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Con Air
It seems entirely fitting that in the final stretch of a presidential campaign militantly indifferent to a host of policy crises, from climate change to wealth inequality, from antitrust prosecutions to affordable housing, the American public is left to gnaw maliciously on a ...

Daily Bafflements
November 02, 2016
• The pipeline protests in North Dakota illustrate how difficult it is for communities to agitate successfully against corporations, which the law regards as people, when corporations want to take over the nature they value. Would granting legal ...

Letter from Louisiana
November 01, 2016
Even as Donald Trump’s campaign has zero chance of winning California or his own state of New York—and despite being spectacularly, unprecedentedly unfit for the office of the presidency—Trump will easily win the eight electoral votes of Louisiana. What could possibly ...

Daily Bafflements
October 31, 2016
• Happy Reformation Day! On this day in 1517, Martin Luther—once an overachieving Catholic monk—nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. You could, as the Economist has, say he was the first person to ...

2016: A Liberal Odyssey
October 31, 2016
In a heart-wrenching letter published in the New York Times, U.S.-born journalist Michael Luo described his family’s recent encounter with the kind of bigoted outburst—culminating with the admonition that Luo’s family should “go back to China”—that, sadly, is quite ...

Flight or Fight
October 28, 2016
When I arrived in Athens in July, I sent an email to Delphina, an activist and blogger who was following the anarchist activities in the city. I was hoping she could show me around and fill me in on some of the nuance that I, as a non-Greek speaker, was missing in the political ...

Words Fail
While media goliaths continue to merge and recombine, one plucky upstart has lately captured the imagination of the infotainment world. I speak, naturally, of the Facebook-only nightly newscast now airing at the behest of the Donald Trump campaign, “Trump Tower ...

Daily Bafflements
October 26, 2016
• Today in “are you fucking kidding me?”: The Federalist helpfully proclaims that “The Senate Should Refuse to Confirm All of Hillary Clinton’s Judicial Nominees.” And since it’s not technically a column about the ...

Tom Hayden and the Vocation of Politics
October 26, 2016
There’s a revelatory scene in a hard-to-find documentary, Troublemakers, shot by Norm Fruchter and Bob Machover in 1965 in the poor wards of Newark, N.J. Tom Hayden and some 100 others had left their rather comfy college-kid lives when Students for a Democratic ...

Just Plain Nasty
October 25, 2016
“It wasn’t just Hillary Clinton you insulted,” they say, “it was me. I’m a nasty woman too.” This was inevitable. As soon as Donald Trump interrupted Clinton in Vegas, in the middle of a deeply boring section on “entitlement ...

Daily Bafflements
October 24, 2016
•  The Times recommends Jessa Crispin’s foray into the healthy linkage between politics and spiritualism, from the latest issue of the magazine: So do we. •  Remember Friday, when the Internet was hacked? Baffler contributing editor Jacob Silverman ...