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This (De-Politicized) American Life
July 30, 2013
It’s true that Team Baffler has developed something of a forensic interest in the goggle-eyed tales of middle-class uplift that teem Ira Glass’s immensely popular “This American Life” franchise. So when the show was graced with the journalism ...

When Playbooks Attack
July 26, 2013
We are quite confident that present-day Washington will go down in the annals of bloated, unselfaware privilege right alongside other, similarly gruesome chapters in the human experiment, such as the reign of Caligula or the film career of Michael Bay. But even we were ...

My City Was Pawned
July 26, 2013
Line up, everybody! It’s time for the Tough Lessons America Must Learn from the bankruptcy of Detroit. Please consult your center-right policy hymnal for the talking points. Or, you know, pick up the August 5 issue of Time magazine, where the cover story on Motor ...

Fleecing the Sheepskin Set
July 25, 2013
The higher-education bubble remains, for all intents and purposes, the biggest shakedown left standing in the U.S. economy. Collective student debt is well north of $1 trillion, held by 38 million Americans in a job market that finds recent college grads facing 52 percent ...

Speed Metal
July 24, 2013
When the New York Times published a blockbuster investigation into the manipulations of the global aluminum supply by Goldman Sachs and other investment banks in late July, the usual rigors of impression management in an official finance scandal duly ensued. The story, by Times ...

Cash Crop
July 24, 2013
Behold, the machinery of our representative government, spinning gloriously in reverse! It’s true that Speaker of the House John Boehner is now on record with the claim that the accomplishments of his party caucus are better measured on the basis of the bills that its members ...

Ira Glass’s Fact Problem
April 12, 2013
A year after This American Life retracted Mike Daisey’s partially fabricated story about visiting an Apple manufacturer in China, the public radio program once again faces charges of lackadaisical fact-checking. This time around, the allegations concern a recent story This ...

April 4 Mail Date
March 29, 2013
Good news from our indomitable publisher: The Baffler 22, Modem and Taboo, hits the mails on Thursday (April 4) and will begin reaching you, our subscribers, three or four business days later. If you haven’t subscribed, you’ll miss our latest installment of awful ...