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Presenting: The Baffler SAT
March 07, 2014
The College Board has announced that it’s making big changes to the SAT. By eliminating it altogether, for the sake of humanity and higher education, you ask? Sadly, no. By simply scoring the exam on a curve, based on everyone’s parents’ net worth? No, that would probably ...

The Sensible Paranoia of a National Security State
March 06, 2014
It’s inevitable: people who steal secrets tend to wonder if someone else is stealing their secrets. Spies spy on spies to see if the spies are spying on them. And here we go again. Several reports this week described allegations that the CIA monitored the computers used by ...

What’s the Matter with White Dudes?
March 05, 2014
White working-class men don’t vote for Democrats anymore, and the New York Times is on it. According to this week’s fast-breaking news analysis, these voters are “the ones who got away.” It’s true. White working-class men, and white men, and men in general, ...

Commodify Your Wiretaps
March 04, 2014
Just in case it wasn’t clear that everything that can be commodified, will, domestic surveillance turns out to be just another product. And the customer thinks it’s, like, way overpriced. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on Monday against Sprint, ...

Microsoft’s Scroogley Strategy
March 03, 2014
There comes a time in every company’s life when it must make a crucial decision: Do we hire Mark Penn? Most companies have no problem saying “no” to this question. Penn is the guy whose last high-profile political gig, after all, was losing the 2008 Democratic ...

Climate Will Change Faster Than We Will
February 26, 2014
Those who care deeply about addressing climate change now (or at least now-ish!) have a nasty little problem with which to contend. The short version of this problem is that “people don’t care enough about it.” It’s trickier than that, though. When the ...

House of Cards Is a Dark Fantasy of Effective Government
February 24, 2014
House of Cards is a terrible show. It’s cynical in all the wrong ways and it shows a “dark underside” of insider Washington that doesn’t exist. There are no “puppetmasters” like Kevin Spacey’s character in real life—the government is ...

From the Office of Pointless Budget Maneuvering
February 21, 2014
It’s almost time for President Obama to release his annual budget proposal, and the world couldn’t be more not excited. Because the president’s budget proposal, much like his State of the Union address, is another one of those rituals that means very little in ...

Now What, Left Wing?
February 21, 2014
It’s a genre by now: advice for the powerlorn. The tone varies, from sermon to pep talk to strategy memo. Liberals are urged to be bolder; radicals are admonished to chill. We need more vision or more grit; more clarity or more passion; utopian dreams or common sense, or both. ...

Searching for Nuance in the Charter School Debate
February 20, 2014
The point of public schooling, H.L. Mencken wrote, “is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” That’s the attack, for those of you who are trying ...