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Author: The Baffler

Columns

Daily Bafflements
January 05, 2016
• We all know that Hillary is fun, and it is also lodged in our collective cortex that Obama is “cool”—even meta-cool. And so would you be, if you’d spent a year “running wild” with Bear Grylls, “talking sports” with Bill ...

Waiving the Age of Reason
January 05, 2016
Most kids start to learn their multiplication tables in the third grade. Their storybooks—typically illustrated, with only a few sentences per page—begin to give way to short chapter books. A year later, they are taught the difference between sedimentary and volcanic rock. ...

Daily Bafflements
January 04, 2016
• ‘Tis the season to be grateful, as Baffler contributing editor Barbara Ehrenreich notes in the New York Times: Falalala-laa-lalalala. • Reasons to feel jaded, part two: Ethan Couch, the “affluenza teen” we keep hearing about, was but a pale shadow of his ...

Daily Bafflements
December 29, 2015
• According to the Washington Post, Robert Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation is, touchingly, “worried that books by people such as [Baffler contributing editor] Astra Taylor will create a thought contagion that will infect ...

Daily Bafflements
December 28, 2015
• Research by Microsoft shows that when robots send out tweets about activism, they reap a higher level of engagement than calls to action by actual humans do. According to MIT Review, “Potential volunteers responded negatively when the clearly ...

Daily Bafflements
December 18, 2015
• After being arrested for what the FBI is calling a “securities fraud trifecta of lies, deceit and greed,” pharma-bro Martin Shkreli stepped down today from his role as CEO of Turing pharmaceuticals. The intelligence agency compared Shkreli’s business model to a ...

High Caliber Television
December 17, 2015
The planned launch of Gun TV, a home-shopping channel devoted exclusively to selling firearms to impulsive shut-ins, is an idea so purely American that one can only marvel that it’s taken this long to come to life. The mass marketing of lethal weaponry to the bored and ...

A Tale of Two Citations
December 15, 2015
A few weeks ago, my girlfriend, an English teacher in a Brooklyn public school, began preparing to teach her tenth-grade students The Metamorphosis. She asked me for a few examples of the Kafkaesque. I had two: first, a French thriller I saw in high school, in which a man with a ...

Daily Bafflements
December 14, 2015
• Hillary Clinton has a line about how, if elected, she will be “the youngest woman president” but her appeal is mainly with college-educated boomers: “Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy has not yet sparked among young women the kind of excitement about ...

Daily Bafflements
December 11, 2015
• Today in union busting: Midwestern home improvement giant Menards has made managers sign an employment agreement stating that Meanwhile, in New York City, where the death toll on construction worksites has been on the rise, union workers are rallying today for safer ...

Daily Bafflements
December 10, 2015
• In spite of our cultural obsession with happiness, a new study shows that being happy doesn’t, in fact, make you live any longer. • Ol’ Dirty Pharma: Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical exec who recently made headlines for raising the price of the AIDS ...

Media Abets Trump’s Shock-Jock Statesmanship
December 09, 2015
It’s not that Trump’s announcement wasn’t newsworthy, shocking, and terrifying—it was all those things, in spades. Rather, the tenor of the coverage made it seem, as it usually does in Trump’s case, that Trump’s Hitleresque scheme struck the astonished American ...