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Daily Bafflements
May 12, 2014
Robes for sale! / Photo by Calvin Ballantine • It’s not just congressional seats that are increasingly up for sale; judicial elections have also been flooded with cash. Judicial primary spending in North Carolina has broken a record at $1.3 million. • ...

The Baffler’s Week That Was
May 09, 2014
Ladies and gentlemen, insiders and outsiders, queers and conservatives, high-frequency traders and Heritage think-tankers, the Lucky, the Hungry, and David Brooks, let’s all take a look back at the past week on The Baffler online: Illustration by David Sandlin, from ...

What the “Mad Men” Economy Can Teach Us About Ours
May 09, 2014
On last Sunday’s episode of Mad Men, Peggy (played by Elisabeth Moss) got a raise—a big one. Peggy, who clawed her way out of the secretarial pool to become copy chief for the Sterling Cooper advertising agency, was granted a pay increase of an additional $100 per week by ...

Thomas Frank on The Great College Trap
May 09, 2014
Founding editor Thomas Frank’s essay from Issue 23, “Academy Fight Song,” exposed the lie being sold to our young people—that if you go to a “good college,” all of your dreams will come true. Those colleges don’t necessarily always have you and your best interests ...

Daily Bafflements
May 09, 2014
Get off my lawn! / Photo by The Pug Father • Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is being sued in San Mateo County for blocking access to a public beach near land that he owns. As the Los Angeles Times reports, the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation objects to the ...

Cosmo for Queers, or, How to Sell a Woman to Herself
May 08, 2014
In 2014, which several publications have named “the year of reading women,” even Cosmo has caught on to the fact that feminism is marketable. Cosmopolitan.com recently hired feminist journalist and veteran Feministe editor Jill Filipovic to increase the magazine’s ...

Think Tanks’ Transparency Problem
May 08, 2014
Yesterday a small nonprofit group called Transparify released its survey of major research organizations around the world, including its ranking of how transparent the organizations are about where they get their money. Some of the biggest, and undeniably most influential, think ...

Daily Bafflements
May 08, 2014
• Via David Grann and Laughing Squid, a map of record stores around the world. • According to this depressing infographic from Masters In Accounting, Wall Street firms gave out $26.7 billion in bonuses in 2013, up 15 percent from the previous year. • “To Break Even in ...

Conservative Family Trees and the Cult of Victimhood
May 07, 2014
One of the most reliably entertaining spectacles in American politics occurs when conservatives play the victim card. A group that is overwhelmingly composed of prosperous white males, conservatives are obsessed with the delusion that nobody knows the troubles they’ve seen. ...

Daily Bafflements
May 07, 2014
• What would it look like if we chose our political representatives not by elections but by lottery? Alexander Guerrero in Aeon describes a “lottocracy.” (See also: “Against Merit,” by Gabriel Zaid, online now.) • Billionaires: they’re just like us! ...

Daily Bafflements
May 06, 2014
“What are you looking at?” / Potrait of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach, via public domain • Here are some highly enjoyable illustrated Martin Luther insults by Peter Mann, including such timeless classics as, “You stink like ...

Hungry for Success: A Sports Myth
May 06, 2014
Shabazz Napier had the childhood that sports writers dream of. Born in Roxbury, a historically African-American neighborhood in Boston, and raised in the Mission Hill housing projects, Napier led the University of Connecticut Huskies to a NCAA Men’s Basketball title this ...