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Daily Bafflements
August 15, 2016
• Over at In These Times, Baffler contributor Kathleen Geier writes that “the progressive label has become little more than a marketing tool . . . As early as the 1970s, liberalism was in bad odor, and some liberal politicians were adopting ‘progressive’ ...

Daily Bafflements
August 10, 2016
• As David Rees wrote last week, “We’re at the point where it seems like there’s nothing Trump hasn’t done—or wouldn’t do, or won’t soon do.” Of course, that was before Trump’s comments on “Second Amendment ...

Noo in Town
August 10, 2016
The biggest economic advances often arise not from boom industries garnering big VC paydays, but from the support businesses that sprout along the periphery to exploit the boom. They fasten on to major economic trendlines the way that fungi, moss, and lichen exploit trees. Take ...

Q & A with Geert Lovink
August 09, 2016
Presently holed up at the Amsterdam School of Applied Sciences, 7,000 miles from Silicon Valley, tech critic Geert Lovink has held it down in different forms of European bohemia since the eighties, asking, over a series of five books: How can we use technology to actually make ...

The Ho-Hum Squad
August 09, 2016
Some time in April 2015, Jared Leto sent someone to throw a dead pig on a table during the rehearsals for Suicide Squad. Those who were present at the time recount their shock and fear beholding the scene, their worry that they might be working with someone who was genuinely ...

Daily Bafflements
August 08, 2016
• The conclusions of the New York Times’s deep dive into think tanks’ independence, or lack thereof, echo those of Jim Newell and Ken Silverstein in Baffler no. 23. In “They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen,” Silverstein points out that liberal think tanks ...

Daily Bafflements
August 03, 2016
• Those darned millennials! We all know they aren’t buying houses because they’re too busy living with their parents and not getting jobs—and they sure as hell aren’t civic minded enough. (A lot of that’s due to economic ...

Daily Bafflements
August 02, 2016
• Today in billionaires: Do you have FOMO for the Koch brothers’ Colorado Springs secret summer consortium for conservative millionaires? Us, too. Take comfort, at least, from the fact you can brush up on the reading list. Among the set ...

Lo How a Trump E’er (Stinkily) Blooming
August 01, 2016
I first caught wind of the blooming of the New York Botanical Garden’s corpse flower—a titan arum, more properly termed—during the Republican National Convention, when caretakers first announced that their ten years of careful labor, watering and fertilizing a ...

Far Out, Cordoned Off
July 29, 2016
The past week of national media coverage has been fixated on a convention on the verge of revolt. Inside the auditorium, no boo went unnoticed. On Tuesday, a walkout led half the press corps out with it; a surprise appearance by Jill Stein even led some reporters to Google her ...