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All the President’s Chums
It seems odd, after the media revolutions of the past several decades, to behold one of the worst conventions of the old press order soldiering blithely on: the private, off-the-record presidential briefing. In a curiously noncommittal dispatch for the New York Times, D.C. ...

Daily Bafflements
January 06, 2016
• Mark Zuckerberg is reading world-renowned war criminal Henry Kissinger’s latest book, World Order—and he thinks you should too! The naive Zuckerberg explains, “[It’s] about foreign relations and how we can build peaceful relationships ...

Daily Bafflements
January 05, 2016
• We all know that Hillary is fun, and it is also lodged in our collective cortex that Obama is “cool”—even meta-cool. And so would you be, if you’d spent a year “running wild” with Bear Grylls, “talking sports” with Bill ...

Waiving the Age of Reason
Most kids start to learn their multiplication tables in the third grade. Their storybooks—typically illustrated, with only a few sentences per page—begin to give way to short chapter books. A year later, they are taught the difference between sedimentary and volcanic rock. ...

Daily Bafflements
January 04, 2016
• ‘Tis the season to be grateful, as Baffler contributing editor Barbara Ehrenreich notes in the New York Times: Falalala-laa-lalalala. • Reasons to feel jaded, part two: Ethan Couch, the “affluenza teen” we keep hearing about, was but a pale shadow of his ...

The Baffler’s Year in Review
December 30, 2015
At the end of 2014, we announced that we would break from our institutional overlords and cast The Baffler’s fortunes into the wilds of independent publishing. So there, zeitgeist! Let 2015 mark the year we opened a publishing office in New York, as planned, to work in ...

Daily Bafflements
December 30, 2015
• Everyone knows you can easily spend an exorbitant amount of money at New York City restaurants. Typically, though, a high three figure bill is associated with such upscale (and probably overrated) establishments as Per Se and Spotted Pig, not Bubba Gump Shrimp or ...

Daily Bafflements
December 29, 2015
• According to the Washington Post, Robert Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation is, touchingly, “worried that books by people such as [Baffler contributing editor] Astra Taylor will create a thought contagion that will infect ...

Daily Bafflements
December 28, 2015
• Research by Microsoft shows that when robots send out tweets about activism, they reap a higher level of engagement than calls to action by actual humans do. According to MIT Review, “Potential volunteers responded negatively when the clearly ...

Daily Bafflements
December 18, 2015
• After being arrested for what the FBI is calling a “securities fraud trifecta of lies, deceit and greed,” pharma-bro Martin Shkreli stepped down today from his role as CEO of Turing pharmaceuticals. The intelligence agency compared Shkreli’s business model to a ...

High Caliber Television
The planned launch of Gun TV, a home-shopping channel devoted exclusively to selling firearms to impulsive shut-ins, is an idea so purely American that one can only marvel that it’s taken this long to come to life. The mass marketing of lethal weaponry to the bored and ...