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Daily Bafflements
October 20, 2014
• A Fox News reporter, interviewing State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf on Friday about the global Ebola crisis, very earnestly asked why the government has not yet considered launching an “ice bucket challenge” to combat the disease. • Today in ...

Indignation Nation
October 17, 2014
One of the great pleasures in life is indignation. It’s right up there with anger, love, and fear. Technically speaking, indignation is one of the “reflective” or “cognitive” emotions. When something big, metallic, and fast hurls toward you down the road, you feel fear ...

Daily Bafflements
October 17, 2014
• The nonpartisan group Crowdpac has compiled the most common first names of conservative and liberal political donors, with interesting results. As Katherine Miller of BuzzFeed puts it, “The liberal names generally sound like a group of women in their late 20s; the ...

The Jobs vs. the Environment Myth Lives On
October 16, 2014
Earlier this month, MSNBC host Chris Hayes participated in a bit of sparring with Cecil Roberts of the United Mine Workers of America. Placing himself firmly in the “anything but country music” camp of post-Carter American liberalism, Hayes brashly proclaimed, “in fifty ...

Daily Bafflements
October 16, 2014
• New York’s attorney general is releasing a report today declaring that nearly three-quarters of all Airbnb listings in the city are illegal. “Commercial operators, not hard-luck residents, supply more than a third of the units and generate more than a third of ...

Runaway Pharma Marketing Gets “Normalized”
October 15, 2014
Last month, Dublin-based drugmaker Shire made headlines for its pending acquisition by AbbVie, a deal that many saw as a new data point in the growing trend of corporate tax inversions. On Tuesday, following news that the White House was cracking down on tax inversions, AbbVie ...

Daily Bafflements
October 15, 2014
• Our reader @divya alerted us to this Independent article about how the CIA’s covert funding of abstract art in the mid-twentieth century and asked if The Baffler has ever been a beneficiary. Next question! • A man who checked into a U.S. Navy program for alcoholism ...

The Lives of Ours: Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour
October 14, 2014
What do an Iraqi doctor-politician, a reformed jihadist who was once Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard, and Edward Snowden all have in common? Right now, someone somewhere is saying about all three: They belong in a cage. But not Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker behind a ...

The Fratty Wolf in Your Leftist Grandmother’s Clothing
October 14, 2014
I want to re-introduce you to someone you probably already know. You might recognize him at a party, or, more likely, at your Marxist reading group, where he’s always expounding on how identity politics detract from the real issues. Some iteration of him appeared in The Awl ...

Daily Bafflements
October 14, 2014
• Customers who have recently bought the iconic Hermès “Birkin” bags (for $20,000 or more) are returning them with complaints that they smell like marijuana, or skunks. The New York Post reports that Hermès is blaming a “badly tanned” batch of ...

Q&A: Mary O’Hara on Austerity and Inequality in the UK
October 10, 2014
Mary O’Hara, a longtime social justice reporter for the Guardian in London, is preparing for the stateside release of her book, Austerity Bites: A Journey to the Sharp End of Cuts in the UK, which was released across the pond this past spring. The timing of the book’s U.S. ...

Greenpeace Wins Again! But So Does Big Oil
October 10, 2014
If you’re big on the crossover between the youth demographic and the oil market—and who isn’t?—your day was made on Thursday when LEGO announced it was ending a partnership with Shell Oil and Ferrari following (although not because of, officials were careful to clarify) ...