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Daily Bafflements
October 10, 2014
• In a past issue of The Baffler, David Graeber asked, where are all the flying cars? This week Elon Musk (he of autopilot electric car fame) expressed ambivalence about the idea: “If the sky was full of cars flying all over the place, it would affect how things ...

Gary Hart and Gonzo’s Ghost
October 09, 2014
A drugged-out shadow hangs over American political journalism: Hunter S. Thompson, spleen of the long ‘60s, id to Woodward and Bernstein’s tag team superego. When he put an end to things in 2005, he sucked his shtick right out the door with him. He was, as Matt Taibbi once ...

Daily Bafflements
October 09, 2014
• Today in Labor Strikes: teachers in Texas, Foxconn workers in China, airline cabin crews in New York who fear exposure to Ebola, and (maybe) Tube workers in London next week. • USA Discounters, a retailer that gained some less than favorable attention this summer for ...

Exile on H Street
October 08, 2014
I’ll begin by laying my cards on the table. I lived in Washington, D.C. from 2010 to 2013. For almost all that time, my apartment was either in Columbia Heights or Mt. Pleasant—neighborhoods that have recently seen an influx of upwardly mobile young people. Wherever I lived, ...

Daily Bafflements
October 08, 2014
• Amazon and its workers are heading to the Supreme Court today with a battle over whether workers should be paid for the time they spend waiting in the security lines they are required to go through after they finish their shifts. Former Amazon warehouse workers in Nevada ...

Silicon Valley’s Futuristic Mega-Zen Brain Machine
October 06, 2014
Biohacking, the hacking of biology, is a broad label that, in its most extreme form, can include DIY plant gene sequencing and the installation of magnets into your fingertips. But the term is also used to describe the habit of obsessively manipulating your diet and gobbling ...

Daily Bafflements
October 06, 2014
• For all the attention Virgin and Netflix have received recently for their “unlimited vacation” policies for employees, that’s certainly not a reality for most of the country’s workers. In fact, half of America hasn’t taken a single vacation day ...

Daily Bafflements
October 03, 2014
• Margaret Hartmann at New York has a roundup of the most terrifying warnings politicians have uttered about Ebola. For instance, Rand Paul, speaking about President Obama’s plan to send 3,000 U.S. soldiers to West Africa to help, said: “You also have to be ...

The Birth of the Time-Motion Human
October 02, 2014
In a darkened room, a woman lies watched by an infra-red camera as she sleeps. It monitors her breathing, her movements, the flicker of her eyelids. Some hours later it stings her with a painful electric shock. She wakes, tumbles out of bed and into the restroom, whereupon a ...

Daily Bafflements
October 02, 2014
• Power corrupts everyone eventually, even the most honest of us. It’s science. • Headline of the Day, via Huffington Post: “Pro-Union Burger King Worker Disciplined for Poor Pickle Placement.” (Runner-up: “Facebook apologizes to drag ...

“Payment on an Unpaid Basis”
October 01, 2014
“Payment is on an unpaid basis,” is a sentence that should not exist. It’s a linguistic offense, but also a legal one: zero dollars an hour is well below the minimum wage in all fifty states. Unless the employee is a child working fourteen hours a day on a farm, an ...