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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 ...

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 ...