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Daily Bafflements
January 14, 2016
• Yesterday afternoon, Al Jazeera America unceremoniously announced the end of all television and digital operations and a massive round of layoffs, to the detriment of another corps of journalists and the delight of a coterie of trolls. • Much like those in the news ...

Daily Bafflements
January 13, 2016
• Your chances of winning the Powerball may be 1 in 292 million, but that hasn’t stopped the media’s bullshit spinners from coming up with terrible advice of their own. One “expert” on Fox News suggests you “buy as many tickets ...

Daily Bafflements
January 12, 2016
• Chelsea Manning mourns former Baffler contributing editor Aaron Swartz three years on from his death, and reviews a new book of Swartz’s essays. She writes: On January 28, John Summers, Baffler editor in chief, is in conversation with ...

Q & A with Neda Semnani
January 11, 2016
In 1979, Iranians living abroad, Neda Semnani’s parents among them, rushed back to Tehran to enjoy the fruits of the Islamic Revolution—only to find Khomeini an even more repressive leader than the Shah. Nursing a young family, Semnani’s mother gave up politics, ...

Daily Bafflements
January 11, 2016
• The FT recognizes the limits of attempting to humanize Charles Koch over lunch: “Koch would like us to get to know him. Or, more accurately, he has been persuaded that staying silent is counterproductive both politically and, increasingly, for his business.” ...

Daily Bafflements
January 08, 2016
• Today in techies: Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to avenge its earlier, more flaccid rocket by landing one on a drone ship, and Martin Shkreli spoils a blind date’s appetite when he orders a $120 cup of tea. • A private art museum in San Francisco is being ...

Daily Bafflements
January 07, 2016
• In the endless flood of thinkpieces on how Millennials are ruining the robust, cheery economy they inherited, some dubious news: the little bastards are increasing their retirement savings faster than any other age bracket. Though we might consider the source (a Fidelity ...

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 ...