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Out of Hand, or Hand to Mouth?
November 12, 2014
Isn’t it all now a “bit out of hand?” That’s what the distinguished food critic, novelist, and essayist John Lanchester asks in a recent issue of The New Yorker. What he means is the media madness that’s afflicting food culture today, from blogs to television shows. ...

The Zombie Movie Without Zombies
October 30, 2014
As unlikely as a “zombie apocalypse” remains, earnest discussion of how to prepare for such an event is a long-standing cultural standby. Amid a bloom of supernatural-orientated dramas culled from comics and B-Movies of the 50s, the zombie genre stands out as the most ...

Captive Labor, Capitalism’s Best Idea
October 24, 2014
This week brings the interesting news that immigrant detainees in Aurora, Colorado are suing the their detention facility’s owner for violating labor laws. According to Colorado Public Radio, “The federal class-action complaint alleges detainees are threatened with solitary ...

“So, What Else Do You Do?”
October 23, 2014
In a recent piece on “the work fetish,” German journalist Patrick Spaet wrote that “Probably no other sentence comes up at a party as often as: ‘So, what do you do?’” Spaet noted that this question contains within it the seeds of another, unspoken inquiry: “Are you ...

Indignation Nation
October 17, 2014
One of the great pleasures in life is indignation. It’s right up there with anger, love, and fear. Technically speaking, indignation is one of the “reflective” or “cognitive” emotions. When something big, metallic, and fast hurls toward you down the road, you feel fear ...

You Can Find Capitalism in Da Club
September 24, 2014
Though “financial coercion” is something of a phrase du jour for hand-wringers describing unsavory employment decisions by women, there is a new phrase in town that seeks to take its throne. It is “consensual trafficking,” and it is brought to you by a New York Times ...

Rhetoric Meets Reality for Married Gay Veterans
September 22, 2014
A couple purely rhetorical statements have recently achieved the status of “bipartisan consensus.” “ISIS is barbaric” is one. “Returning veterans deserve our best treatment” is another. Unfortunately, these truisms are too vague to suggest any particular course of ...

On Scarcity’s Appeal
September 16, 2014
On a Sunday afternoon in January, with an inch of snow forecast for later that evening, a queue of about fifty shoppers lined up outside the front door of the Downtown Brooklyn Trader Joe’s (DBTJ). The crowd inside had reached capacity. Those waiting outside shivered with ...

Eminent Bromain: Bud Light Invades the Rockies
September 11, 2014
This past weekend the corporate conquest of cool entered a new phase: expropriation. AB InBev, a $43 billion multinational conglomerate that brews one in four beers sold around the world, executed an agreement with the archetypal ski town of Crested Butte, Colorado (population ...

Grassroots and Astroturf School Reform
September 05, 2014
If you were asked to list the great leaders of education reform in America, would many of the names belong to people who achieved riches and fame in some other field? What nascent education reformers Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, and Mark Zuckerberg all have in ...

This Just In: “Responsible Consumption” is Bogus
September 03, 2014
“Are environmental and social problems such as global warming and poverty the result of inadequate governmental regulations or does the burden fall on our failure as consumers to make better consumption choices?” Thus begins a very earnest press release about a study ...

Labor Day Reading from The Baffler
August 29, 2014
Happy Friday, all! If you find yourself with some extra time over this long Labor Day weekend, why not take a moment to think about the reason for the season? These classic salvos from The Baffler all happen to be from issue 9 of The Baffler, a labor-themed issue we published in ...