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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 ...

Daily Bafflements
January 22, 2015
• This one really does baffle: when observing the public debate over Boston’s Olympics bid, it may be useful to know that the mayor of our fine city “had signed an agreement with the United States Olympic Committee to prohibit city employees from speaking ...

Constrained Debate and Distractions at the SOTU
January 21, 2015
David Hume wondered how it is that the many come to be governed by the few—it seems more logical that it should be the other way around. He came to the conclusion that it was elite opinion, disseminated by “the pulpit and the schoolroom” (he was writing in the eighteenth ...

Daily Bafflements
January 21, 2015
• Forbes Magazine’s tips on How to Become a Thought Leader include keeping a journal, liberally using LinkedIn, and practicing your speeches on your cat before you try them on people. • In last night’s State of the Union Address, President Obama noted the ...

Wes Anderson’s Class Acts
January 20, 2015
I don’t know a single person who’s really satisfied with this year’s Oscar nominations. The most exciting movies of the year are almost unilaterally shut out. The slate of nominated directors is, with the exception of Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu, ...

One Dinner Too Far: Posh and The Riot Club
January 20, 2015
How are we to understand the violence inherent to the possession of wealth? In the mid-seventeenth century the revolutionary Digger Gerard Winstanley called the possession of immense private property the “kingly power” of men over men, the “great red dragon, the god of ...

Daily Bafflements
January 20, 2015
• President Obama’s State of the Union address is on tonight, and some of the advertisements hyping it are…a bit ominous. Baffler blog contributor Andrew Helms asks, “SOTU or Black Mirror set?” • Today in Billionaires: According to a new Oxfam ...

Simple Notebooks for Complicated Times
January 15, 2015
AdWeek recently brought to the public’s attention the enormous success of Field Notes, a small, Chicago-based company that sells small, forty-eight-page paper notebooks. The overwhelming popularity of these homespun notebooks suggests that the supply of wholesome consumer ...

Daily Bafflements
January 15, 2015
• We assume by now you’ve seen Scott Dadich’s bonkers memo to his employees about what is and is not permitted in the new Wired offices. In the words of British comedian Eddie Izzard, on the new ban on smoking in American bars in the late 1990s, “No smoking ...

Fear, the Ultimate Trump Card
January 14, 2015
America has a long legacy of dressing up its xenophobia in the cheap costume jewelry of law and order. Read what Harper’s Weekly wrote about the Irish immigrants in 1860: Unfortunately, this should sound very familiar. Even today, anti-immigration rhetoric in America reads ...