Skip to content

Latest Posts

Web Exclusives

Google Plus You Equals $$$$
February 19, 2014
It is one of the great Internet mysteries of the last few years: Why does Google Plus still exist? The search engine company’s social network launched in mid-2011 and most people who signed up to “check it out” stopped using it several hours later in mid-2011. ...

We’re Going to Need Some More Professors (Or Not)
February 18, 2014
You’ll be shocked to hear it, but Nicholas Kristof is missing the point (which your Baffler correspondents have been obliged to point out before). “When I was a kid,” Kristof said in a February 15 blog post, “the Kennedy administration had its ...

Play, Dissected
February 18, 2014
“But why on earth won’t they let us play?” That is the question I came away with after reading David Graeber’s excellent “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?”, from The Baffler no. 24. It’s a question I have been asking myself since I began studying and ...

Iron Man 4: Iron Man Fights Income Inequality
February 17, 2014
The career of famous Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw has taken a strange detour in the past five or so years. The former George W. Bush administration economist and economic adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns has, like many of those on the right, ...

Hip New Trend for the Young People: Caring about the Deficit!
February 14, 2014
How do we reach the millennials?, the powerful people constantly wonder. They obsess over it. Because they know that if they can only figure it out, the world will be theirs! (Even more so than it already is!) blog has long been fascinated by terrible political appeals to ...

Baby Steps with Eric Holder
February 13, 2014
Eric Holder’s Justice Department has been a disappointment more often than not. The reefer madness, an absurd and abusive political foray into sensitive academic archives, that ghoulish speech about the power of the federal government to kill U.S. citizens overseas in ...

Congress Stuns World with Minor Hint of Functionality
February 12, 2014
Yesterday, the world witnessed a major breakthrough in contemporary United States governance: the speaker of the House of Representatives decided, for the first time in years, that it would be counterproductive and perhaps even strange to threaten the arbitrary destruction of ...

Do As He Says, Not As He Does. That Would Be Unprofitable.
February 12, 2014
Chamath Palihapitiya is a partner at a wealthy venture capital firm, Social+Capital Partnership, which aims “to create value and change on a global scale.” Being interested not just in profit but in social change, Mr. Palihapitiya appeared Sunday before a marginalized group ...

Minimum Wage Debate Focusing Less on Poverty, More on Lobbying
February 11, 2014
A sharp piece of reporting in the New York Times this week pulls the very thin mask off the expertise-for-hire industry that clusters around the District of Columbia. Reporter Eric Lipton paid a visit to the Employment Policies Institute, a nonprofit “economic research ...

Obamacare May Also Mean No More Employee Parking Spots
February 10, 2014
Could it be that corporate executives are among the biggest “winners” in the implementation of Obamacare? We don’t just mean health insurance company executives, either. We mean executives everywhere, from Delta to AOL to UPS, who now get to eliminate the ...

Glenn Greenwald Will Not Be Doing Trust Falls with the U.S.
February 07, 2014
Suppose you were, say, an ex-pat living in Brazil who wanted to be free to come and go to your home country, America, without much hassle, but the potential for hassle was greater than 0 percent. See, you had been publishing documents exposing the United States ...