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Daily Bafflements
October 05, 2016
• Chris Lehmann—brave soul that he is—has spent a significant amount of time this election season mulling over Donald Trump. Now, over at The Nation, he’s plunging into the growing industry of Trump biographies and Trump’s gospel of ...

The Snarxist Temptation
October 04, 2016
This is a letter to all those who, like me, have been foolish enough to spend this election season feeling something about it (hopeful, committed, angry, you name it). More than anything, though, it’s a letter to those—particularly those on the left—who chose ...

As We Saw Ourselves
October 04, 2016
On September 4, 1957, Carlotta Walls LaNier and eight other African American students tried to enter Central High School in Little Rock, but the students, who became known as the Little Rock Nine, were turned away by the Arkansas National Guard. The dress that LaNier wore that ...

Daily Bafflements
October 03, 2016
• The Hungarian referendum on whether to resettle refugees was botched; half the country didn’t vote at all and about 6 percent cast a spoilt ballot. Astra Taylor wrote in to us from Piraeus Port, Athens, on the day after the EU-Turkey deal on refugee ...

Daily Bafflements
September 30, 2016
• As if being known for inventing the Twitter hashtag isn’t enough of a sign that you’re an irritating schmuck, writing about how you came to non-monogamy by going to Burning Man ought to do the trick. Chris Messina, #hashtag inventor, is here to ...

History and You
September 30, 2016
Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History sidles up to listeners with the faux-charming tagline “Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance.” This plea-cum-disclaimer is an act of charity, perhaps, for a school subject supposedly demanding rote ...

The Pseudo Bowl of Politics
Like most revered American public traditions, presidential debates are jury-rigged miasmas. True, Monday’s feverishly hyped Hofstra University rhetorical slugfest between Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican Lord of Destruction Donald Trump didn’t ...

Daily Bafflements
September 28, 2016
• Midasing, cookie-grubbing, and gish galloping are just a few of the rhetorical moves embraced by Trump, as The Week helpfully explains.   • Chris Inglis, former deputy director of the National Security Agency, has taken to NPR to dub Oliver ...

Daily Bafflements
September 26, 2016
• The video footage of the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott raises, yet again, the question of how the law keeps protecting cops who panic. Natasha Vargas-Cooper wrote about it earlier this year. • “By galloping sideways, the cat ...

Bye Bye, Blackbird
September 26, 2016
During his long life, it was said that Gore Vidal’s literary and cultural appeal stemmed from one singular feat: that he pisses from a very great height. Vidal’s rarefied, mingent corpus was disorienting and too snobbish for some, but for grown-ups, it’s a ...

Daily Bafflements
September 23, 2016
• Over at Columbia Journalism Review, Shelley Hepworth dives into the sticky situation surrounding eyewitness video. In an era where citizens with cellphones often have the first—and best—footage of news events, what is the responsibility of journalists and ...