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Daily Bafflements

The Baffler

March 30, 2016

• Oh, you thought Silicon Valley proper was the hub for tech-driven psychosis? Meet HubSpot, a Cambridge-based company that specializes in inbound marketing, where math, logic, and a healthy dose of anti-capitalism have all been thrown out the door in favor of . ...

Primary Lessons in Propaganda

Corey Pein

March 30, 2016

Magical Thinking

All propaganda is not advertising, but all advertising is propaganda. With “sponsored content” becoming the norm, corporations hiring “reporters” to cover themselves, and media organizations hiring political operatives to deliver the news, the notion that ...

Delegate Math Doesn’t Have Feelings

David Rees

March 30, 2016

Political Cartoons

Even though numbers can provoke an emotional reaction, they have no emotions, no personalities, and no brains.

How to Shoot a Suspect in the Back, Reasonably

Natasha Vargas-Cooper

March 29, 2016

Bad Behavior

Beyond the racial prejudice of juries and district attorneys, a major—and frequently ignored—factor as to why county prosecutors fail to indict cops who maim or kill unarmed citizens is a handful of Supreme Court and federal cases that exalt police discretion over common ...

Daily Bafflements

The Baffler

March 29, 2016

• Andrew Auernheimer, the hacker also known as weev, is claiming to have printed anti-semitic and racist fliers remotely so that they landed right on the printer trays of US universities. Angela Nagle wrote about this fascist sympathizer in the current issue ...

Daily Bafflements

The Baffler

March 28, 2016

• “Today we are seeing the effects of a relentless war against the very idea of working-class politics or working-class community,” writes Baffler contributing editor David Graeber. “That has left most working people with little way to express that ...

Daily Bafflements

The Baffler

March 25, 2016

• Today in billionaires: Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen is donating $100 million to research at the “frontiers” of the life sciences, including a large grant to the developers of CRISPR, a gene-editing and DNA-tracking tool. Corey Pein wrote about one of ...

Daily Bafflements

The Baffler

March 24, 2016

• Today in billionaires: one Silicon Valley plutocrat has taken to the courts to assert his ownership of some land in California’s San Mateo County in order to prevent public beach access. The odd thing about his claim is that the land in question is at the bottom of ...

In a Big Country, Dreams Stay with You

Chris Lehmann

March 24, 2016

The Jaundiced Eyeball

You might think that something called “the great unsettling” involved movement of some kind: the abrupt uprooting of communities and traditions, or the migration of the dispossessed across a continent. But in the opening salvo of the Washington Post’s pompous, turgid, and ...

Daily Bafflements

The Baffler

March 23, 2016

• “It is worth reiterating that Marxism is terrible,” reiterates the dully left-baiting columnist Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine. If it’s the mid-twentieth century again, we at The Baffler didn’t notice. (Also, if ...

Squashing Call-Out Culture, Gently

Amber A’Lee Frost

March 23, 2016

Your Sorry Ass

"Call-out culture” is the way of the performative male feminist. But how to curb the zeal of the recently converted?

Daily Bafflements

The Baffler

March 22, 2016

• Today in the innovation economy: Rebecca Solnit writes in The Guardian about the execution of Alex Nieto and how “disruptive” the tech economy has been for “communities, traditions, and relationships.” She continues, “Many of the ...