Tag: The Baffler

Ahistorical narratives of racial uplift and singular heroes deny complexity and are devoid of real politics.

Looks like you’ve got late-stage Patriarchal Medicine Syndrome. I’m so sorry.

How a hard-not-to-love show glosses over the powers that produced its makeover subjects.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Laurie Penny, Mina Kimes, Skip Hollandsworth, and David Marchese.

This week, we’re sharing stories from David Dayen, M.H. Miller, T. Cooper, Caren Lissner, and Michael Adno.

“We were nothing to these companies but a number in a database. And they fully controlled our fates.”

Looking for an Instagrammable way to spend your Saturday? Mediate your imagination through the forced whimsy of the Dream Machine.

The new Common co-living company isn’t as communal is it pretends.

How lead contaminated the soil under East Chicago’s black and Latino communities.

Digitization has removed the humanity from the music business, from collaboration to mutual respect.

The disturbing parallels between professional football and the business of pimping

Spotify’s corporate-branded playlists are not the solution to the music industry’s problems. They’re a new problem.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Rana Dasgupta, Whitney Joiner, Jesse Barron, Kiese Laymon, and David Roth.

“Does he even know about… Let me stop you there. The answer is no.”

Is the app that ate email eating into a whole lot more—like privacy, productivity, and personal time?

This week, we’re sharing stories by Sam Knight, Rick Perlstein, Ijeoma Oluo, Keziah Weir, and George Saunders.

At The Baffler, Thomas Frank looks at the pros and cons and history of what we call “curation.”

Immigration lawyer Matt Cameron writes in The Baffler, laying bare the inequities, misconceptions, and plain messiness that characterize U.S. immigration law.

Rafia Zakaria’s essay in The Baffler on flying while Muslim is an important read that exposes a long list of things that most white, non-Muslim Americans never have to worry about while traveling.

Writing in The Baffler, Laurie Penny explores what it will mean for the civilization to collapse slowly, because of climate change, rather than in a single nuclear bang.

Journalist and public education advocate Jennifer Berkshire traveled to the heart of DeVos-land — the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan — to learn more about Betsy DeVos and her family’s life-long attempt to dismantle the “nanny state.”

June Thunderstorm, writing in The Baffler with the support of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, digs into the race and class issues that underlie efforts to quell smoking. Is “public health” really the name of the game?

The gospel of yoga, mindfulness, and organic-everything didn’t come out of nowhere. In a world in which once-cherished social safety nets rapidly disappear, taking care of oneself has become an increasingly privatized—and increasingly expensive—endeavor. At The Baffler, Laurie Penny unpacks the ascendant ideology of self-care, and explains why it’s so hard to find an alternative […]

Six stories about bets, luck, and playing the odds.

With a recent slew of documentary films and books, punk’s forty year old body has been repeatedly repackaged, sweetened and sold to the masses at the mall, mystifying and irritating many people in the process. In The Baffler, Eugenia Williamson analyzes punk’s history, evolution, literature and commodifycation and addresses the lingering question: what does being ‘punk’ even mean anymore more? Besides, anyone who’s seen […]

In my not-so-past life as a fashion magazine addict (let’s be real—I bought seven of last month’s fashion mags for a quarter each at a recent library sale), this time of year was crucial to me. What kinds of skirts would appear on the pages of Seventeen? Would I be able to afford them? Would one-piece swimsuits finally be cool? Was this the year I started blow-drying my hair?! Each issue was a mini-New Year’s. Anything was possible.

When pay-to-play becomes pay-to-win, the classic model of video games—paying for time or access to the game—turns into something much more insidious. In The Baffler, game designer Ian Bogost asks us to consider which extracts a higher social cost: the explicit violence of Grant Theft Auto, or the addiction and sly financial drain of Candy Crush? […]

Facebook Feminism: Like It Or Not Susan Faludi | The Baffler | October 2013 | 36 minutes (9,021 words)   Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen) teaches media studies and writes Scandals of Classic Hollywood for The Hairpin, amongst other things. This essay is incendiary and incisive and just didn’t get the play it deserved: maybe because […]

This week’s Longreads Member pick is “The American Nonconformist in the Age of the Commercialization of Dissent,” a 1992 essay by Thomas Frank from The Baffler, the magazine he cofounded with Keith White in 1988.  Frank writes:  “In republishing this bit of juvenilia from 1992—my very first exploration of an idea that I reworked and reconsidered […]

A critical look at the political newspaper and website Politico: One classic method of unleashing irresistible Drudge bait on the Internet is to boil another outlet’s story down to a couple salacious-sounding excerpts, or (failing an effective condensing strategy) to simply reinterpret the material to fit a Drudge-friendly narrative. This past May, for example, Vanity […]