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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, ...

Daily Bafflements
January 03, 2017
• Forget about the United States for a moment. France has accorded its workers “the right to disconnect,” that is, French companies of a certain size have to negotiate a protocol with employees, so that work does not habitually spill over into free time. In The ...

Humane Billboards
December 30, 2016
Ever pass through a city and feel punched in the face by adverts? Descending into London’s tube network it can seem like I’m the product, one unit among thousands dropping down a human conveyor belt. Here I am presented to corporation after corporation, then a break, and the ...

Your Political Correctness Is Showing, Conservatives
December 29, 2016
President-elect Donald Trump and his chief strategist Steve Bannon keep confirming an argument I’ve been making for a while: conservatives are just as “politically correct” as they claim liberals and the left are. They’re just as touchy about it, too—in fact, they ...

Who Says That Next Year Can’t Be Worse?
December 28, 2016
Even at the end of certifiably non-dismal years, the exercise of compiling a “Best of the Fast-Receding Year” roster of stories, posts, and outbursts always reeks with a bit of unseemly self-congratulation. And make no mistake: 2016 is a colossal fucking bummer of a year, ...

Be Afraid
December 23, 2016
In the final minutes of Doomocracy—a piece of immersive theater styled after a haunted house that ran in Brooklyn during the month leading up to Election Day—audience members were confronted with three doors. One was labeled “Clinton,” one ...

The Ass and the Lap Dogs
Like any well-trained lap dog, our national political press is rallying to the unique challenge of covering an incoming American president who is a notoriously truth-averse merchant of social-media make believe by performing the one trick it knows how to do when a new master’s ...

The Baffler’s Trump-Era Gift Guide
December 21, 2016
Forcing the phrase “Merry Christmas” back to the forefront of American culture will make our liberal-infected country “great again,” insists president-elect Donald Trump—but somehow, we’re not feeling the cheer. Instead of masking our suffering with enough mulled ...

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 ...