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Daily Bafflements
July 11, 2016
• Over at Medium, Michelle Alexander writes: As Natasha Vargas-Cooper commented earlier this year on the Baffler blog: • In response to a Pokémon Go user “claiming” the Westboro Baptist Church using a Pokémon called Clefairy ...

Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless
Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the ...

Punk Rock and Protest
July 07, 2016
Growing up, I learned the word solidarity from a vocabulary flash card. It was not something I had ever felt until my shoe became untied in the mosh pit at a NOFX concert in the early 2000s. When I knelt to re-tie it, four strangers formed a wall around my crouching body to ...

New Conventions in Corruption
One persistent truth has held fast amid the ceaseless, unpredictable tumult of Campaign ’16: our corporate media has been utterly flummoxed by it all. Why, the pundit class wails in chorus, are American voters so goddamn angry all the time? Why can’t they make with the ...

Daily Bafflements
July 06, 2016
• “It may be odd for a Labour Prime Minister and a Republican President to have a common political interest, but we do!” wrote former British prime minister Tony Blair in a memo to president George W. Bush. With so much Corbyn bashing making the rounds, ...

Daily Bafflements
July 05, 2016
• When Gay Talese’s newest book, about motelier and voyeur Gerald Foos, was preemptively excerpted in a certain bastion of liberalism (and, more relevantly, fact-checking), he probably didn’t expect to have to disown it before the publication date even ...

Daily Bafflements
July 01, 2016
• Planning your summer vacation? At Montana’s Paws Up resort, wealthy vacationers can learn the skills they might need to survive the apocalypse that they are currently bringing about, for the low, low price of $1,420 per night. Don’t worry, “it’s a ...

The Political Class Struggles
“Elite opinion” is admittedly a baggy construct—whose opinion? which elite?—but thanks to the weird convulsions of Campaign 2016, we’ve been granted a precious opportunity to behold it in all its lush and fulsome glory. Seemingly as one, the lead institutions of ...

It Depends on the Meaning Of “Quo”
June 29, 2016
On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously decided to vacate the conviction of disgraced former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell. The Commonwealth’s GOP chief was convicted in Sept. 2014, along with his wife, Maureen, on federal corruption and bribery charges. The pair had ...

Daily Bafflements
June 29, 2016
• Bernie Sanders takes to the pages of the New York Times to tell the Democrats to “wake up.” We’re a little bummed he didn’t borrow the title of Tom Frank’s latest book, Listen, ...