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Daily Bafflements
December 05, 2014
• Today we celebrate the birthday of Dave Hickey, art critic, editor, gallery owner, and the author of Air Guitar, a 1997 essay collection that has become a classic in the genre. Minou Rafail wrote about Hickey in depth for Issue 14 of The Baffler back in 2001. Hickey ...

I, Start-up
December 04, 2014
Listen and you’ll hear it humming along quietly in the background of your life. It’s the sound of other people’s labor. Alfred, yet another start-up in the on-demand service economy, promises to make it easy and affordable for you to finally tune that sound out. Offering ...

Daily Bafflements
December 04, 2014
• This Powerpoint presentation by a Sony Pictures marketing team, obtained by Gawker after a massive leak/hack of the company’s data, is hilariously bad. • The billionaire-NASA dream team’s quest for Mars continues. “All of the challenges that exist are ...

The Plea and Promise of “Hands Up”
December 03, 2014
On Sunday, five St. Louis Rams football players took the field with their hands up, a message of solidarity with Ferguson protesters as blunt and powerful as the game they play. Afterwards, the St. Louis police officers’ union denounced the gesture, and conservative ...

Daily Bafflements
December 03, 2014
• It’s fitting that the submarine that this East Hampton man bought with the proceeds of his elaborate fine-art forgeries is also, it turns out, a fake. • How can we evaluate and address police killings as a country if we can’t even keep track of how many there ...

“Feminism for What?” – Illustrated
December 02, 2014
Our conference this fall, “Feminism for What? Equality in the Workplace After Lean In,” featured panel discussions exploring the merits and demerits of the self-help genre itself, the role of class divisions in feminist advancement, and how the compounding roles ...

Daily Bafflements
December 02, 2014
• The Dark #Future of #News #Innovation is upon us, and it’s not found in the massive layoffs at the New York Times: “Vice Media, Knight Foundation and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism announced plans Monday evening for a $500,000 journalism innovation fund, ...

The Glossy Magazines of the Islamic State
December 01, 2014
Every organization now peddles its ideology the same way that Nike and MTV do–mass media. Stormfront is a notorious website for (mostly) American neofascists. The North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) has a website. The American Socialist Party is on Twitter. And ...

Daily Bafflements
December 01, 2014
• Well, welcome back, Bafflers, it’s Cyber Monday, which means it’s time to explore all of your gadget gift guides! This list of must-haves by the editors at Popular Science includes a $3,000 drone, a pair of mesh and carbon-fiber sneakers designed by Porsche, and ...

Happy Birthday, James Agee
November 26, 2014
Tomorrow is not only Thanksgiving Day; it’s also the 105th anniversary of the birth of one Mr. James Agee, a reporter and essayist who is very dear to the hearts and brains of The Baffler. In the summer of 1936, when Agee was a 26-year-old writer at Fortune magazine, he went ...

Daily Bafflements
November 26, 2014
• “It would have been powerful to see charges filed against Darren Wilson. At the same time, actual justice for Michael Brown—a world in which young men like Michael Brown can’t be gunned down without consequences—won’t come from the criminal justice system. Our ...

Hollybaba’s Blockbusters
November 25, 2014
If movies can tell us anything about the internal lives of typical film industry executives, it’s that they like to feel like the most important people in any room, like they’re doing everyone else a favor by granting a meeting. So it takes truly special circumstances to ...