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Bye Bye, Blackbird
September 26, 2016
During his long life, it was said that Gore Vidal’s literary and cultural appeal stemmed from one singular feat: that he pisses from a very great height. Vidal’s rarefied, mingent corpus was disorienting and too snobbish for some, but for grown-ups, it’s a ...

Daily Bafflements
September 23, 2016
• Over at Columbia Journalism Review, Shelley Hepworth dives into the sticky situation surrounding eyewitness video. In an era where citizens with cellphones often have the first—and best—footage of news events, what is the responsibility of journalists and ...

When Goo-Goos Attack
September 23, 2016
One of the less edifying displays in this election—there are many—is the level of left-liberal and radical critique of Hillary Clinton. Whether you advocate a vote for Clinton, Stein, or nobody, the discussions of Clinton need more ideological heft than is often ...

Lies of the Times
Sit up and take notice, monitors of plain speech in our elite journalistic discourse: the New York Times has at long last elected to call a lie a lie, at least as far as Donald Trump is concerned. What prompted this long-overdue linguistic breakthrough was the barking, bigoted ...

Daily Bafflements
September 21, 2016
• In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud describes the pre-historic man as a fellow who likes to get his jollies off by pissing on fire pits. “The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire,” Freud explains, “was able to carry it off ...

Protocols of Moron
September 20, 2016
What do you get when you combine an atomized, alienated public that possesses a deep and justifiable mistrust in institutions with a floundering press-political-entertainment complex that’s desperate to hold our nanoscopic attention spans? You get a nation of half-assed ...

Daily Bafflements
September 19, 2016
• “I explain to her that I haven’t called ahead for credentials, but that I just plan on quietly standing with the press corps, jotting down ridiculous things I see and maybe firing off some incredulous low-quality pics on Twitter.” (Thanks, ...

Daily Bafflements
September 16, 2016
• Our friends at MuckRock will fund your pet research project on Palantir with their Thiel Fellowship, although we’re a bit skeptical that the program only lasts one year—we suspect the Paypal founder’s misdeeds and covert operations from intelligence ...

Innovator-In-Chief
September 16, 2016
Earlier this summer, President Obama told Bloomberg Businessweek that he was eyeing Silicon Valley for his post-presidential life: he wanted to become a venture capitalist. And as the summer wound down into Labor Day weekend, his efforts to transform his lame-duck term into a ...

Spreading the Bad News
September 16, 2016
For dogged observers of America’s long-running culture wars, a quiet milestone was reached this year: the fortieth anniversary of pop theologian Francis Schaeffer’s enormously influential 1976 tract How Should We Then Live? This portentously titled, slim volume ...

Fairly Unbalanced
Never do our media savants look more blatantly biased than when they’re trying to wave off complaints about how they shape, and distort, the critical flow of political information. A case in point: New York Times public editor Liz Spayd’s absurdly complacent recent ...