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Ban St. Patrick’s Day
March 17, 2015
Last week, I was struck by sheer terror when an online listicle about St. Patrick’s Day Parades caught my eye, and briefly made me think I had been caught out of the house on the dreaded holiday. Luckily, I still had several days to prepare, and hide. It shouldn’t be like ...

Poor Stories from Brooks and Douthat
March 16, 2015
In the past week, New York Times columnists David Brooks and Ross Douthat have taken on the issues of personal behavior and social norms among people less economically fortunate than themselves. That’s not how they put it, of course. Douthat wants to address “the social ...

Leonard Nimoy was BAFFLED!
February 27, 2015
We lost a true American hero today. There are so many reasons to love the late, great Leonard Nimoy. The fact that he starred in an action-packed 1973 TV movie called Baffled! just happens to be ours. (IMDB.com description: “Race car driver suffers from visions where he ...

The True Cost of “Hollywood South”
February 13, 2015
It only took Louisiana eleven years and $1 billion to buy the title it’s always wanted—“Hollywood South,” the movie-making capital of the world. In 2013, it surpassed the film industry’s old standbys, California and Canada, by having eighteen major-studio releases shot ...

Flint’s Dirty Drinking Water Conundrum
January 28, 2015
If you’ve seen Michael Moore’s 1989 film Roger & Me, you know the outlines of the story of Flint, Michigan. It’s a city that was devastated by the decline of the American automobile industry, and it never really recovered. Twenty-six years on, things have only gotten ...

American Sniper and the Trope of the Sheepdog
January 26, 2015
The invasion of Iraq resulted in hundreds of thousands—perhaps even a million—people losing their lives. How can one attempt to justify so much killing? Enter Clint Eastwood’s new film American Sniper. Early in the movie, Chris Kyle’s father breaks life down for his ...

Simple Notebooks for Complicated Times
January 15, 2015
AdWeek recently brought to the public’s attention the enormous success of Field Notes, a small, Chicago-based company that sells small, forty-eight-page paper notebooks. The overwhelming popularity of these homespun notebooks suggests that the supply of wholesome consumer ...

Undercover Boss: A Christmas Story
December 23, 2014
It came to pass in those days of Bowlus Superius XLIV, two years into the Great Famine, that there went out a decree from Roger Goodellus that all of America should watch saints flay colts with pigskin, and all watched, everyone in his own city. After, all made pilgrimage to a ...

The Plea and Promise of “Hands Up”
December 03, 2014
On Sunday, five St. Louis Rams football players took the field with their hands up, a message of solidarity with Ferguson protesters as blunt and powerful as the game they play. Afterwards, the St. Louis police officers’ union denounced the gesture, and conservative ...

Happy Birthday, James Agee
November 26, 2014
Tomorrow is not only Thanksgiving Day; it’s also the 105th anniversary of the birth of one Mr. James Agee, a reporter and essayist who is very dear to the hearts and brains of The Baffler. In the summer of 1936, when Agee was a 26-year-old writer at Fortune magazine, he went ...

Hollybaba’s Blockbusters
November 25, 2014
If movies can tell us anything about the internal lives of typical film industry executives, it’s that they like to feel like the most important people in any room, like they’re doing everyone else a favor by granting a meeting. So it takes truly special circumstances to ...

Nightcrawler: Flourishing in the Dark
November 13, 2014
Nightcrawler, a new thriller with a sense of humor by Dan Gilroy, is a recession-era American Psycho. It’s a story that grasps the misery of low wages and lower cunning. Or perhaps it could be described as the Hunger Games of capitalist exploitation, couched in a critique of ...