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The Trump Psyche
You know that the Trump distemper in our body politic has risen to a new threat status because our journalistic thought leaders are enlisting the help of mental-health professionals. The new issue of the Atlantic, for one, features a stem-winding cover story by psychologist Dan ...

Daily Bafflements
May 18, 2016
• Over at Current Affairs, Baffler columnist Amber A’Lee Frost takes on the necessity of political vulgarity—or, more bluntly, “rudeness.” One needn’t look further than Donald Trump and the rise of the ...

Daily Bafflements
May 17, 2016
• Matthew Sweet traces the history of research into whether power corrupts, starting in 1870. It’s fascinating, running the gamut from Piritim Sorokin’s view that “the ruling groups are more talented intellectually and more deranged mentally than the ...

Daily Bafflements
May 16, 2016
• Anxiety is on the worldwide march and, according to the Guardian, “Obvious social, cultural and economic factors include the financial crisis of 2008 (. . .) and the subsequent austerity, overwork, unemployment and unaffordable housing.” ...

Daily Bafflements
May 13, 2016
• Today in tech: Time is calling Mark Zuckerberg “the world’s youngest elder statesman,” and backing the moniker up with a nifty, bootlicking rhetorical analysis of a recent speech by the billionaire-cum-changemaker. • Lives (and deaths) of the ...

Blame It on Higher Ed
In a crisis, it’s only natural for us to recur to the familiar totems of our folk beliefs. So, shortly after the de facto elevation of omni-bigot Donald Trump to the 2016 GOP presidential ticket, the estimable big thinkers at the New York Times op-ed shop rolled up their ...

Queen Esther of the Potboilers
May 12, 2016
I have it on good authority that I’m a snob. The epithet is fair enough: I have little patience with popular literature, even though popular literature, by dint of its popularity, is arguably the most effective tool a writer can use to file a claim about the world, ...

Daily Bafflements
May 11, 2016
• The Panama Papers have come to Hogwarts. Emma Watson, the British actress who played the much-beloved Hermione Granger of Harry Potter, was outed as one of the latest big-name beneficiaries of Mossack Fonseca’s services. Of course, being the ...

You (Yes, You!) Are Trump’s VP
Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, it’s difficult to maintain a steady focus on reality. Colors, smells, and tastes are smearing together and getting harder to identify. Objects are mutating before we’ve made sense of them. The border ...

Daily Bafflements
May 10, 2016
• Since Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In came out in 2013, a slew of “Lean Out” polemics have called out Sandberg’s short-sighted approach and her hasty gloss over issues like paid leave. We at The Baffler believe the first and best of these was ...

Spare the Teen, Spoil the Rod
Teen bodies and teen sex are like psychological napalm triggering the worst-case-scenario meltdowns of parents, lawmakers, and prosecutors across the country. Certainly, having a sizeable chunk of the population besieged with explosive hormones, sporting a still-developing ...