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The Baffler’s Week That Was
June 20, 2014
Folks! Hawks and doves, boondogglers and Blackwaters, nannies and mommies, debtors and billionaires, indie rockers and Aussies, platforms, platishers, and public university administrators, let’s all take a look back together at the past week on the Baffler blog! • First, we ...

Happy Birthday, Jean-Paul Sartre
June 20, 2014
This Saturday marks the 109th anniversary of the birth of Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, novelist, playwright, and agitator extraordinaire. Sartre is well known today for many things—though fame was never what he was after. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ...

Higher Ed Pays a High Price for Mediocrity
June 20, 2014
The start of the 21st century saw the emergence of a set of euphemisms to describe the class of universities that are prestigious, but not quite in the Ivy League. These schools were dubbed “The New Ivies” in a number of media outlets, “The Little Ivies” in admissions ...

Daily Bafflements
June 20, 2014
• Retail marketers are testing motion-sensing cameras that would record when people pick things up off the shelf, and how long they hold the things before putting them back down or deciding to buy. Digiday says that this information about how customers “interact with the ...

Why “American” Is a Bad Word in Australia
June 19, 2014
In a recent episode of his new show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver featured Australia’s new-ish right wing prime minister, Tony Abbott, in a segment devoted to “Other Countries’ Presidents of the USA.” The show highlighted Abbott’s long history of verbal slip-ups, ...

Daily Bafflements
June 19, 2014
  • We already know that the emails we write and the phone calls we make aren’t private anymore. But snail mail? You too? • A psychological study has found that kids who have less structured time are more independent and are better at setting and reaching their own goals. ...

Knocking Off YouTube’s Populist Halo
June 18, 2014
In recent years, the large tech companies—Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook—have played a great trick on consumers. By disrupting the old gatekeepers out of existence, they claim, they have leveled the cultural playing field, leaving no barriers between people and the ...

Debtors’ Prisons and Other Catastrophes
June 18, 2014
George Bernard Shaw became a socialist by reading a book. Oddly enough, the book that converted him was not a political tract, but a novel: Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Shaw regarded Dorrit as “a more seditious book than Das Kapital.” The novel centers around the ...

Daily Bafflements
June 18, 2014
• Today in Billionaires: Chinese “recycling tycoon” Chen Guangbiao put ads in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal this week inviting 1,000 impoverished Americans to a free lunch in Central Park. Attendees will apparently receive both food and cash to spend on ...

Domestic Workers, Domestic Cargo
June 17, 2014
The word “slavery” has been so thoroughly abused in the context of American political discourse, that it’s easy to forget that it still means something, even in a nation that ostensibly abandoned the practice a century and a half ago. Yet when Sheila Bapat uses the word in ...

ISIS, Blackwater, and the Billion-Dollar Boondoggle
June 17, 2014
As ISIS, a sectarian Sunni militia so radical that Al Qaeda has disavowed it, pushes towards Baghdad, the situation in Iraq is developing so quickly it may give the impression of appearing ex nihilo. Or, at the very least, the conservative narrative would like us to believe that ...

Daily Bafflements
June 17, 2014
• “Prison labor has gone artisanal,” reports Fortune. Inmates in Colorado, for instance, are working at a goat farm that sells cheese to Whole Foods. “Nationwide 63,032 inmates produce more than $2 billion worth of products a year, most of them sold to government ...