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Decent Drapery
December 20, 2016
The first time it happened was a sunny afternoon early in the spring just after Barack Obama’s inauguration. I was fetching my mail from the post office, located in the wing of a house in the center of the village, right across the road from the town green. I was standing ...

Daily Bafflements
December 19, 2016
• Was the Trump campaign’s decision to spend 3.2 million on badly-designed hats between July 2015 and September 2016 a good one? Over at the Fast Company, Baffler art director Lindsay Ballant gives an insight into why it was indeed. ...

Breadwinners, Breadlosers
December 19, 2016
Like a malevolent Mr. Magoo, Donald Trump continues to barrel incompetently, obtusely, and conveniently into economic windfalls. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently reported the lowest unemployment rate since 2007. At 4.6 percent, the American economy is ...

Daily Bafflements
December 16, 2016
• In Queensland, Australia, a horse named Party Till Dawn tested positive for methamphetamine. That makes the aptly-named mare “the only other horse in the state to test positive for methamphetamine was Island Tang in Mackay in October last ...

Tech Meets Trump
December 16, 2016
It’s clarifying to see the oligarchy assemble itself in the open. President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet selection show has offered a murderer’s row of venal billionaires, spousal abusers, wild-eyed ex-generals, Christian fundamentalists, racists, and the ...

New American Feud
December 16, 2016
The 1980s in America meant saying tata to Watergate salads and letting a bit more of the world into our national cuisine. Then, in a 1998 restaurant review in New York magazine, Hal Rubenstein recorded a plot twist in New York’s—and, by domino effect, America’s—culinary ...

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 ...