Skip to content

Latest Posts

Web Exclusives

Workaday Woes
October 11, 2016
In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell describes advertising firms as “the fungi . . . that sprout from a decaying capitalism.” The same might well be said for American equity funds, 90 percent of which underperformed the market last year. And yet, for most ...

The Trump Train Is Actually a Trump Plane
October 10, 2016
The condition of our nation’s airports seems to be an obsession of The Donald’s—a somewhat unlikely fixation, as many were quick to point out, for someone who refuses to fly commercial. Trump is currently in possession of a small fleet of aircrafts: a Cessna Citation X ...

Daily Bafflements
October 10, 2016
• Moscow is replacing Microsoft technologies with local alternatives. At the beginning of the year, Evgeny Morozov commented in The Baffler that: • Over at The New Republic, Chip Colwell mines the question of why corporations, but not natural features, have ...

The Death of the Autodidact
October 07, 2016
Harry S. Truman seems likely to be our last self-educated president. Currently we are on pace for five consecutive Ivy League-primed commanders-in-chief. Of the twenty-three cabinet or cabinet-rank members in the Obama Administration, thirteen graduated from either Harvard or ...

The Election That Mattered
October 06, 2016
David Daley makes the case in his new book RATF**KED that if you don’t understand what happened in 2010, you don’t understand something fundamental about why American politics is the way it is today. "It's the biggest political heist in modern times," he says.

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 ...