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Daily Bafflements

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Daily Bafflements
September 26, 2016
• The video footage of the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott raises, yet again, the question of how the law keeps protecting cops who panic. Natasha Vargas-Cooper wrote about it earlier this year. • “By galloping sideways, the cat ...

Daily Bafflements
September 23, 2016
• Over at Columbia Journalism Review, Shelley Hepworth dives into the sticky situation surrounding eyewitness video. In an era where citizens with cellphones often have the first—and best—footage of news events, what is the responsibility of journalists and ...

Daily Bafflements
September 21, 2016
• In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud describes the pre-historic man as a fellow who likes to get his jollies off by pissing on fire pits. “The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire,” Freud explains, “was able to carry it off ...

Daily Bafflements
September 19, 2016
• “I explain to her that I haven’t called ahead for credentials, but that I just plan on quietly standing with the press corps, jotting down ridiculous things I see and maybe firing off some incredulous low-quality pics on Twitter.” (Thanks, ...

Daily Bafflements
September 16, 2016
• Our friends at MuckRock will fund your pet research project on Palantir with their Thiel Fellowship, although we’re a bit skeptical that the program only lasts one year—we suspect the Paypal founder’s misdeeds and covert operations from intelligence ...

Daily Bafflements
September 14, 2016
• We’re a magazine, yes—a collection of bound, printed matter pocked with words. But even we, at times, are at a loss for the very things that sustain our being: words. With that in mind, meet the eighteen-hour heels that ...

Daily Bafflements
September 12, 2016
• Epigenetics, the idea that we can inherit some DNA changes from our parents and ancestors, is in the spotlight these days. So it would be remiss of us not to point out that Jackson Lears made the argument that scientists have a thing or two to learn from historians ...

Daily Bafflements
September 06, 2016
• Last night the planets aligned to give us a celestial new Baffler! Issue 32, “Muzak of the Spheres,” is an almanac that just might help decode the cosmologies and religions attendant on America. Buy one if you want to know how the Broadway hit Hamilton excised ...

Daily Bafflements
August 31, 2016
• Today in exploitation: Vice is reportedly “too cool” to respect freelancers and their labor. As one former associate producer on Vice’s HBO series told Columbia Journalism Review:  As Anne Elizabeth Moore wrote ...

Daily Bafflements
August 29, 2016
• Anthony Weiner, sexting extraordinaire, is at it again—this time with a Trump supporter. It’s probably not a viral marketing campaign for the documentary about “Carlos Danger’s” escapades, which Chris Lehmann reviewed back in ...

Daily Bafflements
August 26, 2016
• What to do in your new Cadillac? Rich people stuff, obviously. Of course, for the final word on Rich People Things, we always refer to editor in chief Chris Lehmann, who explored that slippery category in his 2011 book. • What do you get the ...

Daily Bafflements
August 24, 2016
• Yesterday, the National Labor Relations Board declared that graduate teaching assistants at private universities qualify as school employees, thereby freeing students across the country to form their own unions. The NLRB’s decision reverses a ruling from 2004 ...