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Daily Bafflements
August 31, 2016
• Today in exploitation: Vice is reportedly “too cool” to respect freelancers and their labor. As one former associate producer on Vice’s HBO series told Columbia Journalism Review:  As Anne Elizabeth Moore wrote ...

Daily Bafflements
August 29, 2016
• Anthony Weiner, sexting extraordinaire, is at it again—this time with a Trump supporter. It’s probably not a viral marketing campaign for the documentary about “Carlos Danger’s” escapades, which Chris Lehmann reviewed back in ...

Gone with the Winds
August 29, 2016
When a hurricane strikes, and is destructive or deadly enough, its name will be retired. For this to happen, the storm will have had to inflict so much damage that to reuse its name would be, according to the National Hurricane Center, a serious faux pas for “obvious reasons ...

Daily Bafflements
August 26, 2016
• What to do in your new Cadillac? Rich people stuff, obviously. Of course, for the final word on Rich People Things, we always refer to editor in chief Chris Lehmann, who explored that slippery category in his 2011 book. • What do you get the ...

The Media Con Job
A curious outbreak of truth-telling seems to be seizing our right-wing media. In this most deranging campaign season of our postmodern political lives, the specter of Donald Trump—billionaire tribune of the forgotten white working class—has sent some of our most notable ...

Daily Bafflements
August 24, 2016
• Yesterday, the National Labor Relations Board declared that graduate teaching assistants at private universities qualify as school employees, thereby freeing students across the country to form their own unions. The NLRB’s decision reverses a ruling from 2004 ...

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 ...