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All the News That’s Fit to DeMint
June 04, 2014
Move over, FoxNews.com, the Daily Caller, The Blaze, the Washington Times, Breitbart, and Drudge; move over, everybody. Make some room, because the Heritage Foundation launched its very own news site on Tuesday, which the Washington Post reports will keep twelve journalists on ...

Daily Bafflements
June 04, 2014
Nope, no fancy coffees for you, Seattle. / Photo by runner 310. • A $15 minimum wage doesn’t sound so high after all when the AP calculates that a full-time job with that hourly pay (about $31,000 a year) still only buys the very basics in Seattle and many other ...

The Partial Promise of Feminine Hygiene Patenting
June 03, 2014
In 1926, the nascent sanitary napkin industry was in peril. Women, all a-flutter about their rights and whatnot, were proving resistant to giving up their maternally derived tendencies to make their own sanitary products. Traditionally, women sewed pads from castaway fabrics, ...

Daily Bafflements
June 03, 2014
• Slavoj Žižek on teaching: “I hate students,” he said, “they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.” And on office hours in particular: “I can’t imagine a worse experience than some idiot comes there and starts to ask you questions, which is still ...

Happy Birthday, Marquis de Sade
June 02, 2014
Today marks the 274th birthday of French revolutionary and libertine extraordinaire Marquis de Sade, and The Baffler is celebrating by re-reading Hussein Ibish’s reflections from Issue 22, “The United Sades of America.” In the popular imagination, Marquis de ...

Citizen Koch and the Oligarchic Slide
June 02, 2014
It takes about $99,000 to buy a Democratic congressman. That’s one of the grim factoids we learn in Citizen Koch, the new documentary from directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. That particular insight comes from James Bopp, who would know pay from payola; the conservative boffin ...

Daily Bafflements
June 02, 2014
• Today in Billionaires: heiress Alexis DeJoria is gaining some attention lately, not for her bucks, but for her skills as a professional drag racer. • If the EPA’s proposed plan to cut power plant emissions by 30 percent by 2030 is implemented, it “could very well be ...

The Baffler’s Week That Was
May 30, 2014
• We started the week off with two celebrations of the Class of 2014, with a commencement speech by Siddhartha Deb to graduates at the New School, and some news about Sheryl Sandberg’s visit to Harvard. Her commencement speech this week was accompanied by a visit from ...

Why Somaly Mam’s Lies Matter
May 30, 2014
Following a Newsweek cover story about the various exaggerations and fabrications of Cambodian anti-sex trafficking activist Somaly Mam and her colleagues last week, Mam announced on Wednesday that she would resign. In his Newsweek story, Simon Marks asked, “She has done ...

Friends without Benefits
May 30, 2014
It is an axiom of our age that a good crisis is a great opportunity, and nowhere is this belief more strongly held than in our nation’s beloved tech sector. San Francisco has a housing crisis; one startup founder aims to do his part by renting his couch in return for “$900 ...

Daily Bafflements
May 30, 2014
• Plans for more living-wage protests against Walmart are underway. “The company made a $16bn profit last year; the Walton family, which owns more than half of Walmart, is worth almost $145bn,” the Guardian reports. “The company pays 825,000 workers, around two-thirds of ...

Remembering Christopher Lasch
May 29, 2014
Christopher Lasch, one of the leading American social critics of the last half-century, would have celebrated his eighty-second birthday this weekend, were he still alive. Lasch succumbed to cancer in 1994, at the heartbreaking age of sixty-one, but his intellectual legacy lives ...