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4 weeks ago | 
thebaffler.com | Jess Bergman
In recent years, new interpretations of the history of the United States have stirred controversy far beyond the academy, as scholars, journalists, and opportunistic political figures have debated and even attempted to legislate how to interpret our collective past.
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1 month ago | 
thebaffler.com | Jess Bergman
The Dazzling Paget Sisters by Ariane Bankes. McNally Editions, 192 pages. 2025. Since Diane Johnson’s The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith And Other Lesser Lives (1972), which excavated the life of the poet George Meredith’s wife, Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith, among others, there has been a small but vibrant market for biographies of figures previously relegated to the margins of other people’s lives.
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1 month ago | 
thebaffler.com | Tanvi Misra |Jess Bergman
In the middle of last month, a Florida state trooper pulled over a car after it crossed the state border from Georgia, allegedly for speeding. The officer arrested all three men inside, including a twenty-year-old U.S. citizen passenger named Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez—and promptly booked them under the state’s recently passed, and subsequently blocked, law barring undocumented people from entering Florida.
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1 month ago | 
thebaffler.com | Jess Bergman
On the Clock by Claire Baglin, translated from the French by Jordan Stump. New Directions, 144 pages. 2025. In the world of mass-produced food, “pink slime” plays a crucial role. Coined by a former meat inspector and USDA microbiologist named Gerald Zirnstein, the term refers to beef trimmings melted into a paste and treated with ammonium hydroxide. “It’s pink. It’s pasty. And it’s slimy looking,” said Zirnstein, explaining his thinking.
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1 month ago | 
thebaffler.com | Jess Bergman
In September 1982, while withdrawing from Beirut, Israeli military forces plundered the research center of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Israel had sought to eradicate the group through its illegal invasion of Lebanon in June of that year, after supporting and arming right wing factions in the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), a conflict that is an integral part of the Palestinian question.
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2 months ago | 
thebaffler.com | Jess Bergman
Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp. Simon & Schuster, 256 pages. 2025. During the Holocaust, there was a word for a prisoner who was resigned to his death: a Muselmann. Primo Levi described Muselmänner in his memoir Survival in Auschwitz as “an anonymous mass” that formed the “backbone of the camp.” “[They are] non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer,” he wrote.
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Mar 5, 2025 | 
thenation.com | Jess Bergman
Books & the Arts / March 5, 2025 Rumaan Alam’s Haves and Have-NotsWith his latest novel, Entitlement, he asks: Can wealth inequality make you lose your mind? Ad Policy
An interior view of a model condominium at the sales center for the Platinum luxury condominiums in New York City, 2008. (Amy Sussman / Getty Images)Over the past decade, Rumaan Alam has established himself as a gently wry chronicler of New York’s upwardly mobile classes—as well as a vigilant observer of their homes.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
newrepublic.com | Jess Bergman
In Tony Tulathimutte’s debut novel, Private Citizens, Will, a computer programmer, wonders “whether masturbating to porn was an art form: not as ‘erotica’ or performance art, but as solitary pursuit of the sublime.” Surely, he thinks, “someone must have done it seriously, subtly, with literacy and flair, a masturbauteur.” Tulathimutte’s fiction teems with such figures, but if their self-pleasure is an art, it’s usually a baroque one—tragic, violent, or both.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
yahoo.com | Jess Bergman
In Tony Tulathimutte’s debut novel, Private Citizens, Will, a computer programmer, wonders “whether masturbating to porn was an art form: not as ‘erotica’ or performance art, but as solitary pursuit of the sublime.” Surely, he thinks, “someone must have done it seriously, subtly, with literacy and flair, a masturbauteur.” Tulathimutte’s fiction teems with such figures, but if their self-pleasure is an art, it’s usually a baroque one—tragic, violent, or both.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Jess Bergman
Polymarket’s backers claim that its prediction markets are a “social epistemic tool.” Yet the platform is vulnerable to market manipulation by design.
