2016
When a hurricane strikes, and is destructive or deadly enough, its name will be retired. For this to happen, the storm will have had to inflict so much damage that to reuse its name would be, according to the National Hurricane Center, a serious faux pas for “obvious reasons ...

Daily Bafflements
August 26, 2016
• What to do in your new Cadillac? Rich people stuff, obviously. Of course, for the final word on Rich People Things, we always refer to editor in chief Chris Lehmann, who explored that slippery category in his 2011 book. • What do you get the ...

The Media Con Job
August 25, 2016
A curious outbreak of truth-telling seems to be seizing our right-wing media. In this most deranging campaign season of our postmodern political lives, the specter of Donald Trump—billionaire tribune of the forgotten white working class—has sent some of our most notable ...

Friends on the Dole
August 24, 2016
Welcome to The Baffler’s agony corner, YOUR SORRY ASS, where Amber A’Lee Frost dispenses bossy, judgmental advice on how to live your life fairly, kindly, and with good humor. Send us your rants and pleas, please: [email protected]. Dear Your Sorry Ass, I ...

Daily Bafflements
August 22, 2016
• With Ivanka Trump publicizing intern-written blog posts about how to survive as an intern, we urge you to recall the year 1997, when Jim Frederick wrote about unpaid interns as unwitting scabs. • The apple didn’t fall far from the tree: “Trump ...

Elon Musk, Fatalist
August 19, 2016
Odds are that you’ve heard by now that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said something Totally Trippy at Recode’s Code conference earlier this summer. According to the darling of Silicon Valley, “the odds that we’re in base reality is one in ...

Enemy of the PayPal
August 18, 2016
The financial unwinding of Gawker Media’s tawdry tour through the justice system landed on an oddly anticlimactic note this week: Univision, the Spanish-language TV network that has been aggressively colonizing the digital mediasphere, picked up the bankrupt web empire for ...

The 1,000-Meter Whine
August 17, 2016
The Olympics and American presidential elections have a lot in common: both celebrate the absolute best humanity has to offer; both reward integrity and fair play; both are devoid of corruption; and both appeal to citizens’ highest ideals and are thus immune to cynicism and ...

Spoiling for the Green Party
August 17, 2016
At the Green Party National Convention in Houston this month, the villain that loomed the largest wasn’t Hillary Clinton or global warming or even Donald Trump—it was the doctrine of lesser evilism. Some say that a vote for Jill Stein is a wasted vote, but Martina ...

Daily Bafflements
August 15, 2016
• Over at In These Times, Baffler contributor Kathleen Geier writes that “the progressive label has become little more than a marketing tool . . . As early as the 1970s, liberalism was in bad odor, and some liberal politicians were adopting ‘progressive’ ...

Noo in Town
August 10, 2016
The biggest economic advances often arise not from boom industries garnering big VC paydays, but from the support businesses that sprout along the periphery to exploit the boom. They fasten on to major economic trendlines the way that fungi, moss, and lichen exploit trees. Take ...