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Commodify Your Wiretaps
March 04, 2014
Just in case it wasn’t clear that everything that can be commodified, will, domestic surveillance turns out to be just another product. And the customer thinks it’s, like, way overpriced. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on Monday against Sprint, ...

Microsoft’s Scroogley Strategy
March 03, 2014
There comes a time in every company’s life when it must make a crucial decision: Do we hire Mark Penn? Most companies have no problem saying “no” to this question. Penn is the guy whose last high-profile political gig, after all, was losing the 2008 Democratic ...

Climate Will Change Faster Than We Will
February 26, 2014
Those who care deeply about addressing climate change now (or at least now-ish!) have a nasty little problem with which to contend. The short version of this problem is that “people don’t care enough about it.” It’s trickier than that, though. When the ...

House of Cards Is a Dark Fantasy of Effective Government
February 24, 2014
House of Cards is a terrible show. It’s cynical in all the wrong ways and it shows a “dark underside” of insider Washington that doesn’t exist. There are no “puppetmasters” like Kevin Spacey’s character in real life—the government is ...

From the Office of Pointless Budget Maneuvering
February 21, 2014
It’s almost time for President Obama to release his annual budget proposal, and the world couldn’t be more not excited. Because the president’s budget proposal, much like his State of the Union address, is another one of those rituals that means very little in ...

Now What, Left Wing?
February 21, 2014
It’s a genre by now: advice for the powerlorn. The tone varies, from sermon to pep talk to strategy memo. Liberals are urged to be bolder; radicals are admonished to chill. We need more vision or more grit; more clarity or more passion; utopian dreams or common sense, or both. ...

Searching for Nuance in the Charter School Debate
February 20, 2014
The point of public schooling, H.L. Mencken wrote, “is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” That’s the attack, for those of you who are trying ...

Google Plus You Equals $$$$
February 19, 2014
It is one of the great Internet mysteries of the last few years: Why does Google Plus still exist? The search engine company’s social network launched in mid-2011 and most people who signed up to “check it out” stopped using it several hours later in mid-2011. ...

We’re Going to Need Some More Professors (Or Not)
February 18, 2014
You’ll be shocked to hear it, but Nicholas Kristof is missing the point (which your Baffler correspondents have been obliged to point out before). “When I was a kid,” Kristof said in a February 15 blog post, “the Kennedy administration had its ...

Play, Dissected
February 18, 2014
“But why on earth won’t they let us play?” That is the question I came away with after reading David Graeber’s excellent “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?”, from The Baffler no. 24. It’s a question I have been asking myself since I began studying and ...