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Debt Resistance Lite: John Oliver’s Stunt
June 10, 2016
Last Sunday, HBO’s topical comedy show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver aired a segment in which the show acquired and then retired nearly $15 million of consumer medical debt. Oliver used his monologue to go after debt buyers who use questionable tactics to collect on ...

Sexting, Lies, and Videotape
Midway through the painfully exhaustive documentary Weiner, the title subject’s wife, Hillary Clinton’s adviser Huma Abedin, is puttering around her Manhattan kitchen, fumbling through an array of flatware in an effort to give a semblance of normalcy to her day. One of the ...

Daily Bafflements
June 08, 2016
• Hillary Clinton made history last night, becoming the first woman to secure a spot as the Democratic nominee. At the Brooklyn Navy Yard last night, she told a crowd of raucous supporters, “Tonight’s victory is not about one person. It belongs to ...

Anthem for Bummed Youth
June 08, 2016
As the Democratic primary campaign comes to a close, let us recall how strange and improbable it has been all along. Hillary Clinton started out as her party’s hand-picked standard-bearer, the baddest and brightest of the nation’s dominant political faction. No ...

Daily Bafflements
June 07, 2016
• Today we premiere our summer issue, entitled “Memory Holes,” a series of dispatches from distinct destinations, real and imaginary, at which history has been sacrificed, overwritten, or restyled. Whether you’re in Hungary, where Susan Faludi ...

Daily Bafflements
June 06, 2016
• “Which has been easier for you,” Baffler contributing editor Susan Faludi asked her father, “to be accepted as a woman after being born a man, or to be accepted as a Magyar after being born a Jew?” Faludi’s new book, In the Darkroom, is ...

Who’s Defamin’ Who?
Anyone who’s trudged through the past fortnight’s worth of punditry about the Gawker–Hulk Hogan–Peter Thiel donnybrook can be forgiven a fugitive longing for the codes of honor that settled sexually charged dude-feuds back in the bad old age of chivalry. ...

Imperial Style
June 01, 2016
It is the quintessential first-world epiphany: a search for a British-made canvas rucksack for a safari trip is made in vain—and a banker’s life is changed forever. That’s the opening gambit, at least, to one of the many PR pitches that’s hit my inbox over the last ...

Daily Bafflements
May 31, 2016
• Aditya Chakrabortty sits at the deathbed of neoliberalism: “From the 1980s the policymaking elite has waved away the notion that they were acting ideologically—merely doing ‘what works.’ But you can only get away with that claim if what ...

Facebook’s ‘Injection Tools’
So it’s come to this. After half a century of right-wing invective targeting the alleged scourge of liberal media bias, conservative activists are up in arms over the (unverified) claim that social-media page designers are tweaking impartial news-feed algorithms—in a ...