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Daily Bafflements
April 28, 2014
• Craft beer, artisan pizza, independent movie theaters, gourmet coffee, and displacement of the poorest residents: tales of gentrification in Johannesburg, South Africa. • “Because of the high cost, climbers usually range from the young, sponsored athlete to wealthy men ...

Daily Bafflements
April 25, 2014
Justin Timberlake/Sean Parker photo illustration by Mike Cicchetti • “Starting a company was once an urge felt only by the blindly ambitious and slightly unsound, but in the Valley it’s been ostensibly transformed into a scheduled path one can simply elect and apply ...

The Baffler’s Week That Was
April 25, 2014
Women and men, feminists and fashionistas, wealthy heirs and high-heel wearers, militant multi-taskers, Camus-carrying intellectuals, and rifle-wielding libertarians, let’s all take a look back at the past week on the Baffler blog: • “Feminism is going to make it possible ...

Have Assault Rifle, Will Travel
April 25, 2014
What an exciting weekend this shall be for freedom-loving Americans: it’s the annual NRA convention! And now that little PR flaps like “lots of kids getting shot in an elementary school” are well in the rearview, our beloved gun manufacturers trade association can pivot to ...

Daily Bafflements
April 24, 2014
• The newsreel archive British Pathé has now uploaded its entire collection of 85,000 historic films, in high resolution, to YouTube, here. • Today is the first day of the National Rifle Association convention in Indianapolis. According to OpenSecrets.org, the NRA ...

The Real and the Ideal: Reflections on Partisan Review
April 24, 2014
Boston University, which published Partisan Review for the last quarter-century of that celebrated magazine’s sixty-nine-year history, has just put the entire archive online. It is a miniature history of 20th-century American intellectual life. It sometimes seems like half the ...

If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit
April 24, 2014
Here is the definitive list of the ten best quotes and excerpts from this New York Times article about the modern-day equivalent of foot-binding, in which women elect to have various types of surgery on their feet in order to fit into ludicrous shoes: Shoe by Christian ...

Billionaire Donors and True Believers
April 23, 2014
Democrat billionaires are always looking for an excuse to justify their outsized political spending. Aren’t liberals supposed to be against the wealthy few pouring great gobs of money into the political system? How can they justify railing against this state of affairs while ...

Daily Bafflements
April 23, 2014
Photo by The Baffler • Look what we found in a bagel shop in Brooklyn! • Relatedly: after yesterday’s news that Kim’s Video will be closing its last NYC location this summer, we heard that the late great and also-shuttered Bleecker Street Records is ...

What Women Wear
April 22, 2014
Much of what passes for feminism these days is concerned exclusively with how things look. Discussions frequently focus on the rights of women—whether cis or trans—to appear in public without conforming to traditional beauty standards; or what has or hasn’t been ...

The Tyranny of Time Management
April 22, 2014
A fairly ridiculous study has found that “sporting the latest tech toy can make you seem more like a leader.” For a paper entitled “Looking Innovative: Exploring the Role of Impression Management in High-Tech Product Adoption and Use” (#innovative), which ...

Daily Bafflements
April 22, 2014
• Ground sensors and satellites are being deployed to help predict and slow the crumbling of ancient Pompeii. As BLDGBLOG describes, “guards will receive electronic updates from the city itself while out on their daily rounds, including automated pings and alerts of ...