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Daily Bafflements
June 06, 2016
• “Which has been easier for you,” Baffler contributing editor Susan Faludi asked her father, “to be accepted as a woman after being born a man, or to be accepted as a Magyar after being born a Jew?” Faludi’s new book, In the Darkroom, is ...

Who’s Defamin’ Who?
Anyone who’s trudged through the past fortnight’s worth of punditry about the Gawker–Hulk Hogan–Peter Thiel donnybrook can be forgiven a fugitive longing for the codes of honor that settled sexually charged dude-feuds back in the bad old age of chivalry. ...

Imperial Style
June 01, 2016
It is the quintessential first-world epiphany: a search for a British-made canvas rucksack for a safari trip is made in vain—and a banker’s life is changed forever. That’s the opening gambit, at least, to one of the many PR pitches that’s hit my inbox over the last ...

Daily Bafflements
May 31, 2016
• Aditya Chakrabortty sits at the deathbed of neoliberalism: “From the 1980s the policymaking elite has waved away the notion that they were acting ideologically—merely doing ‘what works.’ But you can only get away with that claim if what ...

Facebook’s ‘Injection Tools’
So it’s come to this. After half a century of right-wing invective targeting the alleged scourge of liberal media bias, conservative activists are up in arms over the (unverified) claim that social-media page designers are tweaking impartial news-feed algorithms—in a ...

The Anti-Imperial Emperor
May 25, 2016
The U.S. presidential campaign has provided the “developing” world with a remarkable spectacle. Donald Trump’s antics have served as welcome evidence that political tragedy and disaster don’t only happen down here in less rich countries. But political idiocy coming from ...

Daily Bafflements
May 25, 2016
• Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, seems to have a finger in every pie. According to a report from Forbes, it turns out that the tech billionaire has been bankrolling Hulk Hogan’s, a.k.a. Terry Bollea’s, lawsuit against ...

Daily Bafflements
May 24, 2016
• In Baffler, no. 31 (which is out next week!), Astra Taylor columnizes on the effects of the EU-Turkey deal, supposedly designed to stem the flow of migrants over the sea by sending them into Turkey. Contrary to that agreement, though, the Greeks aren’t willing to ...

Daily Bafflements
May 23, 2016
• “Someone like Snowden should not have felt the need to harm himself just to do the right thing,” says John Crane in a Guardian excerpt of Mark Hertsgaard’s book Bravehearts, about the discrediting and danger whistleblowers face. Also quoted is ...

Interview with Whistleblower Bill Binney
May 23, 2016
Bill Binney resigned from his job as technical director of the NSA in October 2001. The data-monitoring tool he had developed, ThinThread, had been shelved and, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush-Cheney administration chose dragnet monitoring instead. He spoke to Kade ...