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Hocus Pocus

Columns

Commodify the Classics!
April 30, 2014
Older denizens who came of age when the groves of academe blossomed now worry they will soon look upon bare, ruined choirs. The assumptions we long held about higher education have one by one withered and died. This is particularly true in the liberal arts, where class ...

Daily Bafflements
April 30, 2014
• The cause-i-fi-cation and brand-i-fi-cation of the artist Ai Weiwei, from The L Magazine. • In related news, the making of the cottage industry of posthumously-discovered street photographer Vivian Maier, from Chicago Reader. • The Denver Post investigates why Colorado ...

Rahm Emanuel, Mayor One Percent
April 29, 2014
In Chicago this past weekend, a tragic story made headlines. A thirty-two-year-old anti-violence advocate named Leonore Draper was shot and killed while returning home from an anti-violence charity event. Police say that Draper was a victim of gang crossfire. The Leonore Draper ...

Donald Sterling, Cliven Bundy, and What People are “Given”
April 29, 2014
It’s 2014, and yet our news cycle seems to be currently dominated by a pair of unreconstructed racists. We’ll get to them in just a second. What their rhetoric most reminds us of, though, is a Racist In The News from the distant past: 2013. Let’s travel back in time to ...

Daily Bafflements
April 29, 2014
• “Kodak did finally modify its film emulsion stocks in the 1970s and ’80s—but only after complaints from companies trying to advertise chocolate and wood furniture . . . . Kodak never encountered a groundswell of complaints from African-Americans about their products. ...

What Piketty’s Conservative Critics Get Wrong
April 28, 2014
With his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty has lobbed a truth bomb that has blown up several decades’ worth of received opinion about the way the economy works in capitalist societies. He makes a powerful, meticulously-argued, data-driven case that ...

The Long Arm of the NRA
April 28, 2014
This past weekend, the annual convention of the National Rifle Association was held in Indianapolis, a panoply of fearmongering speeches and fearsome weapons for sale—otherwise known as “9 acres of guns and gear.” This year’s convention featured Sarah ...

Daily Bafflements
April 28, 2014
• Craft beer, artisan pizza, independent movie theaters, gourmet coffee, and displacement of the poorest residents: tales of gentrification in Johannesburg, South Africa. • “Because of the high cost, climbers usually range from the young, sponsored athlete to wealthy men ...

Daily Bafflements
April 25, 2014
Justin Timberlake/Sean Parker photo illustration by Mike Cicchetti • “Starting a company was once an urge felt only by the blindly ambitious and slightly unsound, but in the Valley it’s been ostensibly transformed into a scheduled path one can simply elect and apply ...

The Baffler’s Week That Was
April 25, 2014
Women and men, feminists and fashionistas, wealthy heirs and high-heel wearers, militant multi-taskers, Camus-carrying intellectuals, and rifle-wielding libertarians, let’s all take a look back at the past week on the Baffler blog: • “Feminism is going to make it possible ...

Have Assault Rifle, Will Travel
April 25, 2014
What an exciting weekend this shall be for freedom-loving Americans: it’s the annual NRA convention! And now that little PR flaps like “lots of kids getting shot in an elementary school” are well in the rearview, our beloved gun manufacturers trade association can pivot to ...

Daily Bafflements
April 24, 2014
• The newsreel archive British Pathé has now uploaded its entire collection of 85,000 historic films, in high resolution, to YouTube, here. • Today is the first day of the National Rifle Association convention in Indianapolis. According to OpenSecrets.org, the NRA ...