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Advice for a Trumpland Thanksgiving
Conventional wisdom holds that “kitchen table activism” with kith and kin is somehow easier than talking to strangers, but I’ve never found that to be true. In my experience, people—especially conservative people—are more likely to accept disagreement from a stranger ...

Are Sex Offenders Human?
November 15, 2016
In July 16, 2015, Barack Obama visited a federal prison, the first sitting president ever to do so. It was a powerful statement of support for a broad movement—stretching from Black Lives Matter to Right on Crime—to reform the U.S. criminal justice system, one of the ...

Daily Bafflements
November 14, 2016
• And so it begins. Over the weekend Mr. Trump, when asked how many immigrants he wanted to deport (or jail), threw out a cool three million figure. He gave a top job to Steve Bannon, a man who makes your common-or-garden spin doctor look quaint. We suggest you do not ...

Crash of the Pop-Culture Party
November 14, 2016
To hear some pundits insist, with perfect seriousness, that it was important for Taylor Swift to speak out on Hillary Clinton's behalf ahead of the election was to realize how celebritized our virtue-signaling politics has become. When disappointed liberals quote The Hunger ...

Show Me Where It Hurts
November 11, 2016
History hurts. That is how we know it. That is how we must understand our place in it. It may not hurt for everyone all the time, but that doesn’t mean the bones aren’t broken under the skin. Too often we may not feel it, and that is probably by design. Because so ...

Round-up of Recriminations
November 10, 2016
Recriminations will abound in the days to come. The finger-pointing won’t stop for months, years, maybe decades. After all, it’s not every day global empires collapse from within, tweet by inexorable tweet. Given the scale of the disaster, we should expect the arguments to ...

Daily Bafflements
November 09, 2016
There’s an Onion piece from 2002 entitled “Man Blames Hangover On Everything But How Much He Drank.” You don’t even need to read it; we’ve all been there. One has to wonder if the Democratic elite is going to pull the ...

The New Hampshire Special
After two days of door-knocking for Hillary Clinton in southern New Hampshire, my girlfriend and I decided to stop off at Manchester’s Red Arrow Diner before driving back to Brooklyn. It had come highly recommended (the diner, that is, not the door-knocking, which I knew ...

Daily Bafflements
November 07, 2016
• On purges, cigarette-pack warnings, and projectile vomiting: Baffler contributing editor Barbara Ehrenreich provides a medical perspective on the U.S. election. (Thanks, The Guardian!) • Fresh from a Trump rally, Baffler contributing editor Astra Taylor enters a ...

Born and Bred
November 07, 2016
This election cycle has been rife with punditry on the anger of the white working class, supposedly fueling Donald Trump’s rise to prominence. But like many of the overblown narratives rounding out the cable news cycle in this bizarre election, it’s not quite true. In White ...

Daily Bafflements
November 04, 2016
• Has cryonics taken a great leap forward in Russia? Forgive us for being a bit skeptical, after Corey Pein’s dive into American transhumanism back in issue 30. As Bloomberg Businessweek cheerily summarizes, • If you believe everything you read, time may be running ...