Skip to content

Daily Bafflements

Reed pleads guilty, the supposed Uber “Movement,” and the human cost of repealing the ACA

• Harrisburg “mayor for life” Stephen Reed has pleaded guilty to stealing city artifacts. David Gambacorta followed the case for his Baffler no. 33 report, and he’ll be on call on the Baffler Twitter account tomorrow to answer your burning questions about this bizarro story.

Bloomberg’s story of Uber drivers sleeping in parking lots (“Howard has been parking and sleeping at the 7-Eleven four to five nights a week since March 2015 . . .”) makes you wonder what sort of a “Movement” Uber thinks it is. Last week on the Word Factory Jathan Sadowsky wrote about “Uber Movement,” the new arm of the company, which offers to share Uber’s significant hoard of data with governments. He asks: “Who will scrutinize Uber’s bid to exploit austerity by colonizing public services?”

• Bernie Sanders did lie when he said 36,000 people a year will die if ACA is repealed. The actual figure—according to the New England Journal of Medicinelooks closer to 43,000.

• From the weekend’s protests comes this audio recording of Verso, Jacobin and Haymarket’s starry “anti-inauguration extravaganza” in Washington.