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Noam Chomsky on Boston’s Hospital Shooting
January 27, 2015
Noam Chomsky on Boston’s Hospital Shooting 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, 22, 2015. Video by Mark ...

Noam Chomsky on Torture
January 27, 2015
Noam Chomsky on Torture 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 Steele and ...

The Utopian Vision of Pawnee, Indiana
January 27, 2015
Parks and Recreation, now entering its final season on NBC, has always represented a very particular, very liberal fantasy about how government should work. Though the city of Pawnee, Indiana is broadly drawn to the point of caricature—every branch of government seems to have ...

Daily Bafflements
January 27, 2015
• In the run-up to Monday night’s snowstorm, Mother Jones published the results of an extensive series of calculations for how much you should tip a food delivery person during a blizzard. The author came up with the answer of 30 percent. Our answer: learn to cook, or ...

Noam Chomsky on Wealth and Privilege
January 27, 2015
Noam Chomsky on Wealth and Privilege 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 ...

Noam Chomsky on the Legacy of Selma
January 27, 2015
Noam Chomsky on the Legacy of Selma 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 ...

Democracy in Greece, for Now
January 26, 2015
In seven years’ time, Athens has been transformed from one of Europe’s gleaming capital cities to Europe’s version of Detroit—much of it dirty, forlorn, its storefronts abandoned, its population in decline. Graffiti is ubiquitous. There are homeless beggars huddling on ...

American Sniper and the Trope of the Sheepdog
January 26, 2015
The invasion of Iraq resulted in hundreds of thousands—perhaps even a million—people losing their lives. How can one attempt to justify so much killing? Enter Clint Eastwood’s new film American Sniper. Early in the movie, Chris Kyle’s father breaks life down for his ...

Daily Bafflements
January 26, 2015
• West Virginia Public Radio has an interview with a former radical Muslim who says he was inspired to rethink his views after reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm. He says it gave him a new understanding of “what happens when somebody tries to create a ...

Daily Bafflements
January 23, 2015
• Billionaire Tom Steyer won’t run for Congress, he says. (We don’t know if anyone was really asking him to, but okay.) He writes in a statement, “My decision about whether to engage from the outside or seek elected office came down to a single question: how ...

Where Are Silicon Valley’s Surveillance Whistleblowers?
January 22, 2015
Last week, following the terrorist attacks in Paris, British Prime Minister David Cameron said—surprise!—that his government needed more power to monitor online communications. He went so far as to imply that encryption itself was a problem, and later said that American tech ...