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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 ...

Barren and Dangerous
October 24, 2016
In the thriller du jour The Girl on the Train, a kind of Rashômon for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, three female perspectives compete for our attention and sympathy. At its core, Rachel (Emily Blunt) enacts her onscreen alcoholism via smudged eye makeup and artfully blurred ...

Cars Entering and Leaving Mosul
October 21, 2016
What they don’t tell you about the battle for Mosul is how boring it is, hour by hour, day by day. From my vantage point near the Iraqi village of Bartella, ISIS positions are visible in the smoke-filled distance, across the crinkled flatness of Nineveh; in front of me, gangs ...

Trump TV?
Until very recently, it seemed self-evident that Donald Trump was the biggest raging moron in American public life. But that was before CNN president Jeff Zucker’s star turn before the guardians of establishment wisdom at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. A full year ...

Daily Bafflements
October 19, 2016
• It’s that time again! Join us for our second presidential debate live blog this evening, featuring the likes of Amber A’Lee Frost, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, Chris Lehmann, and David Rees. Tune in to this space around 9 p.m. tonight. We promise it’ll help ...

Your CV Groans with Guilt and Shame
We tell ourselves that our circumstances are our own fault because we find it more reassuring to believe that we are to blame for our woes as opposed to, say, capitalism or basic misfortune. The sociopolitical or existential threat of a world beyond our control is far more ...

When All Boats Aren’t Lifted
October 18, 2016
One of the key features of our current malaise is what I call "disremembering." The fact is that some people in this country think that we have double digit unemployment because black people don't want to work. They think that white wealth is thirteen times that of black wealth ...

Daily Bafflements
October 17, 2016
• The only thing that got us through the abject depression of the last “presidential” debate were the witty asides of Baffler regulars Natasha Vargas-Cooper, David Rees, Laurie Penny, and EIC Chris Lehmann. So we will be liveblogging the next debate, on ...

Fear of a Feminist Future
October 17, 2016
To imagine the future is a political practice, which means that it’s both strangely awful and awfully strange. In 1990, a team of scientists and researchers was given the task of mapping far-future scenarios for the disposal of nuclear waste. Their dilemma: how to design a ...

Beverly Hillbilly Elegy
October 14, 2016
Imagine if you discovered one day that your father was a closeted polygamist, that your brother secretly sold meth, or that your sister the schoolteacher had an affair with one of her fifth graders. A similarly dark family secret confronted me recently, when I learned that my ...

Battle of the Brands
So it’s come to this: the most potentially explosive revelations about America’s Fifth Avenue Mussolini, Donald Trump, are behind an entertainment-industry paywall, one that no mere journalistic enterprise has the power or (in all likelihood) the resources to scale. Reality ...

Daily Bafflements
October 12, 2016
• President Barack Obama opines at Wired that today is the greatest, bestest time to be alive in the United States. Although Obama is still mired in the day-to-day slog that is his day job, he has enough free time to guest edit Wired, which naturally ...