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Old School
February 14, 2017
Anatomist Louis Bolk once called humans sexually mature primate fetuses. (And yes, it sounds suitably disturbing in the original German: einen zur Geschlechtsreife gelangten Primatenfetus.) As Bolk patiently explained, our evolutionary history is something of an arms race ...

Daily Bafflements
February 13, 2017
• “Gerrymandering, in a word, is why American democracy is broken,” claims The Washington Post, echoing David Daley, in his Q&A with Baffler associate editor Dave Denison. “Eight of the ten most gerrymandered districts in the United States were drawn ...

Running Riot
February 13, 2017
In Psychology 101 you learn of those “false binary” or “false dichotomy” situations that crop up where two viewpoints are so powerful they tend to pull all other options into their orbit. If you're not capitalist, you're socialist. In Chicago if you're not a White Sox ...

Flight of the Punk-Pecking Carnage Vultures
February 13, 2017
Let’s face it—unless the consumerist world order crumbles soon, the music we make in protest now could easily, a few decades down the line, end up tinkling over the speakers of an antiseptic big-box store. That’s all the more reason to stop worrying about how our ...

Daily Bafflements
February 10, 2017
• “Society is creating a new crop of alpha women who are unable to love,” warns Fox News. Authoritarian wives everywhere are forgetting which side their bread is buttered on, apparently. As concerned as we are about this development, we’ll stick with the ...

The Defiant I Am Not Your Negro
The film’s promotional poster notably features just Baldwin’s eyes and the title, and all through the film are magnetic images of black people staring, looking off, caught in their own subjectivity. The effect of these eyes turned back on the viewer is breathtaking. What ...

Suits and Ties
February 10, 2017
The alt-right has been going through some growing pains these last few weeks. On inauguration day, the now-notorious Richard Spencer got socked in the face on camera. The assailant is still at large, the celebrations of his getting attacked are viral, and there’s a video game ...

Old-school Organizing in Iowa
There is also a lot of inspiring social organizing in Iowa. It is not to a scale compared to New York City or L.A. or anything, but in 2012 a grassroots community organization named Iowa CCI, bird-dogged Mitt Romney at the state fair and forced him into his “Corporations are ...

It’s Already Happened Here
February 09, 2017
At the center of all this executive-assured destruction, there is Trump, both a hater and a loser. Desperate for applause and enthusiastic about abusing executive power, he is driven by narcissism and need. His paranoia and megalomania is typical in foreign authoritarian ...

Turn On, Tune In, Disrupt Something
February 09, 2017
There’s a direct line to be drawn between the counterfeit “at one with everything” consciousness revelations of the Golden Gate Park Human Be-In and the phony “disruption” revolutions of Palo Alto today. You can “Turn on, Tune in, Drop” without missing this ...

Freedom for Me, Not Thee
Welcome to This American Carnage, your weekly slice of life from the country of Trump. Donald Trump’s first hundred days in office may be a disaster for the country, but for that pocket of conservative Christians worried about the ease of religiously motivated discrimination, ...

The Philistine Factory
February 08, 2017
“The life of observation, meditation, cogitation, and speculation pursued as an end in itself is the proper life of man. From reason moreover proceeds the proper control of the lower elements of human nature—the appetites and the active, motor, impulses.” —John Dewey, ...