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Why Should “Flash Boys” Shock Us?
April 04, 2014
Media coverage of Wall Street scandals often vilifies individuals or specific practices as corrupt while failing to grapple with deeper problems posed by the financial sector. Missing from most coverage, too, is an examination of the growing role Wall Street has come to play in ...

Daily Bafflements
April 04, 2014
Dorothea Dix / U.S. Library of Congress • Today is “404 Day,” organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups to bring attention to Internet censorship in public libraries and schools. • Today is also the 212th birthday of Dorothea Dix, an activist ...

The Next Phase of the Obamacare Battle
April 02, 2014
Tuesday was a good day for the Affordable Care Act. The administration met its original projection of 7 million enrollments during the first six-month open enrollment window on private health insurance exchanges. That doesn’t include last-minute enrollments on the ...

Dragnet Surveillance and the English Language
April 02, 2014
The revelations over the past nine months that the United States is engaging in various mass-surveillance programs that collect and store huge amounts of information about both Americans and foreigners has rightly invited frequent references to George Orwell’s Nineteen ...

Daily Bafflements
April 02, 2014
A protest against Google buses in San Francisco. Photo by Chris Martin • Mother Jones calls yesterday’s Google bus protest “the most San Francisco thing ever,” and has some excellent pictures to back it up. • From Prison Policy Initiative, a fascinating pie chart ...

Mindlessly We Roll Along
April 01, 2014
There are no doubt many reasons for the PhD glut and the resulting insane academic job market. But one of them is surely that, dreary as academic life can be, most work in the real world sucks even worse. The life of a middle or senior manager, devoted to shaving fractions of a ...

Daily Bafflements
April 01, 2014
Papal bling. / Walters Art Museum • The “bling bishop” of Germany, who built a luxury mansion for himself with $43 million of church funds, has been removed from his post. (At least it included a $4 million chapel.) According to Al Jazeera, “Last year, [Pope] Francis ...

Traffic and Weather
March 31, 2014
“I compare [fortuna] to one of those raging rivers, which when in flood overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil from place to place; everything flies before it, all yield to its violence, without being able in any way to withstand it; ...

The Bigger the Checkbook, the Bigger the Bull
March 31, 2014
One of the more pathetic manifestations of our pretty-much-unregulated campaign finance system occurred this weekend in Las Vegas. New Jersey governor Chris Christie was speaking to a modest gathering of prospective donors from the Republican Jewish Coalition, whose views on ...

Beyoncé, Kim, and the Politics of Celebrity Labor
March 31, 2014
How do you make a celebrity? It’s popular to think of celebrities as highly disposable—as cheap and as flimsy as a poly-blend tank from Forever 21, with similarly dubious ethics of production. But the labor involved in the production of celebrity is not only complex, but ...

Daily Bafflements
March 31, 2014
Pictured: an O.G. London billionaire / Vanity Fair • Photographers James and Karla Murray documented the changing faces of Manhattan in their book Store Front: The Disappearing Faces of New York. “Then and now” photograph pairings are nothing new, but ...

The Baffler’s Week That Was
March 28, 2014
“A magazine that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary readers by praising anything.” –Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (quoted in The Baffler’s Issue 22, Modem & Taboo). Happy Friday, Bafflers. In case you missed them on the ...