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On Shooting the Messenger
December 10, 2014
The concept of “shooting the messenger” predates actual shooting by millennia. It is said that the ancient Greeks so dreaded the receipt of bad news that those charged with its delivery along the proto-postal routes that birthed the modern marathon were at mortal risk upon ...

Daily Bafflements
December 10, 2014
• Today in Billionaires: Newt Gingrich has read the New York Times report about a plan by top GOP donors to all decide on a 2016 candidate early in order to avoid a costly billionaire v. billionaire brawl, and no sir, he does not like it. “If I were Mitt Romney, Chris ...

Get Up, Light Up (Get Rich)
December 09, 2014
There are celebrity sell-outs in every business—even the drug business. Fans of the world’s most famous reggae icon—once thought to be the herald of a spiritual revolution—might be taken aback to soon find his face smiling up from the packaging of the new “Marley ...

Daily Bafflements
December 09, 2014
• A huge Reuters report on “an elite cadre” of attorneys reveals that “although they account for far less than 1 percent of lawyers who filed appeals to the Supreme Court, these attorneys were involved in 43 percent of the cases the high court chose to ...

The Disruption This Time
December 08, 2014
I’ve been attending and observing protests for thirty years, and I’ve never seen anything quite like what I’ve experienced in New York City over the last week. In the days after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to charge police officer Daniel Pantaleo for the choking ...

Daily Bafflements
December 08, 2014
• “More than a year after federal regulators issued new privacy rules for kids’ mobile apps, online stores are flooded with cute and silly software programs that quietly collect vast amounts of data on the youngest consumers, including a person’s location and ...

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 ...