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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 ...

Daily Bafflements
December 09, 2015
• She may have already been named the world’s most powerful woman—now, though, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is TIME’s Person of the Year for 2015. In a way, it’s not hard to see why. Twenty-six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Merkel’s ...

Daily Bafflements
December 08, 2015
• The field of “public-school consultancy” is booming, writes Alissa Quart in The Atlantic, an example of how, though “on the surface, public schools can seem egalitarian, especially with their websites’ emphasis on words such as ...

Daily Bafflements
December 07, 2015
• Chefs’ memoirs, restaurant reviews, and cookbooks are everywhere, and yet the “creepy, and classist, and outdated” field of food writing—from Yelp to the New York Times—insistently ignores the millions of service employees who ...

Q & A with Evgeny Morozov and Dan Davies
December 07, 2015
A little while ago, director Dan Davies of Banyak Films in London materialized in The Baffler’s editorial HQ in Harvard Square with contributing editor Evgeny Morozov in tow, steered him to our admittedly tacky blue sectional couch, and, before a midday audience munching on ...