Skip to content

Latest Posts

Web Exclusives

Who Cares What the Surgeon General Thinks About Guns?
March 18, 2014
The NRA is back in the ring, baby, and ready for a fight. And it’s not just blocking every little gun-related bill or appointment that goes through Congress—obviously it’s still doing that. But now it’s blocking nominees for any appointment position if those ...

The Risks to Rent-a-Soldiers
March 18, 2014
Owning stuff is hard, and you have to fix it if it breaks. Renting is easier. The U.S. Army currently has about 520,000 soldiers on active duty, with near-term fiscal constraints that will bring that number closer to 490,000, according to Military.com. Budget plans for 2015 ...

Erin Go Branding
March 17, 2014
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Bafflers! The big St. Patty’s Day headlines today are about all of the beer brands that have pulled out of city parades. In New York City, the organizers of the annual parade there banned “public expression of gay pride”—LGBT groups can march ...

The Baffler’s Week That Was
March 14, 2014
Why, hello there! Behind the scenes of the website, we’re currently shining our spectacles and waxing our mustaches in preparation for a re-launch of the site in just a month or two. We promise that the new online Baffler will be shiny, and colorful, but not startlingly so. In ...

Let Them Eat Art
March 14, 2014
Today is the first day of Asia Week, a massive art fair in New York City attracting Asian art dealers and buyers from all around the world. It follows shortly behind a string of art fairs in New York—the Art Dealers Association of America show, the Armory Show, the Independent ...

Wising Up About “High Politics”
March 13, 2014
To discuss David Brooks now is to discuss a psychological problem, not a political one. The most striking thing about Brooks’s “The Leaderless Doctrine,” his New York Times op-ed piece this week, isn’t what the columnist says; rather, it’s what he ...

Murdoch + Vice = Branded Content Bros
March 12, 2014
News Corp’s Wall Street Journal announced this week that it was launching a new “content division,” called “WSJ. Custom Studios.” As Capital New York relayed on Monday, the new service is being pitched as “an innovative, intelligent and flexible suite of capabilities ...

California’s Yuppie Nerd Culture
March 12, 2014
The effects of gentrification on Bay Area real estate and cost of living have been well documented. But what about the impact of big tech bucks on the overall culture? Can San Francisco afford to stay weird anymore? Last week, Kevin Roose wrote convincingly about the shifting ...

Kerry’s History Lesson
March 11, 2014
In 1931, the English historian Herbert Butterfield published something in between a long essay and a short book, The Whig Interpretation of History. The spirit of the Whiggish historical narrative, Butterfield wrote, was “illustrated to perfection” by the words of a ...

The Patronizing Pew Poll on the Millennial Generation
March 10, 2014
It is time, once again, for the Baffler blog to consider what other people consider about the millennials. What do they think? What unseen forces move these mysterious creatures? The Baffler blog has previously considered various political appeals to the Millennial Generation, ...

SXSW, Pictured
March 10, 2014
This morning on The Awl we saw these delightful snapshots from SXSW of Mashable’s wrecking-ball and requisite safety-waiver (“A selfie isn’t worth dying for,” wrote Gillian Lanyon). And now here’s another image worth highlighting, caught by Can’t Stop the Bleeding ...