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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 ...

Scab Cinema and Pseudo-Reality TV
May 29, 2014
When critics talk about movies or TV shows, they mostly treat them as self-contained texts to be described, interpreted, and “read.” This way of thinking similarly dominates the way most of the audience thinks about the work. If anyone talks about the production side, it is ...

Daily Bafflements
May 29, 2014
Yawn. / Photo by Shine 2010. • Gaby Holzwarth was a street-busking violinist until she got discovered by several tech executives in Palo Alto. She now plays regularly for Silicon Valley house parties, on private jets, and at tech conferences like yesterday’s Code ...

Philanthro-Capitalists Can’t Buy a Clue
May 28, 2014
“Humility” is not a term usually associated with former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, especially when it comes to his demonstrated views on the importance of wealthy people in American society. His mayoral tenure focused on luring the world’s richest to live and invest ...

Sheryl Sandberg at Harvard
May 28, 2014
At Harvard’s commencement ceremony today, the Class Day speaker is Facebook COO and Chief Lean-er In Sheryl Sandberg. She’s already had a lot of practice with commencement speeches; she has delivered them in past years at Barnard and the Harvard Business School, among other ...

Daily Bafflements
May 28, 2014
Pictured: not enough. / Photo by peddhapati • Forty-five cents questioned as a meaningful improvement in one’s quality of life. • Relevant woman old, says irrelevant old man. • Safe sex probably a good idea for people who have sex for a living, every day, all day; ...

Getting Real about Closing the Gender Pay Gap
May 27, 2014
The reasons why Jill Abramson was abruptly fired from her position as executive editor of the New York Times remain unclear, but a pay dispute is alleged to be among them. According to The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta, Abramson’s starting salary in 2011 when she began the job ...

Commencement
May 27, 2014
Editor’s Note: Siddhartha Deb was the keynote faculty speaker for the 2014 commencement ceremony at Eugene Lang College at the New School on May 22. We’re glad to post his address here, with his kind permission. So, look at all of you in your gowns and your mortarboard ...