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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 ...

Daniel Aaron, 1912-2016
May 10, 2016
On April 30, Baffler contributor and friend Daniel Aaron succumbed to complications from pneumonia at the age of 103. A scholar of plain-speaking eloquence, which flowed from his mastery of the American literary canon, Aaron developed a deep and complex relationship with radical ...

Irish Exceptionalism: The Nationalist Left
May 09, 2016
Coming to Ireland from the United States, particularly the United States in 2016 under the looming shadow of Trumpism, the latest incarnation of a nasty right-wing populism that wraps itself in the flag and scapegoats immigrants for its troubles, it was hard to feel that a ...

Daily Bafflements
May 09, 2016
• Last year in the Baffler, Neda Semnani wrote the story of her parents, a pair of Iranian revolutionaries, and of their lives in the lead-up and aftermath of the 1979 revolution. Under the repressive “revolutionary” rule of the new ...

The Spanish Democracy Revolutions
May 06, 2016
The Zapatistas of Chiapas have a phrase: “The fight for democracy is a slow burn.” It resonates at the Parliament of Catalonia, and all across the Spanish state, where indignation is rife. Research over there late last year gave me the opportunity to see four post-capitalist ...