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Hocus Pocus

Columns

The Real and the Ideal: Reflections on Partisan Review
April 24, 2014
Boston University, which published Partisan Review for the last quarter-century of that celebrated magazine’s sixty-nine-year history, has just put the entire archive online. It is a miniature history of 20th-century American intellectual life. It sometimes seems like half the ...

If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit
April 24, 2014
Here is the definitive list of the ten best quotes and excerpts from this New York Times article about the modern-day equivalent of foot-binding, in which women elect to have various types of surgery on their feet in order to fit into ludicrous shoes: Shoe by Christian ...

Billionaire Donors and True Believers
April 23, 2014
Democrat billionaires are always looking for an excuse to justify their outsized political spending. Aren’t liberals supposed to be against the wealthy few pouring great gobs of money into the political system? How can they justify railing against this state of affairs while ...

Daily Bafflements
April 23, 2014
Photo by The Baffler • Look what we found in a bagel shop in Brooklyn! • Relatedly: after yesterday’s news that Kim’s Video will be closing its last NYC location this summer, we heard that the late great and also-shuttered Bleecker Street Records is ...

What Women Wear
April 22, 2014
Much of what passes for feminism these days is concerned exclusively with how things look. Discussions frequently focus on the rights of women—whether cis or trans—to appear in public without conforming to traditional beauty standards; or what has or hasn’t been ...

The Tyranny of Time Management
April 22, 2014
A fairly ridiculous study has found that “sporting the latest tech toy can make you seem more like a leader.” For a paper entitled “Looking Innovative: Exploring the Role of Impression Management in High-Tech Product Adoption and Use” (#innovative), which ...

Daily Bafflements
April 22, 2014
• Ground sensors and satellites are being deployed to help predict and slow the crumbling of ancient Pompeii. As BLDGBLOG describes, “guards will receive electronic updates from the city itself while out on their daily rounds, including automated pings and alerts of ...

Rich Kids Philanthropy Club
April 21, 2014
The White House recently invited a bunch of rich kids over to talk about how they should spend their fortunes. Oh yes, they did! The event was closed to the media, of course. The rich, whether old or young, don’t tend to like their names disclosed to the press, and the White ...

What Workplace Intolerance Really Looks Like
April 21, 2014
Conservatives are rarely more gleeful than when they’re accusing liberals of hypocrisy. That’s why they accusing the left of illiberal “intolerance,” as they did recently when Mozilla fired its homophobic CEO, Brendan Eich (he had donated to an anti-gay marriage ...

Daily Bafflements
April 21, 2014
These operators are standing by to answer any questions you may have about military service. / Photo by davidd • Doctors are apparently already saving patients’ lives by using Google Glass in the ER, but they’re also risking patients’ lives by texting and reading ...

The Baffler’s Week That Was
April 18, 2014
Ladies and gentlemen, pimps and hoes, prudes and Pulitzers, nannies, grannies, and ballers: let’s all take a look back at the past week on the Baffler blog. • The Pulitzers were awarded early this week, which gave us an occasion to return to two excellent pieces from the ...

The Nonsensical Sexism of the “Grandma Hillary” Storyline
April 18, 2014
On Thursday afternoon, a thirty-four-year-old woman announced that she and her husband were expecting their first child. Which is great news for them. But did you also know that this is the most significant political story of the century, dramatically affecting the 2016 United ...