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Comedy Gold, Man!
How does a decades-old plutocratic convergence of power look to the hometown paper of America’s public-sector ruling class? Why, like a puckish plotline in a high-living thirties comedy of manners, or as fodder for a campy sci-fi horror punchline, that’s how! Here, for your ...

Daily Bafflements
December 14, 2016
• Baffler contributing editor Susan Faludi’s In the Darkroom has made the New York Times’ Top Ten Books of 2016, where it was described as a “rich, arresting and ultimately generous memoir, [in which] Faludi—long known for her feminist journalism— tries to ...

Do Friedmans Dream of Electric Sheeple?
December 13, 2016
Thomas Friedman's books are distinctive for their awesome length and unrelenting banality—sort of like a tech-support chatbot that got a non-fiction MFA. But there's a question to resolve: Is he a human being or an android?

Daily Bafflements
December 12, 2016
• Pankaj Mishra writes about the new angry world we live in, in which old liberal dichotomies no longer make sense. Quoting Tocqueville, he argues that “people liberated from old hierarchies ‘want equality in freedom, and, if they cannot get it, they still want ...

The Russia House
December 12, 2016
“Russians pretty bad people, Mr. Wessby,” Tiu agreed. “They stink bad.” — John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy I, for one, do not look forward to the rule of our new Russophilic overlords. The Trump camp is lousy with Putin apologists, including ...

The Impunity Game
December 09, 2016
“There is something about the [CIA’s] detention and interrogation program that brings out the worst in people,” says Dr. James Mitchell, a psychologist who helped the CIA design and implement so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs), which have been ...

Neutering the News
It was pretty much obvious at the outset of Liz Spayd’s tenure as New York Times public editor that the paper had elevated a dangerous simpleton into a position of influence. And now, with Spayd’s tone-deaf chiding of Times reporters for mostly anodyne comments on the empty ...

Daily Bafflements
December 07, 2016
• Dear Bafflers, we offer you a new issue, “The Virtue Cartel.” This one’s dedicated to the virtuecrats—in the words of Chris Lehmann, these are the “policy big thinkers, military strategists, ...

The View from Abroad
December 06, 2016
Mr. Trump and Mr. Creosote, by Jake Lamar in Paris It was in October, during the third and final debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, that the memory came to me. Watching Trump spew a wild and often incoherent stream of invective on ...

Failing the Empathy Exams
December 05, 2016
There’s been a lot of talk about empathy lately. Most of this talk, though, has been disastrously misguided. Many on the beleaguered American left have been vehemently pushing back against mainstream calls to empathize with Trump supporters since the election. With ...

Daily Bafflements
December 05, 2016
• Baffler contributing editor Susan Faludi demonstrates how free speech came under attack in Viktor “The Viktator” Orbán’s Hungary, drawing parallels with Trump’s intimidation of the press. It’s a sobering read, but enlightening: Read it ...

A People’s History of the Third Reich
December 02, 2016
Liberals should stop asking whether Donald Trump—or his chief strategist and the former head of Breitbart, Steve Bannon—is a Nazi. Not because the employees of Trump’s son-in-law and adviser said so in an embarrassing paean to the “zealous Zionist” ...