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Author: The Baffler

Columns

Daily Bafflements
February 08, 2016
• Despite the boom in so-called “women’s conferences”—take “The Women in Policing Conference (‘Hear Them Roar!’),” the “Inc. Women’s Summit (‘Be Inspired, Be Empowered, Get Equipped’),” ...

Flu in the Face
February 04, 2016
Anyone who spends time in enclosed public spaces is barraged with images from television news, most often broadcast from the default network, CNN. We glimpse these images, with the sound down, for only seconds at a time as they bounce, germ-like, from corner to corner, chasing ...

Field of Dreams
February 03, 2016
 Because the Iowa caucuses are a perversely puny and undemocratic spectacle, heroic exertions are required to endow them with long-term narrative meaning. Worry not, though: Our media-political complex exists largely to billow the semblance of significance into the decaying ...

Daily Bafflements
February 02, 2016
• Hey, Iowa—time to revisit Baffler senior editor Chris Lehmann’s words on Ted Cruz, from the LRB last June: “Every phase of Cruz’s launch into national renown has showcased this same barely repressed appetite for self-destruction . . . a man trained in every elite ...

Twilight of the Superpredators
February 02, 2016
In the early 1990s a conservative criminologist at Princeton, John J. DiIulio, scanned the horizon and predicted that a new superbreed of hoodlums was coming like a demographic tidal wave. Over a twenty-year span, DiIulio forecast, 270,000 juvenile offenders would roam the ...

Daily Bafflements
January 29, 2016
• Brands will be brands, we suppose . . . Pepsi is opening a “baffling” new Brooklyn restaurant called Kola House, offering guests “a premium experience,” that only vaguely reminds them of the company’s flagship beverage. Such ...

Daily Bafflements
January 28, 2016
• Former Labour Leader Ed Miliband weighs in on income inequality in the United Kingdom and the United States in the pages of the LRB, even giving a shout-out to the Fight for 15 movement. He considers, among others, Robert Putnam’s Our Kids, dissected recently ...

The Loudest Voice Not in the Room
January 28, 2016
It speaks volumes about the general disarray of the presidential campaign spectacle that it has now reached its highest pitch over the prospect of Donald Trump remaining silent over the course of a televised debate. (OK, technically Trump intends to be absent for the ...

Daily Bafflements
January 26, 2016
• Gird your loins with a superfruit smoothie, it’s the thirty-six best quotes from Davos 2016! Mining pits of inanity we had assumed were long depleted, the world’s “thought leaders” have outdone themselves, coming up with such gems as ...

The Law of Maximum Torment
January 26, 2016
The following extract is from The Cowshed, published in English this month by New York Review Books. The translator is Zha Jianying. The “cowshed” itself was a makeshift prison for intellectuals who were labeled class enemies during the Chinese ...

Daily Bafflements
January 25, 2016
• It’s an important day in the Annals of Disruption: the fifth anniversary of the uprising in Egypt, a political moment often used as proof that American social networks equal freedom. “The growth of social media and the disappearance of class from the ...

The People’s Republic of Troy
January 22, 2016
Christopher Logue called his politics “dusty pink”: committed pacifist, rebellious ex-soldier, and former petty thief, the poet harbored a lifelong loathing for authority. His formal education included a stint at the notoriously abusive Christian Brothers schools; it ...