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Daily Bafflements
January 28, 2016
• Former Labour Leader Ed Miliband weighs in on income inequality in the United Kingdom and the United States in the pages of the LRB, even giving a shout-out to the Fight for 15 movement. He considers, among others, Robert Putnam’s Our Kids, dissected recently ...

The Loudest Voice Not in the Room
It speaks volumes about the general disarray of the presidential campaign spectacle that it has now reached its highest pitch over the prospect of Donald Trump remaining silent over the course of a televised debate. (OK, technically Trump intends to be absent for the ...

Daily Bafflements
January 27, 2016
• Over at VICE, Baffler contributing editor Eugenia Williamson—who recently wrote about the commercialization of punk for issue no. 29—bravely traveled to the Newark Airport to check out Terminal C’s latest installment, CBGB LAB. No, Newark ...

Daily Bafflements
January 26, 2016
• Gird your loins with a superfruit smoothie, it’s the thirty-six best quotes from Davos 2016! Mining pits of inanity we had assumed were long depleted, the world’s “thought leaders” have outdone themselves, coming up with such gems as ...

The Law of Maximum Torment
January 26, 2016
The following extract is from The Cowshed, published in English this month by New York Review Books. The translator is Zha Jianying. The “cowshed” itself was a makeshift prison for intellectuals who were labeled class enemies during the Chinese ...

Daily Bafflements
January 25, 2016
• It’s an important day in the Annals of Disruption: the fifth anniversary of the uprising in Egypt, a political moment often used as proof that American social networks equal freedom. “The growth of social media and the disappearance of class from the ...

The People’s Republic of Troy
January 22, 2016
Christopher Logue called his politics “dusty pink”: committed pacifist, rebellious ex-soldier, and former petty thief, the poet harbored a lifelong loathing for authority. His formal education included a stint at the notoriously abusive Christian Brothers schools; it ...

Daily Bafflements
January 21, 2016
• Guy Patrick Cunningham wrestles with Baffler contributing editor David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy over at the LARB, concluding that “even if you find Graeber’s direct democracy too radical, he ...

Pounding Sanders
There’s something undeniably stirring in the mobilization of America’s Responsible Pundit Consensus. This week finds the liberal lectors of said consensus singing, not surprisingly, from a single hymnal entry, the one called “Bernie Sanders Is Not a Serious Presidential ...

Daily Bafflements
January 20, 2016
• In the Palinian spirit of not pussyfooting too much, The Baffler has moved our print edition to a quarterly publication schedule—that’s right, we’re putting our spurtive past behind us, and being a bit more punctual. On the web we can offer you a little regularity, ...

Daily Bafflements
January 15, 2016
• The Guardian’s Gaby Hinsliff writes on the cachet of going offline that “there is no status symbol so powerful now as not having a status—or not, at least, in the ‘look at me’ Facebook sense—at all.” After all, “going off grid is ...