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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 ...

Race to the Bottom
One might well ask, amid this new chorus of pundit swooning, why is it that so many of the Trump administration’s policies are explicitly designed to foment hate and evil? The painfully obvious M.O. of the Trump White House is to deny basic civil protections to the vast ...

It Is Just Open Season Now
There is a hypocrisy in being shocked about Trump proposing a border wall when the compromise by Republicans and Democrats included this ramp-up of ICE and CBP and a border wall that was deeply, deeply militarized. I think that is one of the things that we need to pay attention ...

Plus-Size Proletarian
Mind and body cannot be divided (until we’re all uploaded to the cloud or transplanted into sexy robot bodies, of course). So while your guilt is an understandable result of our terrible atomized neoliberal society, it is ultimately a malfunction.

Undoing Islamophobia
Muslim Americans must be at the forefront of the fight to preserve—and increasingly, to restore—them in the face of the most sustained assault they have received in many decades. A concerted effort on all these fronts, both nationally and globally, may well ensure that at ...

After the Ugly Laws
February 28, 2017
The ways disabled individuals move when we “crawl” or “walk on all fours,” the ways we sound when we “screech” or “howl” or “make strange noises,” the ways we lack control when our bodies relieve themselves at inappropriate times, the way we transgress social ...