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Daily Bafflements
August 22, 2016
• With Ivanka Trump publicizing intern-written blog posts about how to survive as an intern, we urge you to recall the year 1997, when Jim Frederick wrote about unpaid interns as unwitting scabs. • The apple didn’t fall far from the tree: “Trump ...

Elon Musk, Fatalist
August 19, 2016
Odds are that you’ve heard by now that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said something Totally Trippy at Recode’s Code conference earlier this summer. According to the darling of Silicon Valley, “the odds that we’re in base reality is one in ...

Enemy of the PayPal
The financial unwinding of Gawker Media’s tawdry tour through the justice system landed on an oddly anticlimactic note this week: Univision, the Spanish-language TV network that has been aggressively colonizing the digital mediasphere, picked up the bankrupt web empire for ...

Daily Bafflements
August 17, 2016
• Jill Stein’s candidacy may be a long shot—even in a race where both major party nominees are intensely, passionately disliked. Yet she’s still managed to garner the attention of major outlets—hell, her town hall tonight is going to air on ...

The 1,000-Meter Whine
The Olympics and American presidential elections have a lot in common: both celebrate the absolute best humanity has to offer; both reward integrity and fair play; both are devoid of corruption; and both appeal to citizens’ highest ideals and are thus immune to cynicism and ...

Spoiling for the Green Party
August 17, 2016
At the Green Party National Convention in Houston this month, the villain that loomed the largest wasn’t Hillary Clinton or global warming or even Donald Trump—it was the doctrine of lesser evilism. Some say that a vote for Jill Stein is a wasted vote, but Martina ...

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 ...