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A St. George Segregationist Update
August 18, 2014
[This is an update on the situation Tom wrote about in The Baffler’s current issue, published last month. – Ed.] In mid-July, Frontline devoted a half-hour to the unfolding secessionist fight in Baton Rouge. The investigative PBS special zeroed in on consequences of ...

S.W.A.T. USA
August 18, 2014
Sunday night in Ferguson, Missouri, the second night of an imposed curfew, brought not calm, but more chaos. The world watched the scene unfold on several online livestreams and read rapidly-changing reports over Twitter. (Broadcast television news was largely useless.) At 10 ...

Daily Bafflements
August 18, 2014
• New York Times reporter James Risen, who is likely facing prison for refusing to give up an anonymous source for a story and book about the CIA, calls President Obama “the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.” • Oh, also, in case ...

What’s the Matter with New Atheism?
August 14, 2014
  Taken in its original context, Nietzsche’s famous dictum “God is dead” sounds more like a warning than a triumphant boast. When the line appears in The Gay Science, Nietzsche places it in the mouth of a village madman who soon realizes the world is not yet ready to hear ...

Daily Bafflements
August 14, 2014
  • It’s the fifteenth anniversary of ABC gameshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? • Today in Fearmongering: Ahead of Florida’s November vote on medical marijuana, an anti-legalization group, “No on 2,” tweeted this: “Will the new face of ...

Anne Manne and the “Asshole Effect”
August 13, 2014
In a recent article in Aeon, Eric Schwitzgebel suggests that in order to fully understand the problem of “moral ignorance,” we need “a theory of jerks.” In her new book The Life of I, Australian writer Anne Manne gives us one: late capitalism breeds jerks, rewards ...

Daily Bafflements
August 13, 2014
• This is what a bunch of tech hype looks like, all graphed up by Gartner. Entrepreneurs, if you seek to reach the “post-nexus stage” with your digital business, go hard on these technologies: “Smart Workspace; Connected Home; 3D Bioprinting Systems; ...

Daily Bafflements
August 12, 2014
• Today in Pure Coincidences, courtesy Mother Jones: a) A lot of bottled water comes from drought-parched California. b) In California, groundwater’s a property right; extraction is unregulated. (At least for now; stay tuned.) • The living Latin ...

The Masons, the Rotarians, and You
August 11, 2014
© Mark Dancey In our current issue, Thomas Frank examines the long, strange history of the Masons, the Rotarians, the Elks, the Lions, Shriners, and all the other fraternal orders that have gradually fallen out of fashion. “The Freemasons,” he writes in “Veiled Pensioners ...

Daily Bafflements
August 11, 2014
  • The NCAA can no longer prohibit compensation for student-athletes, a federal judge ruled Friday. While you wait out the appeals process, see e.g. Matt Hinton’s “Billionaire Ball,” circa Baffler no. 20, 2012. “It’s become steadily harder to use ...

The Assassin’s Fate: Paul Berman Shoots and Misses (Again)
August 08, 2014
  We Sicilians are connoisseurs of malevolence. So I approached Paul Berman’s hatchet job on Alexander Cockburn (The New Republic, August 1) with an alacrity tempered only by my apprehension that Berman wasn’t quite up to the job. His previous attempts at character ...