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A Letter to the King
February 03, 2015
Dear King Abdullah, First of all: Hi there! Secondly: I’m very sorry to hear that you are dead. But on the bright side, your relationship with America is the best it’s ever been! In fact, the Department of Defense is currently running an “essay contest” in your name, ...

Daily Bafflements
February 03, 2015
• An interior design company that is literally called Euro Trash has decorated the Capitol Hill offices of Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) to resemble a specific room from the fictional palatial estate of “Downton Abbey,” from PBS’s dramatic series of the ...

The Shrinking Power of Punk
February 02, 2015
Is American indie rock fighting a war it can’t win, or is it just not fighting anymore? It’s too quiet in independent music today, but it wasn’t always so. Greil Marcus introduces his 1989 book Lipstick Traces: a Secret History of the Twentieth Century by discussing the ...

Daily Bafflements
February 02, 2015
• Dissent has a good piece on how tech bros and billionaires are threatening to overwhelm Seattle’s culture of radical culture and politics. Meanwhile, in Manhattan, this $100 million penthouse is getting a 95 percent tax cut. • Today in Labor Strikes: Workers at ...

Nostalgia 2.0
January 30, 2015
If there were one thing that we could never outsource, it would have to be our memories. Personal, intimate, and unique, memories are a part of us that not even the ruthless efficiencies of computer code can improve. Nor could these precious memories be commodified in any ...

Daily Bafflements
January 30, 2015
• Today in Billionaires: Unfortunately for the Qatari royal family, a city councilman in London has denied their proposal to knock down houses in order to combine two mansions into a “super-mansion” with “17 bedrooms, 14 lounges, four dining rooms, a ...

Iowa Doesn’t Matter
January 29, 2015
The Iowa presidential caucuses are only a year away, and so it’s fitting that the 2016 GOP primary would kick off in earnest in Des Moines. Congressman Steve King’s “Iowa Freedom Summit” last weekend featured nine hours of speeches from almost twenty-four Republican ...

Daily Bafflements
January 29, 2015
• Excited for the Super Bowl this weekend? We hate to be a buzzkill, but, participation in youth football now appears to have long-lasting neurological effects. Alan Neuhauser in U.S. News & World Report writes on a study showing that NFL players who also played the sport ...

Flint’s Dirty Drinking Water Conundrum
January 28, 2015
If you’ve seen Michael Moore’s 1989 film Roger & Me, you know the outlines of the story of Flint, Michigan. It’s a city that was devastated by the decline of the American automobile industry, and it never really recovered. Twenty-six years on, things have only gotten ...

Paying Tribute to Yet Another Petro-Tyrant
January 28, 2015
It’s been a rough week in Middle East policy for the Obama administration, though they don’t seem to realize it. Consider recent events: Iranian nuclear negotiations are threatened by Republicans and Democrats who want to force through new sanctions, with Israeli prime ...

Daily Bafflements
January 28, 2015
• Today in Oh Really?: British researchers at the University of Warwick “have for the first time provided strong evidence for what conspiracy theorists have long thought—oil is often the reason for interfering in another country’s war.” • Per New York ...

Noam Chomsky on American Sniper
January 27, 2015
Noam Chomsky on American Sniper Noam Chomsky and the ACLU Massachusetts’s Kade Crockford spoke at The Baffler’s talk “The Tsarnaev Trial and the Rest of Us” at the Lily Pad in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Thursday, January 22, 2015. Video by Mark ...