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Flu in the Face
February 04, 2016
Anyone who spends time in enclosed public spaces is barraged with images from television news, most often broadcast from the default network, CNN. We glimpse these images, with the sound down, for only seconds at a time as they bounce, germ-like, from corner to corner, chasing ...

Field of Dreams
 Because the Iowa caucuses are a perversely puny and undemocratic spectacle, heroic exertions are required to endow them with long-term narrative meaning. Worry not, though: Our media-political complex exists largely to billow the semblance of significance into the decaying ...

The Iowa Caucus: A Creative Visualization
Politics is hard, and we need some straightforward and literal way to handily process the ever-shifting alliances of power in an election season. To that end, The Baffler has employed expert comic mind David Rees to give a visual rendering of the day’s signature political ...

Daily Bafflements
February 03, 2016
• Yesterday, Yahoo announced it intends to lay off 15 percent of its workforce—or approximately 1,700 employees. It’ll also be closing several offices, including those in Dubai, Mexico City, Milan, Madrid, and more. The company’s woes don’t end there; ...

Daily Bafflements
February 02, 2016
• Hey, Iowa—time to revisit Baffler senior editor Chris Lehmann’s words on Ted Cruz, from the LRB last June: “Every phase of Cruz’s launch into national renown has showcased this same barely repressed appetite for self-destruction . . . a man trained in every elite ...

Twilight of the Superpredators
In the early 1990s a conservative criminologist at Princeton, John J. DiIulio, scanned the horizon and predicted that a new superbreed of hoodlums was coming like a demographic tidal wave. Over a twenty-year span, DiIulio forecast, 270,000 juvenile offenders would roam the ...

Daily Bafflements
January 29, 2016
• Brands will be brands, we suppose . . . Pepsi is opening a “baffling” new Brooklyn restaurant called Kola House, offering guests “a premium experience,” that only vaguely reminds them of the company’s flagship beverage. Such ...

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 ...