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Daily Bafflements
January 17, 2017
• Amid mounting pressure on Obama to pardon whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden this week (update: Manning will be freed in May!) it’s worth revisiting Astra Taylor’s salvo on presidential pardons, and their shady, unofficial ...

Pissologies
January 17, 2017
Why didn’t Donald Trump just piss on the bed himself? Everything else about the story makes sense; it doesn’t really matter whether it’s accurate or not. The rest of the allegations against Trump—that he’s a long-standing Russian asset, that his entire campaign was run ...

Not Unwinnable
January 16, 2017
As a general rule, it’s wise to steer clear from analyzing memes that originate and evolve on the Twittersphere. Users wield the medium in different enough ways that Twitter is at best a fractured discourse, it moves too quickly to be relevant longer than a day, and the ...

Obama Out
This week, the country’s dominant mode of pop-cultural expression was the public speech—something of a throwback trend, given Americans’ patterns of media consumption nowadays. In the smartphone era, we tend not to gather around and listen to our leaders ...

Ungovernable
Once it was clear that he had won the Electoral College, he was going to be the next president of The United States, a point that I raised was “Now we need to prepare to be ungovernable.” That lingered in my head. It is a phrase that I remember picking up from my younger ...

Daily Bafflements
January 11, 2017
• When it comes to election 2016, you could say, “when it rains, it pours.” And “pour” it did last night after BuzzFeed dropped a 35-page dossier on what kompromat (compromising material) the Russians allegedly have on ...

Russia to Our Right
January 11, 2017
Russian interference in U.S. politics during the elections of 2016 and beyond is one big, fat, ugly squirrel. It commands attention but distracts from the related but more important matter of rising, Russian-supported far-right movements throughout the world, which support ...

After Truth?
January 10, 2017
Post-blackness has retreated from public discourse. And now "post-truth" has become the latest empty idea in search of a meaning. Both obscure the fact that blackness and truth are always under siege.

Shameless Liars
January 10, 2017
Today, we’re quick to call those who lie too grandly or frequently, or without requisite shame, pathological liars. But psychiatrists tend to mean something more exact. The pathological liar was manifestly not a con artist. For one thing, he didn’t lie for the sake of wealth ...

Daily Bafflements
January 09, 2017
• Longtime Baffler hand Siddhartha Deb has a books column in 2017! In his first piece, today, he remembers John Berger, and his “principled opposition to the contemporary idea of the writer as entrepreneur.” • “There have always been crazy movements ...

A Tax on Shivering
January 09, 2017
If one of the functions of writing is to make the reader see, and see again, here is a brief list of what John Berger made visible. Paintings, photographs, advertisements, motorcycles, swimming pools, the aging body, migrating workers, and mass demonstrations; the intricate ...

Daily Bafflements
January 06, 2017
• Today in tech: Tristan Harris, a Silicon Valley stalwart with a résumé that includes the likes of Google and Apple, has begun running “digital detox experiments” designed to put an end to the practice of hacking human psychology. According to the Atlantic, Harris is ...