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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 ...

Daily Bafflements
December 16, 2015
• Pro Publica delves into a case in Washington, where a young woman recanted a true story of being raped by a man who turned out to be a serial offender. The inconsistencies in her story and seemingly odd behavior—both of which are fairly normal in ...

A Tale of Two Citations
December 15, 2015
A few weeks ago, my girlfriend, an English teacher in a Brooklyn public school, began preparing to teach her tenth-grade students The Metamorphosis. She asked me for a few examples of the Kafkaesque. I had two: first, a French thriller I saw in high school, in which a man with a ...

Daily Bafflements
December 14, 2015
• Hillary Clinton has a line about how, if elected, she will be “the youngest woman president” but her appeal is mainly with college-educated boomers: “Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy has not yet sparked among young women the kind of excitement about ...

Daily Bafflements
December 11, 2015
• Today in union busting: Midwestern home improvement giant Menards has made managers sign an employment agreement stating that Meanwhile, in New York City, where the death toll on construction worksites has been on the rise, union workers are rallying today for safer ...

Daily Bafflements
December 10, 2015
• In spite of our cultural obsession with happiness, a new study shows that being happy doesn’t, in fact, make you live any longer. • Ol’ Dirty Pharma: Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical exec who recently made headlines for raising the price of the AIDS ...