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Daily Bafflements

• For havoc, bloodletting, and all things uncivilized, may we direct you to The Baffler no. 28—our longest yet! —which arrives on newsstands today. In it, we’ve salvos by David Graeber, Heather Havrilesky, and A. S. Hamrah to offer, as well as a conversation with Noam Chomsky, poetry by Zbigniew Herbert and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, stories by Kim Stanley Robinson and Lucy Ellmann, and an awful lot more depravity to tremble along to. Please pick up a copy.

• Last week an appeals court overturned the “Black Swan” ruling that Fox Searchlight should have paid interns on the set of Darren Aaronofsky’s feature. This caused us to revisit Jim Frederick’s 1997 salvo on the intern economy, in which he issued a warning that “The tide of indentured college servitude is unstoppable and the market for free labor can only get worse in the near future.” He was spot on, more’s the pity. No interns were used in the production of Baffler no. 28. 

• Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute is sending a six-ounce gallery of works of humanities and art to the moon, to brighten up “a realm that is traditionally thought of as cold and lifeless.” They hope it will become a “Cultural Heritage Site that anticipates the journey of humanity into luminous outer space.” Also anticipating that voyage is The Baffler’s own fiction editor Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel Aurora, which is published today. Read an excerpt in the new issue!

• “Sometimes you’ve got to live life on a limb if you truly believe in your company,” said the Canadian man who tied a bunch of helium balloons to his garden chair and drifted into the sky, to drum up business for his eco-friendly carwashing service