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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 ...

The Sad Taste of Success
January 06, 2017
“For a while,” the New York Times recently observed, “it seemed as if slapping the word ‘girl’ on a title virtually guaranteed best-seller status.” There were the mass-market paperbacks, like Gone Girl, as well as the more highbrow ...

Meltdown of the Phantom Snowflakes
January 04, 2017
“Are you a strong woman?” The camera crew wanted a snappy answer. We were filming a short news segment on the beach in Brighton, with a frigid wind gusting around the boom mic and seagulls circling overhead, screaming for chips. I didn’t know how to reply. The issue of ...

Daily Bafflements
January 04, 2017
• This is for all the ladies out there: Did you know your male partner is micro-cheating and, like, totally getting away with it? On Facebook, he’s reacting to all these other women’s posts with a “love,” not a “like” (no. ...

Keeping Up with the Deviants
You've touched on a curious new phenomenon I've been observing: I have recently noticed that more often than not, modern, culturally progressive young people no longer shamefully confess to me their perversions. It's sad, really—I live for prurient gossip, and there's no ...

Sad Dreams of a Sanitized Heaven
January 03, 2017
There are many horrors the incoming administration promises to impose on the disadvantaged in America, and one of the cruelest is a crackdown on a woman’s right to access abortion. It is all the more frightening for already being well underway. On December 12, ...