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Daily Bafflements
May 19, 2014
• Calling all of you “Millennial Marxists” looking for love—there’s an online dating site just for you. Presenting the radical left’s answer to OkCupid, via Critical Theory: OkComrade. • David Cole reviews Robert A. Ferguson’s new book Inferno, on the “anatomy ...

The Baffler’s Week That Was
May 16, 2014
Illustration by Mark S. Fisher, from Issue 24 This week! On The Baffler online! We reached peaks of excitement, and depths of dread! Let’s look, shall we? • From our current issue, we put up Gene Seymour’s salvo on the political implications of science ...

“Dilbert” and Dissent in the Workplace
May 16, 2014
Jill Lepore’s brief history of office life, appearing in last week’s The New Yorker on the occasion of Nikil Saval’s new book Cubed, takes the reader on a textual tour of “The Office Through the Ages.” Her tour begins with a mid-nineteenth-century ...

The Stats and Stories of American Healthcare
May 16, 2014
For far too long in America, health care policy has been diagnosed by the numbers alone. Politicians and the media alike have subtracted narrative thinking from the national debate. Most media outlets will report on the latest public approval ratings of the Affordable Care Act, ...

Daily Bafflements
May 16, 2014
• Yesterday, while commentators and critics were trading financial analysis of whether abruptly-ousted New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson’s salary of $525,000 a year was more or less than her predecessor’s salary, thousands of fast-food workers across the ...

What Piketty’s Neoliberal Critics Get Wrong
May 15, 2014
[Part 2 to Geier’s earlier post, “What Piketty’s Conservative Critics Get Wrong,” here. – ed.] As a genre, the reviews of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century have been fascinating in what they reveal about the status of the economic inequality debate ...

Zuckerberg Gets Schooled in Newark
May 15, 2014
Was the hoodied billionaire hoodwinked? That’s one conclusion one could reach after reading Dale Russakoff’s exhaustive piece in The New Yorker this week on Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million challenge grant investment designed to jumpstart the ...

Daily Bafflements
May 15, 2014
• “The National Rifle Association (NRA) has launched a new web series designed to appeal to millennials,” reports Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason. “Called Noir, it features an interracial pair of flawless, ambiguously aged young folks mixing standard conservative talking ...

Dispatch from the Narcissism Wars
May 14, 2014
It is worth recalling why some of us tasked with entering adulthood in the late 1970s found Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism to be a steadying tonic, an indispensible aid to bullshit detection. It was, of course, a time of institutional collapse, and both the ...

Glassholes at Work
May 14, 2014
If any single event thus far has perfectly encapsulated up the public’s relationship with Google Glass, it was the Bay Area bar fight which made Sarah Slocum a minor celebrity. A few months ago, Slocum made headlines by claiming she had been assaulted by anti-Glass zealots in ...

Daily Bafflements
May 14, 2014
Is this Internet? / Photo courtesy of the Boston Public Library • From Max Linsky comes a set of scanned pages from a handbook for a class about the Internet that his grandmother took in her retirement home in 1998. “How Big is the Internet? No one ...

The Domino Sugar Refinery and the Art of Real Estate
May 13, 2014
At the southern end of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the hipster epicenter of the world’s hipster epicenter, is the site of the century-old Domino Sugar Refinery, now a hulking shell of empty warehouses. Soon, thanks to the development company Two Trees (the people who invented the ...