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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 ...

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 ...