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Beverly Hillbilly Elegy
October 14, 2016
Imagine if you discovered one day that your father was a closeted polygamist, that your brother secretly sold meth, or that your sister the schoolteacher had an affair with one of her fifth graders. A similarly dark family secret confronted me recently, when I learned that my ...

Battle of the Brands
So it’s come to this: the most potentially explosive revelations about America’s Fifth Avenue Mussolini, Donald Trump, are behind an entertainment-industry paywall, one that no mere journalistic enterprise has the power or (in all likelihood) the resources to scale. Reality ...

Daily Bafflements
October 12, 2016
• President Barack Obama opines at Wired that today is the greatest, bestest time to be alive in the United States. Although Obama is still mired in the day-to-day slog that is his day job, he has enough free time to guest edit Wired, which naturally ...

Friend, Swipe Your Trump Card!
Of course, the fact that the glorious Presidential Black Card can be “activated” for a piddling $35 belies the intimidation factor of its “none more black” aesthetic. It’s the equivalent of spray-painting a pile of spaghetti red and telling people it’s a Ferrari. But ...

Workaday Woes
October 11, 2016
In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell describes advertising firms as “the fungi . . . that sprout from a decaying capitalism.” The same might well be said for American equity funds, 90 percent of which underperformed the market last year. And yet, for most ...

The Trump Train Is Actually a Trump Plane
October 10, 2016
The condition of our nation’s airports seems to be an obsession of The Donald’s—a somewhat unlikely fixation, as many were quick to point out, for someone who refuses to fly commercial. Trump is currently in possession of a small fleet of aircrafts: a Cessna Citation X ...

Daily Bafflements
October 10, 2016
• Moscow is replacing Microsoft technologies with local alternatives. At the beginning of the year, Evgeny Morozov commented in The Baffler that: • Over at The New Republic, Chip Colwell mines the question of why corporations, but not natural features, have ...

The Death of the Autodidact
October 07, 2016
Harry S. Truman seems likely to be our last self-educated president. Currently we are on pace for five consecutive Ivy League-primed commanders-in-chief. Of the twenty-three cabinet or cabinet-rank members in the Obama Administration, thirteen graduated from either Harvard or ...

The Election That Mattered
October 06, 2016
David Daley makes the case in his new book RATF**KED that if you don’t understand what happened in 2010, you don’t understand something fundamental about why American politics is the way it is today. "It's the biggest political heist in modern times," he says.

Daily Bafflements
October 05, 2016
• Chris Lehmann—brave soul that he is—has spent a significant amount of time this election season mulling over Donald Trump. Now, over at The Nation, he’s plunging into the growing industry of Trump biographies and Trump’s gospel of ...

The Snarxist Temptation
October 04, 2016
This is a letter to all those who, like me, have been foolish enough to spend this election season feeling something about it (hopeful, committed, angry, you name it). More than anything, though, it’s a letter to those—particularly those on the left—who chose ...