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Rubber and Heroin in a Dying City
In 2001, facing an industry significantly weaker than it had seen in recent years, the Goodyear Tire Company laid off nearly eight thousand employees around the country, many in its hometown of Akron, Ohio. Akron is a town that has run on rubber since 1898, when Frank Seiberling ...

Useful Idiots of the Art World
March 08, 2017
In a gallery in East London, in the summer of 2016, something strange was taking place. LD50 was about a year old by then, run by Lucia Diego, and had hosted shows by prominent artists at varying stages of their careers—Dinos and Jake Chapman, John Russell and Joey Holder, ...

Daily Bafflements
March 07, 2017
• “This isn’t shaping up to be the millennium we were promised,” comments Chris Lehmann, in his introduction to Baffler no. 34, “The Snare of Preparation,” which is out on newsstands today. “The data-bedazzled twenty-first century was to be a time of painlessly ...

Our Better Ban
March 07, 2017
My brother went to medical school at a state-run university in Pakistan. You had to be brilliant to get in, not just really smart but brilliant in the sense of perfect to the final percentage point. The list of admitted students was published on a bulletin board outside the ...

Framed Narrative
March 06, 2017
It is hard these days for even Israel’s most diehard supporters to pretend that something has not gone seriously wrong. A case in point: the sentencing last month of Elor Azaria, a twenty-year-old Israeli army medic caught on video putting a bullet in the head of a wounded ...

The Unhappy Medium
March 06, 2017
In every society of every kind, there is a simple technique available to reasonable moderates wishing to prove that the left and the right are actually the same, and therefore discredit the seriousness of their politics by association. The exercise relies on tautological ...

Daily Bafflements
March 03, 2017
• Poor Travis Kalanick. The hits just keep on coming. Since the starry-eyed media has suddenly realized Uber is a terrible company (is one of those words redundant?), we’ve seen him lecture a driver on “personal responsibility” (the employee told Kalanick Uber’s ...

The Handmaiden of Entrepreneurship
March 03, 2017
In the authors’ entrepreneurial hermeneutics, all of us are born orphans, claiming true love and respect only when we create something of value in the marketplace that other people need. Here Heidegger’s concept of geworfenheit (thrownness)—the idea that our existence ...