Skip to content

Latest Posts

Web Exclusives

Daily Bafflements
June 12, 2014
• What’s next for Eric Cantor? He announced on Wednesday that he’s stepping down as House Majority Leader after a surprising (or not-so-surprising?) upset in the Virginia primaries this week. Tell us what you think Cantor’s next gig will be by writing to us on Twitter ...

Insurance Vultures and the Internet of Things
June 11, 2014
Nothing’s really free on the Internet. From search engines and email to social media and online publishing, if you’re not entering in your credit card number somewhere, you’re paying in a different way. As the adage goes, if you’re not the consumer, then you’re the ...

Daily Bafflements
June 11, 2014
• From BBC Radio and The Independent comes an account of the “disastrous” meeting of Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot in 1964, and why it went so horribly wrong. “If you meet your hero in real life you will have an unrealistic expectation based on a facet of themselves that ...

Karl’s Struggle, Our Narcissism
June 10, 2014
I first awaited The Author in a claustrophobically tight crowd of people packed inside of a Brooklyn bookstore. The reading wasn’t to begin for another hour, but the store’s staff was forced to close the doors before too many more guests depleted the room’s oxygen levels. ...

Benghazi Fever and the Battle of the Branches
June 10, 2014
For the past year or so, left-wing Twitter’s favorite running gag has been to invoke right-wing Twitter’s bizarre fixation on Benghazi—or, rather, on #BENGHAZI—the seemingly unkillable non-scandal which evolved out of the 2012 terror attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya. ...

Daily Bafflements
June 10, 2014
• Today in Billionaires: billionaire Carl Icahn is excited about his investment in the dollar-store industry, and is discussing “strategies to enhance shareholder value.” How kitschy! • In somewhat related news, Alex Park reveals the moment in history when hobby shops ...

Racial Inequality and the Economics of Reparations
June 09, 2014
In The Atlantic this month, Ta-Nehisi Coates has a powerful essay making the case for reparations. Coates’s piece doesn’t dwell on the specifics of how a reparations policy would work. His aim, instead, is to launch a broader public consideration of the lingering impact of ...

Zombie Statistics on Sex Work
June 09, 2014
As a former escort, I can say with confidence that nearly everything you know, or think you know, about the money involved in sex work is wrong. And as a former statistician, I know the numbers definitely are. Last month the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) released ...

Daily Bafflements
June 09, 2014
Stop. Your priorities are all wrong. / Photo by Horia Varlan. • New York’s state legislature only has two weeks left this session, and probably won’t have time to consider new laws on the minimum wage or campaign finance issues. Newsday reports that ...

The Baffler’s Week That Was
June 06, 2014
Cartoon by P. S. Mueller • This week, we had occasion to re-visit two great pieces from the archives: Hussein Ibish’s appreciation of Marquis de Sade’s political legacy (for Sade’s 274th birthday, obviously), and Jim Newell’s salvo about ...

Silicon Valley’s Office Politic
June 06, 2014
The workplace has played a fraught role in America’s pop cultural life as of late, particularly as refracted through the lens of popular television. We’ve had the banal cubicle hilarity of The Office and Workaholics contrasted with the austere eros and thanatos of ...

Daily Bafflements
June 06, 2014
This face-cheese doesn’t make itself, you know. / Photo by Claire P. • From The Baffler’s own Chris Lehmann in In These Times, a look at Whole Foods’s “artisanal union-busting” in Chicago. • Glenn Greenwald writes at First Look that ...