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What We Talk About When We Talk About Patriarchy
September 15, 2013
Over at Slate last week—a place where half-thought memes go to die almost hourly, it seems—Hanna Rosin declared the end of the patriarchy. On paper, of course, I (and countless other ardent feminists like me) should be out in front of the wake for this sturdiest of ...

The Imaginarium of Dr. O’Bagy
September 13, 2013
In a way, it’s a shame that U.S. intervention in Syria may be avoided just as the cast is filling out. Playing the administration that heralds the threat of foreign WMD attacks in some far-off Middle Eastern land, we have the Obama administration. As the cantankerous ...

George Packer’s Abstract Period
September 12, 2013
Leaving a great abstraction untouched is the practice of an investigator who’s already chosen sides, or so suggests Baffler senior editor Chris Lehmann in his review of New Yorker staff writer George Packer’s latest book, The Unwinding. The review, published Thursday at ...

The Good, the Bad, and the Rhetorically Challenged
September 12, 2013
Appearing like Brigadoon out of the smog of American political discourse, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s New York Times op-ed is a weirdly clear-eyed piece that reads as a reminder that power doesn’t have to speak in the babbling gibberish of our ...

A Pax On All Your Houses
September 11, 2013
The Internet got off to a great start this week! It killed a man. Saw, acknowledged, then scalped him. He is dead, for now. We can all rest. The era of Pax Dickinson being-employed-while-having-an-offensive-Twitter is over. Pax Dickinson, the erstwhile chief technology officer ...

The Great American War Dance
September 10, 2013
Academic historians insist upon the uniqueness of periods and places. They tell tales of a world where “the past is a foreign country.” It’s rather striking to note, therefore, that the voice of American military power has remained consistent throughout our ...

For-Profit Journalism Whiffs the For-Profit Education Story
August 16, 2013
The online keepers of Slate are tireless packagers of phony contrarianism–the painfully baroque and self-involved currency that smarty-pants Washington scribes use to advertise their capacity to see beyond the played-out terms of conventional political and cultural debate. ...

The Intern Ceiling
August 16, 2013
“When negotiating,” Sheryl Sandberg writes of the male-female corporate income divide in her bestselling book Lean In, “Think personally, act communally.” Write that down, young lady. When navigating the land of the unpaid internship, however, women ...

The Fraud That Failed
August 13, 2013
It was a stirring demonstration of the Obama White House’s determination to safeguard the battered livelihoods of the real victims of the 2008 mortgage meltdown: an ambitious sweep of the mortgage-fraud racket by federal law enforcement. Attorney General Eric Holder ...

Ronald Reagan, God of the Sea
August 01, 2013
Who says that the GOP House majority is a nihilist band of ideological hacks, professionally averse to the act of governing? Why just look at the heroic labors of House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa! The famously gun-toting, car-alarm-voicing lawmaker has apparently wearied of ...

ThreatWatch, Surveil Thyself
August 01, 2013
Back in 2012, Baffler contributor Maureen Tkacik kicked up a fuss when she dared to venture into the content-challenged, consensus-packaging, and immensely profitable business model for The Atlantic Monthly and its many curious satellite properties. In particular, Tkacik ...