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Hocus Pocus

Columns

The Next Phase of the Obamacare Battle
April 02, 2014
Tuesday was a good day for the Affordable Care Act. The administration met its original projection of 7 million enrollments during the first six-month open enrollment window on private health insurance exchanges. That doesn’t include last-minute enrollments on the ...

Dragnet Surveillance and the English Language
April 02, 2014
The revelations over the past nine months that the United States is engaging in various mass-surveillance programs that collect and store huge amounts of information about both Americans and foreigners has rightly invited frequent references to George Orwell’s Nineteen ...

Daily Bafflements
April 02, 2014
A protest against Google buses in San Francisco. Photo by Chris Martin • Mother Jones calls yesterday’s Google bus protest “the most San Francisco thing ever,” and has some excellent pictures to back it up. • From Prison Policy Initiative, a fascinating pie chart ...

Mindlessly We Roll Along
April 01, 2014
There are no doubt many reasons for the PhD glut and the resulting insane academic job market. But one of them is surely that, dreary as academic life can be, most work in the real world sucks even worse. The life of a middle or senior manager, devoted to shaving fractions of a ...

Daily Bafflements
April 01, 2014
Papal bling. / Walters Art Museum • The “bling bishop” of Germany, who built a luxury mansion for himself with $43 million of church funds, has been removed from his post. (At least it included a $4 million chapel.) According to Al Jazeera, “Last year, [Pope] Francis ...

The Bigger the Checkbook, the Bigger the Bull
March 31, 2014
One of the more pathetic manifestations of our pretty-much-unregulated campaign finance system occurred this weekend in Las Vegas. New Jersey governor Chris Christie was speaking to a modest gathering of prospective donors from the Republican Jewish Coalition, whose views on ...

Beyoncé, Kim, and the Politics of Celebrity Labor
March 31, 2014
How do you make a celebrity? It’s popular to think of celebrities as highly disposable—as cheap and as flimsy as a poly-blend tank from Forever 21, with similarly dubious ethics of production. But the labor involved in the production of celebrity is not only complex, but ...

Daily Bafflements
March 31, 2014
Pictured: an O.G. London billionaire / Vanity Fair • Photographers James and Karla Murray documented the changing faces of Manhattan in their book Store Front: The Disappearing Faces of New York. “Then and now” photograph pairings are nothing new, but ...

The Baffler’s Week That Was
March 28, 2014
“A magazine that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary readers by praising anything.” –Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (quoted in The Baffler’s Issue 22, Modem & Taboo). Happy Friday, Bafflers. In case you missed them on the ...

Class War with a Smiley Face
March 28, 2014
In Silicon Valley there really is a class war going on, a wage-fixing cartel that’s pitting the one percent against everyone else. Thomas Piketty, the economist who wrote the new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is most famous for his insight that economic inequality ...

Daily Bafflements
March 28, 2014
Wait, what did you guys just say? / Credit: Jeffrey Pang • Let’s start this Friday off right. A Philadelphia craft brewery is releasing a new beer made with, among other ingredients, smoked goat brains. Okay! • Over at The Billfold, an interview with Melissa Gira Grant, ...

Questioning Authority & Other Forbidden Ideas
March 27, 2014
Cass Sunstein’s mind is a glorious reimagining-machine, reshaping everything it encounters. “Consider the question of whether people pay sufficient attention to their own futures,” he muses in his book, Why Nudge?: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism. ...