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Towards a Politics of Delight and Desire
September 25, 2014
When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, he was looking to expose the dangerous working conditions of the meatpacking industry and bring relief to its workers. Instead, the popular reaction to his book led to new food standards and sanitation laws. (Apparently the worst thing about ...

Daily Bafflements
September 25, 2014
• Democracy in Action Headline of the Day: “Another Donna [Texas] school board election worker charged in coke-for-votes scheme.” (From the McAllen, Texas Monitor, via Quartz.) • China’s teenagers are being forced by their schools to work long hours for ...

You Can Find Capitalism in Da Club
September 24, 2014
Though “financial coercion” is something of a phrase du jour for hand-wringers describing unsavory employment decisions by women, there is a new phrase in town that seeks to take its throne. It is “consensual trafficking,” and it is brought to you by a New York Times ...

Daily Bafflements
September 24, 2014
• If you’ll remember, we used to help the homeless by turning them into walking Wi-Fi hotspots; now we might as well help them by actually housing them inside ad-emblazoned billboards. • Today in Billionaires: Larry Ellison bought an island in Hawaii. He has said he ...

What “Yes” in Scotland Might Have Meant
September 23, 2014
Looking at a map of the world and seeing the number of places over which the sun of the British Empire has most definitely set, it’s difficult to imagine why, when Scotland was presented with the opportunity to leave the United Kingdom, they did not take it. It goes against ...

Daily Bafflements
September 23, 2014
• Today in Billionaires: Some residents of the Dolores Heights neighborhood of San Francisco feel “under seige” by a “massive construction encampment” surrounding a $10 million “fixer-upper” bought (and currently being slowly and ...

Rhetoric Meets Reality for Married Gay Veterans
September 22, 2014
A couple purely rhetorical statements have recently achieved the status of “bipartisan consensus.” “ISIS is barbaric” is one. “Returning veterans deserve our best treatment” is another. Unfortunately, these truisms are too vague to suggest any particular course of ...

Daily Bafflements
September 22, 2014
• Check out some photos of yesterday’s historic People’s Climate March in New York; the crowd was estimated at 300,000. All major media outlets carried stories about the protest, of course, but the best take, as usual, is the New York Post take: “The ...

“So, What Do You Do?”
September 19, 2014
[A version of this article appeared in the German newspaper Die ZEIT in July, where it inspired considerable debate and commentary. The article has been translated by the author and is reprinted here with permission; he has also written a response to the commentary, below. – ...

Daily Bafflements
September 19, 2014
• For a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Ahir Gopaldas evaluated the different categories of emotions that drive consumers to “ethical consumption,” like buying organic produce or free-trade stuff, even when it costs them more money. ...

David Graeber vs. Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go?
September 19, 2014
David Graeber vs. Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go? Once upon a time, in the heyday of social prognostication, many Americans believed that gadget-related knowledge would surely yield immeasurable leaps forward in the progress of the human species. Yet as David Graeber ...

U2, Apple, and the Strip-Mining of Punk Rebellion
September 18, 2014
“Wasn’t that the most incredible single you ever heard?” asked Apple CEO Tim Cook as the last note of The Edge’s guitar died away. He was playing U2’s new single “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” to the audience at the end of a press conference this month for the new ...