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The Slow Confiscation of Everything
February 17, 2017
There will be no definite moment can say that yes, today we are fucked, and yesterday we were unfucked. Instead the fuckery increases incrementally year on year, until this is the way the world ends: not with a bang, not with a bonfire, but with the slow and savage confiscation ...

Daily Bafflements
February 17, 2017
• Did you know that today is the Day of Facts? Museums and libraries around the country are tweeting furiously in support of their favorite commodity, knowledge. • Today in plutocrats: It’s not their fault, says science. Rich people just think differently. ...

New Praetorianism
February 17, 2017
There is a fundamental synergy between Democratic chauvinist exceptionalism, GOP clash-of-civilizations dogma, and Trump’s grotesque strongman antics. The Democrats may prefer a reboot of Cold War apocalypticism; Trump, for his part, looks eager to tear up global treaties, ...

A Moment of Urgency
On January 28, as protesters rushed to airports around the country seeking to defend refugees and migrants against Trump’s travel ban, taxi drivers with the New York Taxi Workers Alliance took the protest a step further and refused to pick up fares at JFK Airport. The taxi ...

Follow the Mendacity
The key directive for the media, now that the Post’s reporting has claimed its first White House casualty, is not to let up on its side of its battle with the Trump White House for a moment. After all, the Flynn saga shows in stark relief that the preferred operating procedure ...

Borderline Delusion
February 16, 2017
No room in this history for settler colonialism and slavery, none for the importation of cheap, easily exploited labor in the “on” periods, for the racial exclusions of the “off” periods expressed in a preference for white European populations.

Pax Trumplandia
Welcome to This American Carnage, your weekly slice of life from the country of Trump. Another February, another Munich Security Conference, a.k.a. the “world’s most prestigious geopolitical gathering.” This time, though, the conference will take place as a ...

The Long Haul
Welcome to The Baffler’s agony corner, YOUR SORRY ASS, where Amber A’Lee Frost dispenses bossy, judgmental advice on how to live your life fairly, kindly, and with good humor. Send us your rants and pleas, please: [email protected].  Dear Your Sorry Ass, Like a ...

Is Trump a Populist?
February 15, 2017
People relate “rightwing populism” to the excoriation of immigrants, demonization of the poor, and railing about high finance on the campaign trail. That criticism never amounts to any actual policies when the candidate is in office. What’s left is simply xenophobia and ...

Deportation Nation
I think we sugarcoat it by making it very procedural, but actually, that night she was kidnapped from her family and there are many of us in the community that took action. We had them waiting outside in vigil for Lupita in hopes that the director would have released her. ...

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 ...