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Daily Bafflements
April 02, 2015
• The Obama administration takes some flak for its low “innovation score” in a new survey. • WBUR reviews Scott Timberg’s Culture Crash, outlining his proposal for economic protections for the creative class that leave everyone else high and dry. • The rental market ...

More Bodies for “Never Forget”
April 01, 2015
Watching the NCAA tournament Friday night at a bar in New York’s West Village, I found myself staring at an American flag pinned to the wall. The World Trade Center, lately rebuilt, loomed about one-and-a-half miles away, its well-lit spire tumescently patriotic at 1,776 feet ...

Daily Bafflements
April 01, 2015
• TechCrunch recently hosted a meetup in Dubai for would-be startup entrepreneurs in the hopes of “disrupting” the Middle East. • Right in The Baffler’s own backyard, the Boston Redevelopment Authority is seeking to extend its “urban renewal authority” [read: ...

Coming-of-(Middle)-Age Tales
March 31, 2015
Ah, the comedy of coming of middle age. The sad, respectable adulthood of the formerly young and cool has been milked for laughs since at least The Big Chill (1983), acclaimed in its time for brilliantly documenting the Baby Boomers’ unwilling decline into middle-class ...

Daily Bafflements
March 31, 2015
• Dressing for Success: In a post on creative work attire that calls to mind our fashion-themed current issue, Amber Stott lets us in on how urban farmers and foodies can be just as innovative as Silicon Valley startup bros. • Rahim Madhavji recounts the woes of the ...

Out of the Blue
March 30, 2015
Andreas Lubitz, the 27-year old German copilot who flew a jetliner into a mountain in the French Alps last week, seemed normal, according to preliminary reports of his character and personality. Sure, Lubitz had worries—his girlfriend was pregnant; he was having difficulty ...

Daily Bafflements
March 30, 2015
• Baffler founding editor Thomas Frank talked bank regulation on WBAI’s Julianna Forlano Show this weekend. • Living in an area with high income inequality could be shortening your life, according to the New York Times. • In yet another round of waxing philosophical on ...

Taking a Cat Photo Approach to History
March 27, 2015
In the midst of chaos and tragedy of the 2014 Ferguson riots, a white cop embraced a black youth. It was a moment of harmony within a storm of racial conflict. It was a beautiful photograph. No wonder we made it the defining image of the riots by sharing it 400,000 times on ...

Daily Bafflements
March 27, 2015
• The investigator becomes the investigated: NYU professor and human rights activist Andrew Ross, who wrote in The Baffler about his travels and travails fighting for migrant worker rights in the United Arab Emirates, is now apparently the target of a “murky ...

Freedom Fries: McDonald’s and the Fourteenth Amendment
March 26, 2015
In his book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser demonstrates the dominance of McDonald’s, not just in the context of the history of the fast food industry, but in the history of all industry. McDonald’s is the largest owner of retail property in the world. The company trains ...

No Sympathy for Poors from the Silver Hordes
March 26, 2015
According to a new Brookings Institution study, the majority of America’s elderly don’t want the government to help poor people. And they sure as hell don’t want the government to provide them with health insurance. (Get our government hands off their Medicaid?) The ...

Daily Bafflements
March 26, 2015
• Franco Moretti and Dominique Pestre apply quantitative linguistic analysis to World Bank Reports over the decades, in a piece called “Bankspeak.” An excerpt: “the semantic cluster of governance includes a series of terms which express a sense of compassion, ...