jason arias

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[jason-arias]

White Knight Syndrome The FBI Agent as moral crusader, from James Comey to Dale Cooper The Baffler By Niela Orr 'On television, the reappraisal of the FBI is filtered through its own messianic figure: the virtuous special agent. Now the Bureau—which, like many American institutions, was once seen as a force for good—is facing a reassessment. This shift can be seen in a number of popular TV shows, including Twin Peaks: The Return and Mindhunter, Netflix’s critical darling. It also finds expression on Must-See TV events like Comey’s congressional hearings. Which is to say that television has started to interrogate the received wisdom that tells of the FBI’s goodness; meanwhile, in real life, those outside of progressive circles are finally reckoning with it, too. More and more, the Bureau is projected as a symbol of incoherence and mayhem, and this jibes, too, with its public perception after the 2016 election.'

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2018 Pundit Pinup Calendar Illustrations by Eric Diotte The Baffler Overpopulation is a 21st century issue that The Baffler is concerned about. Rather than twiddle idly in this hamster bin, we've taken the matter into our own hands by developing a new contraceptive. Administered monthly.

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Black Metal shirt The Baffler

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Paradise Tossed Stephen Greenblatt’s new book blames everything on Adam and Eve, but not in a religious way The Baffler By Jessa Crispin 'For Greenblatt, a secularist who believes in progress, Adam and Eve’s is a story whose best version is secular, with all religious meaning stripped away from it. It is not fundamentally a story that helps us deal with the mystery of our origins, Greenblatt tells us; it’s a way to “think about innocence, temptation, and moral choice, about cleaving to a beloved partner, about work and sex and death.” But in the beginning, according to Greenblatt, the religious literally believed the world began with a dude named Adam and a chick named Eve. It was only through the progress of science and reason that allowed people to understand the story first as allegory and now as literature. Greenblatt, who cannot seriously be considered to be much of a thinker, is the worst kind of historian. ... It was Claude Levi Strauss who pointed out there is no direct correlation between the myths of a culture and how that culture behaves. A polytheistic culture with many stories of important feminine deities is not necessarily more likely to be more egalitarian than a monotheistic patriarchal one. A culture will hear in a story what it wants to hear, which is why the same story of Adam and Eve has been used by different sects as a justification both for sacred sexual freedom within a marriage, and for chaste marriages devoid of all sexual contact even for procreation.'

[jason-arias]

Superfluous Preferences By Jenni Juvonen Motherboard

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Fresh Hell The best dispatches from our grim new reality The Baffler

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Spielberg's Children It's Steven's world, we're just dying in it The Baffer By Jonathon Sturgeon 'This penchant for escapist self-referencing mocks all of us in the trailer for Spielberg’s forthcoming Ready Player One. The film, a spectacle of digital animation that should remind us, if we cared to remember, that Spielberg gentrified cinema with Jurassic Park’s radically animated dinosaurs, appears to be a work of intense contemporary realism, though it’s supposedly set in 2045. The trailer’s voiceover begins: "I live here in Columbus, Ohio. In 2045, it’s still ranked the fastest growing city on Earth, but it sure doesn’t seem like it when you live in the Stacks. They call our generation “the missing millions.” Missing not because we went anywhere; there’s nowhere left to go. Nowhere except the Oasis. It’s the only place where it feels like I mean anything. A world where the limits of reality are your own imagination." This voiceover could not better describe Spielbergism—and life under the sway of total entertainment—if it meant to. “The Stacks,” a trashscape of stacked mobile homes and broken-down vehicles, very much describes the rural Midwestern landscape in 2017. And it’s clear that we’ve already lost not one but two generations to “the Oasis,” a “world” defined by “imagination.” The Oasis is just any given Spielberg film, a fact driven home by what follows: a procession of characters and images from Spielberg’s entire output, from Back to the Future’s DeLorean to the giant from The Iron Giant. Spielberg is a net of crisscrossing references to Spielberg.'

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The Conversion of Gucci Mane By Niela Orr The Baffler 'Perhaps for some, Gucci’s jumping the broom felt too sudden a pivot from his old ways, from the days when he released the Trap House series of albums and mixtapes. This was the man, after all, who penned “Freaky Girl”—now he had brought his girl home to mama. To them this marriage, not to mention Gucci’s new lease on life, is highly suspicious. The whole scheme, in fact, risks alienating Gucci’s core fan base. Which is to say that the “Gucci is a clone” meme is internet catnip taken curiously far, but it is also the articulation of an idea that has historically been projected onto black people—the idea that we don’t have, or shouldn’t exercise, interior agency.'

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Greek Tragedy By Doug Henwood The Baffler 'Varoufakis wanted the government to invoke the default option and, should the authorities eject Greece from the eurozone, improvise a new currency through the tax system. But his colleagues had lost their nerve. Ignoring the referendum, they rolled over, agreed to yet another austerity deal, and Varoufakis resigned.'

[jason-arias]

A Wonk on the Wild Side Hillary Clinton’s book is a technocrat’s lament By Chris Lehmann The Baffler 'a wonk’s lament...still unresolved disorientation at the specter of an angry, populist electorate.'

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Tragic Kingdom David Simon's The Deuce and the Disneyfication of porn By Niela Orr The Baffler 'Simon told Market Watch that despite its premise about the Times Square sex industry in the early seventies, the show is actually “a critique of market capitalism—the idea that the unencumbered market is anything more than a tool for building mass profit.” It’s not, he said, “a blueprint for building society.”'

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The Story is in the Soil By Justin Lee Motherboard "Have you ever looked at the sun through a drop of blood? Seen life refracted through life? Imagine a blood well, a tower of woven steel, an endless gout spraying high into the air, the crimson drops turned to sparks by the afternoon sun. Now, imagine the same scene at night, those drops falling on you, black as sin in the mouth of an infant. See them glisten in the moonlight. Feel them cool against your skin."

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They, We, Me By Ryan Bloom Motherboard '"Anti-Android is Anti-Human," Adèle said. "You can't separate the two."'

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The Destructive Character The eternal return of culture's alienated oddball white guy By Niela Orr The Baffler '…like many ballyhooed “last gasps” prophesied after the 2016 election, the trend has yet to really conclude. In fact, the weirdo white antihero is becoming more and more observable as a distinct character outside of pop culture and in our national conversations; you might argue that the curiously odd ineptitude of this alienated character is a fictional precursor to the isolated and aggressively loserish national figures we find ourselves beholden to in the daily news.'

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Dunce's App How Silicon Valley’s brand of behaviorism has entered the classroom By Audrey Watters The Baffler 'Harvard University psychologist B.F. Skinner claimed that he came up with the idea for his “teaching machine” in 1953 while visiting his daughter’s fourth grade class. Skinner believed that all learning was a matter of shaping behaviors and he contended that, much like the animals he trained in his lab, students should be taught through a system of rewards and reinforcement. Machines, he considered, could do this much more reliably than teachers. This machine, Skinner argued, would address a number of flaws in the education system: it would enable students to move at their own pace through lessons and, on top of this, students would receive immediate feedback on their work. Skinner was unsuccessful in convincing schools in the 1950s and ’60s to buy his teaching machines, but anyone who pays attention to the claims made by today’s education technology industry will recognize Skinner’s promises. These are the principles behind much of what gets touted as “personalization” today.'

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In Defense of the Money Phone By Niela Orr The Baffler 'In “The Story of O.J.,” he instructs, “You wanna know what’s more important than throwin’ away money at the strip club? Credit.” Later, he finesses the argument: “Ya’ll on the Gram holdin’ money to your ear / There’s a disconnect, we don’t call that money over here.” Of course, the attention he pays to social media flossing says more about his own middle-agedness and sense of financial responsibility than it does the spending habits of young rappers who’ve become modestly rich overnight.'

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More Mush from the Taste Police By Chris Lehmann The Baffler "The shortcoming of these prim re-education sermons is that even their hypothetical purchase on the public weal is plainly well past the sell-by date. We have, after all, endured a devastating recession, followed in short order by an austerity-driven upward distribution of wealth, and a white-nationalist uprising on the American right, all within the past decade. On what imaginable planet should the question of how and where liberals feed, entertain, and irksomely congratulate themselves for their reading habits be a subject that any sane person gives a shit about?"