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Author: The Baffler

Columns

Daily Bafflements
November 20, 2015
• As the song goes, breaking up is hard to do, but Mark Zuckerberg thinks he can ease the pain for you. Facebook is testing out a new set of tools called “take a break,” which quickly offer coupled users who change their relationship status the chance to see ...

Daily Bafflements
November 19, 2015
• Wired reports on claims by the Tor Project, a free “onion routing” software for enabling anonymous communication online, that the FBI paid researchers at Carnegie Mellon University $1 million to hack its users aiding in an investigation which resulted in ...

Daily Bafflements
November 17, 2015
• Last month Caitlin Dewey gave Washington Post readers the skinny on #femtube, an online agglomeration of women (especially young girls) with exorbitant YouTube followings. Today The Baffler’s Lucy Ellmann notes the boring religiosity with which these ...

Daily Bafflements
November 16, 2015
• University architecture has always laundered the reputations of “slave traders, ennobled gangsters, monk-robbers and tyrants’ stooges.” That time-honored tradition is carrying on into the twenty-first century, and not just at Harvard. ...

Daily Bafflements
November 13, 2015
• Johari Osayi Idusuyi, the woman prescient enough to bring a book (Claudia Rankine’s brilliant Citizen, at that) to a Donald Trump rally speaks to Jezebel. • On the Paris Review blog, Baffler regular Scott Beauchamp looks at the expressive vandalism of ...

The Biddable Muse
November 12, 2015
If it had been up to me—and it really should have been—Playboy wouldn’t have abandoned its voyeuristic legacy of naked-lady photo spreads and centerfolds. Instead, I would’ve doubled down, expanded the magazine to the epic scale that, say, Vogue attains ...

Daily Bafflements
November 12, 2015
• NPR reports that the roots of today’s urban beekeeping trend run deeper than previously thought. According to a new study in Nature, humans have been keeping bees for honey and beeswax for nine thousand years. • The startup world is abuzz lately about ...

Daily Bafflements
November 10, 2015
• “The big secret of the innovation economy is that it’s not very innovative,” said Baffler mayor John Summers to Christopher Lydon on Radio Open Source last week. Listen along here!  • You’ve heard the news: Modigliani’s ...

Daily Bafflements
November 09, 2015
• Welcome to “The Edge,” a low-hanging target for a magazine with a habit of blunting. Described as the “Uber of buildings,” this steely, app-responsive structure sounds like a giant game of musical chairs. No one has a ...

Daily Bafflements
November 06, 2015
• With the news that President Obama has rejected the Keystone XL Oil Pipeline proposal in what is being called a victory for environmentalists, it seems a good time to look back at Scott Beauchamp’s dissection of the “jobs vs. environment myth” here on ...

Daily Bafflements
November 05, 2015
• In case your kids are lacking appropriate role models, one venture capitalist is stepping up to offer them a tale of some true superheroes. In the Kickstarter pitch for Joe Floyd’s new graphic novel, he tells us that “young people grow up idolizing the ...

Daily Bafflements
November 04, 2015
• This is Amazon’s week of delusion. Yesterday, the company known for steadily cutting off booksellers’ and publishers’ oxygen opened a brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle, according to the Seattle Times. And on Thursday, that same company, whose ...