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Daily Bafflements
September 16, 2015
• “Hitler’s world may not be so far away,” writes Timothy Snyder! “Once standard of living is confused with living, a rich society can make war upon those who are poorer in the name of survival. Tens of millions of people died in ...

Daily Bafflements
September 15, 2015
• Hey, writers, what comes up when we Google your name? “The new first-person economy” writes Laura Bennett, “incentivizes knee-jerk, ideally topical self-exposure.” The result? “On its face, the personal-essay economy prizes inclusivity and ...

Take Your Idealism Out of the Freezer
September 15, 2015
Just before the British General Election in early May, I encountered local candidates hustling for our votes in the neighborhood park. Among them was North Islington’s longstanding Labour MP, Jeremy Corbyn, whom I found delivering a heartfelt defense of the National Health ...

Daily Bafflements
September 14, 2015
• “The chances are no specific event or Svengali-like radicalisation inspired the Tsarnaev brothers to blow up the Boston Marathon,” writes Gary Indiana in the LRB, “The Tsarnaevs were a ‘tight-knit family’ in the most ruinous sense that ...

Daily Bafflements
September 10, 2015
• Happy George Scialabba Day! Today we celebrate the man sometimes known as “the People’s Republic’s answer to Harvey Pekar,” whose boxes of papers, written “when not busy scheduling room usage or checking on the progress of air-conditioning ...

Daily Bafflements
September 09, 2015
• Today in billionaires: “It’s like Nazi Germany,” says a resident of Boca Chica Village, the Texas town Elon Musk’s SpaceX has generously “put on the map.” From its drones to the new checkpoints that have sprung up, to the restrictions ...

Daily Bafflements
September 08, 2015
• The Griffith Review takes aim at the trend for mindlessly repeating that we live in “the golden age of storytelling,” making mention of Eugenia Williamson’s Baffler no. 20 salvo about This American Life, and the racket ...

Daily Bafflements
September 04, 2015
• WikiLeaks praised David Graeber’s Baffler no. 28 salvo on bullying and warmaking. Writes Graeber, • Our friends over at Pacific Standard report that regardless of their crimes, defendants who cannot afford bail are four times more likely to be sentenced to ...

Daily Bafflements
September 03, 2015
• In a wide-ranging conspiracy, a rogue USDA official and the American Egg Board were discovered to have launched a covert attack on the Silicon Valley startup responsible for a plant-based egg substitute and Just Mayo, which some argue just isn’t. More than one ...

Daily Bafflements
September 02, 2015
• On the side effects of an addiction: “Coloring”—that’s right, coloring—“is not for cowards. Three months since Jones began, the calluses on her fingers are just the surface symptoms of her devotion to her hobby.” But fear ...

Daily Bafflements
September 01, 2015
• In Baffler no. 24, Gene Seymour took an interest in—OK, a well-deserved swipe at—the “[Jeff] Bezos vanity project” that is “the construction of a mammoth timepiece that will tick off the next ten thousand years of life on this ...

Daily Bafflements
August 31, 2015
• Stephen King opines that a novelist can be too prolific for critics, but—then again—that it’s suspicious if a novelist isn’t producing some excess work. Of the “recently retired” Philip Roth, King notes: “Our Gang was pretty ...