, May 18, 2015
Daily Bafflements
The boy who never grew up. / McKay Savage
• From Henry James’s speculation that Roosevelt’s initials stood for Theodore Rex to the Emperor-like Obama: Is the United States a monarchy? “In the words of one late 19th Century American newspaper: ‘Great Britain is a republic, with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king.’”
• Onward with today’s literary motif, a BBC journalist arrested for investigating working conditions in Qatar looks into the tiny, loaded country’s “Jekyll-and-Hyde approach to journalism.”
• Alain de Botton, Sigrid Rausing, Walter Salles: the perks and troubles of being an Ultra High Net Worth individual seeking to pursue an artistic career (complete with combustible scuptures).
• The California Sunday Magazine features the teens who have followed Peter Thiel’s sage advice and dropped out of school to launch tech startups. “Fontenot isn’t an entrepreneur right now so much as the Peter Pan to these Lost Boys—and they are mostly boys—a playful leader and evangelist,” writes Nellie Bowles. In this cloistered world of app-ordered cheese and stylists (to tell the hapless whiz kids what to wear to meetings with VCs), there’s nary a baby, Wendy-bird, or old person in sight . . .