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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 ...

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 ...