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Daily Bafflements

Columns

Fresh Hell
October 01, 2021
By Your Side Earlier this year, a British police officer kidnapped, raped, and strangled thirty-three-year-old Sarah Everard before incinerating her corpse and dumping it in a pond. That officer, sworn to uphold fundamental human rights and accord equal respect to all people in ...

Fresh Hell
September 24, 2021
Galactic Empire Chic The loathsome trash storm of New York Fashion Week has come and gone, but only this week, at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space, and Cyber Conference in glamorous Maryland, was next season’s hottest look unveiled. We speak, of course, of the U.S. ...

Fresh Hell
September 17, 2021
Our Shining Future You might say the general state of things would appear to be undeniably and utterly bleak—some might even venture to say “hopeless”—what with any and all attempts to staunch the resurgence of mass death, hastening climate collapse, expanding wealth ...

Fresh Hell
September 10, 2021
The Siren’s Call Last month in Buffalo, New York, workers at the nation’s preeminent purveyor of extra caramel, no whip, light ice battery acid announced they were forming a union: Starbucks Workers United. In response, the company—which reported $19.16 billion in revenue ...

Fresh Hell
September 03, 2021
We Didn’t Start the Fire Though we, the people of this disintegrating empire, are simultaneously beset with unprecedented wildfires, unprecedented flooding, and reaccelerating mass death, that’s certainly no reason to go without, for the second year in a row, that dusty, ...

Fresh Hell
August 27, 2021
Blair Bitch Project As the United States’ bungled withdrawal from its bungled twenty-year, multi-trillion-dollar exercise in “nation-building” nears its inevitably violent conclusion, many of the politicians who so gleefully rallied to the cause back in the day have what ...

Fresh Hell
August 20, 2021
Pity the Parasite Earlier this month, the Biden administration kicked the eviction crisis further down the road with yet another stopgap moratorium on forcibly unhousing people during the pandemic’s hasty resurgence—and from sea to acidifying sea, landlords are pissed. While ...

Fresh Hell
August 13, 2021
Extinction Express This week marked the release of another funereal report about our rapidly accelerating climate crisis from the UN-convened scientific body of the IPCC: having failed to curb emissions enough to prevent the planet from warming to the threshold of 1.5 degrees ...

Fresh Hell
August 06, 2021
A Plague on Your Houses Last Saturday, the nation’s eviction ban was allowed to expire, putting some 3.6 million people living in the richest nation in the history of the world at imminent risk of becoming homeless all because—according to the Biden administration’s ...

Fresh Hell
July 23, 2021
Medaling in Folly The year is 2021 and the 2020 Olympics are now officially, heedlessly, dismally underway in Tokyo, having kicked off on Friday with the “Parade of Nations” in a stadium that the city of Tokyo, currently under a state of emergency due to the ongoing ...

Fresh Hell
July 16, 2021
Bezos and His Daemen On Tuesday, Jeff Bezos, by dint of his billions, will zip-zoom up to the edge of outer space in his Blue Origin rocket, inaugurating a new era of conspicuous wealth-waste that will, in the words of Richard Branson—who beat Bezos to space by nine ...