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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” ...

Faux News Channel
In line with venerable liberal tradition, the disaster known as Election ’16 has bred a slew of culprits behind the surprise defeat of Hillary Clinton, all reassuringly distant from the leadership sanctums of the national Democratic Party: James Comey, WikiLeaks, Vladimir ...

Daily Bafflements
November 30, 2016
• Our lovely readers have weighed in on our Bleak Friday reading list, “Good Books for Dark Times.” Over on our Facebook page, several readers offered their own additions, including: Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, Eric ...

Looking Plain, Getting Laid
I am a twenty-one-year-old cisgendered, heterosexual woman, and I am not hot. I don't mean that I am ugly, but I also don't just need a makeover, and I don't have low self-esteem; I just mean that I am not hot. A little fat, bad skin, a bit of a weak chin—that sort of thing. ...

Starving in America
November 29, 2016
In the late seventeenth century, the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather laid out a vision for America in a fiery sermon: “For those who indulge themselves in idleness,” he told his congregation, “the express command of God unto us is, that we should let them starve.” Nearly ...

Daily Bafflements
November 28, 2016
• Angela Nagle podcast alert: “Because all of this stuff is so steeped in irony,” she comments, drawing on her Baffler essay on 4chan, “it’s very hard to know what anyone actually means . . . So for example if you see a swastika being used ...