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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 ...

Daily Bafflements
July 29, 2016
• This week, we got to hear Bill Clinton wax poetic about his long romance with the Democratic nominee, straining eyebrows across the nation. A few months back, In These Times gave another account of that fateful first date. And don’t forget to catch up on all our ...

Like Uber—but for Dog Crap
July 29, 2016
Late Thursday afternoon, at the close of my workday, a strange subject heading appeared in my inbox: “Pooper. The latest app to push the boundaries of the sharing economy.” Although I read precisely none of the dozens of press releases that flood my inbox each week ...

Treacherous Waters
All right, then—America’s own major-party-anointed oligarch has officially urged Russian cyberspies to hack State Department communications. And his underlying political rationale is enough to give M.C. Escher a throbbing migraine: Hillary Clinton is guilty of grave, if ...

How the Other Half Protests
July 28, 2016
I’ve been lurking in a restaurant in the center of the city, the luxurious kind, with a staff in custom uniforms. They ask you who you are when they take you to your table. When the server comes, he calls you by your name. I paid fifteen dollars for an appetizer salad there. ...

Daily Bafflements
July 27, 2016
• Over at New York Review of Books, Masha Gessen weighs in on the hysteria surrounding Russia’s possible (plausible?) role in hacking the Democratic National Committee. She writes:  Meanwhile, Trump has used this as an opportunity to troll pundits. ...