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After the Wall
November 20, 2014
The Berlin Wall fell twenty-five years ago this month. As one would expect, there are competing stories about how it happened. There is the tale of Reagan the Stalwart, which bloomed in the early triumphal years after 1989 but has since ebbed. There are the feather-haired East ...

Daily Bafflements
November 20, 2014
• We’ve really got to stop giving the New York Times such a hard time for being out of touch with the financial realities of most of its readers’ lives. In a section of the paper on Wednesday that was literally entitled “Your Money,” an article ...

What To Do About Uber?
November 19, 2014
On Monday, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith published a report from a dinner he and several other media figures attended with Uber executives. During the dinner, Smith wrote, senior vice president Emil Michael proposed spending $1 million to dig up dirt on journalists critical ...

Daily Bafflements
November 19, 2014
• Here is a blog post about a custom T-shirt startup company, presented without comment or context: “Karl Marx Would Have Liked Teespring.” (Via Zachary Davis.) • Read Baffler blog contributor Alana Massey’s excellent salvo about the hours and hours of ...

Why the SAT Can’t “Democratize” Harvard
November 18, 2014
Does anyone actually like the SAT? Given how our media reports on every changing detail and decision related to the test, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Americans are absolutely dying to hear about it. A few days ago, CBS News reported that more and more colleges are ...

Daily Bafflements
November 18, 2014
• So much for “upward mobility”: a new study for the journal Human Nature tracked British surnames from 1170 and 2012 to compare the families’ social status over time, by looking at elite school attendance and property ownership. The researchers found that ...

The Art of Con
November 17, 2014
Last weekend, heralded all by tourist boards, local TV news reports, and a massive full-color ad campaign throughout the city’s public transportation system, what turned out to be a relatively modest art exhibition opened in downtown Chicago. It shouldn’t have been ...

Daily Bafflements
November 17, 2014
• A group of dancers sued their employer, a Manhattan strip club, for minimum wage violations, and won $10 million. • Just as corporate cash has infiltrated politics, the trappings of political races have infiltrated big business: check out this hedge fund’s attack ...

Daily Bafflements
November 14, 2014
• Thanks to Jacqui Shine for the walk down memory lane yesterday, when she included The Great Grunge Hoax of 1992 in her comprehensive history and analysis of the New York Times Styles section for The Awl. Shine says she’s been working on this piece and studying this ...

Nightcrawler: Flourishing in the Dark
November 13, 2014
Nightcrawler, a new thriller with a sense of humor by Dan Gilroy, is a recession-era American Psycho. It’s a story that grasps the misery of low wages and lower cunning. Or perhaps it could be described as the Hunger Games of capitalist exploitation, couched in a critique of ...

Daily Bafflements
November 13, 2014
• “Only the Birds Will Be Shocked” is the title of a photo slideshow accompanying a New York Times feature on the “master (or mistress) of the universe bathrooms” in New York penthouses, with floor-to-ceiling glass sides. “It was like you were peeing ...