Skip to content

Latest Posts

Web Exclusives

Daily Bafflements
October 08, 2015
• Missed our celebration of George Scialabba at the Brattle Theatre last month? No worries, the appreciations of George’s critical gifts keep rolling in. Here’s a lovely one from The Chronicle of Higher Education. If that whets your appetite, you’re in ...

Daily Bafflements
October 07, 2015
• If you passed by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on Monday, you likely would have heard the clamor of protestors raising a fuss about the long-dead French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Donning signs reading “God Hates Renoir” and Treacle ...

Daily Bafflements
October 05, 2015
• “I’m sorry I can’t spin right now. I’ve won the Nobel Prize,” and other homely reminiscences of genius, lovingly collected by the Times, remind us of Tom Frank’s piece about the “Parable of the Phone Call,” ...

Daily Bafflements
October 02, 2015
• Today in billionaires: well, they’re in your presidential races, your global financial markets, your social media—and now even your lighthearted prime-time procedurals. Fox has announced its plans to produce “a comedic procedural about a socially inept ...

Daily Bafflements
October 01, 2015
• Our friends at Pacific Standard question the ethics of sending manned missions to Mars. In light of our responsibility for climate change, “our tendency to plunder frontiers to destruction,” and our historical callousness toward the folks we send hurtling ...

Daily Bafflements
September 30, 2015
• “The twenty-first-century university is a super freak, in fact—the kind you don’t take home to mother,” Siva Vaidhyanathan noted in our latest issue, no. 28. If that’s the case, then the for-profit university system is a super freak that would bamboozle ...

For Whom the Phone Rings
September 29, 2015
A version of this essay was published at Salon.com in 2014.  It’s genius season again. From NPR to the New York Times, they’re talking about where people were when they found out they had won the MacArthur Fellowship, our society’s most prestigious honor. Twenty-one of ...

Daily Bafflements
September 29, 2015
• Of “secular Satanism,” the “Dark Enlightenment squid monster,” and anti-democratic techies, Park MacDougald has this to say on The Awl: Corey Pein wrote about the fascism swirling around our islands of libertarian ...

Daily Bafflements
September 28, 2015
• Over at The Atlantic, Scott Beauchamp contests the idea that experience on the battlefield can help you in the boardroom—and why should it? “Simply put, military service is one of the few remaining social experiences one can have where the goal isn’t to ...

Daily Bafflements
September 25, 2015
• “Your Selfie Sticks Can Go To Hell,” proclaims The Gothamist. They’re not joking. On the eve of Pope Francis’ U.S. visit, the Secret Service offered up their own sermon of sorts—a list of banned items at all papal appearances. Among the ...

Voices of the Village
September 24, 2015
Ronald Blythe is now more than ninety years old, beloved and revered in England as a newspaper columnist, literary critic, and memoirist. But he remains best known for his summer labors of 1967, when he sat down with the residents of a single town in his home county of Suffolk ...

Daily Bafflements
September 24, 2015
• Contrary to papal PR, Catholic universities don’t do any more to help the poor than any other universities. Never fear, though, budding Catholics! Joining the orders is very in vogue. Who needs an education anyway.  • Thanks to The Nation ...