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Daily Bafflements

• This weekend saw Narendra Modi lead the first International Yoga Day, with the controversial Indian prime minister playing up the benefits of yogic exercises to the realms of health, happiness, and national unity, as well as yoga’s role in fighting crime. Jorian Polis Schutz wrote about U.S. yoga’s social pretensions in Baffler no. 22: “Once you would have discharged your suffering by joining a march for your (or other people’s) rights. Now you spend hours contorting yourself, suspending yourself upside down, sweating your brains out in private—in short, belaboring your body—as if in some sort of karmic redress of the visions of right living and livelihood that once marched in the streets, partially at the expense of personal practice.”

• Remember the Russian farmer who invented his own currency? According to another alternative currency founder, the economist Rustam Davletbaev, there is good reason why the state treated Mikhail Shlyapnikovs canny solution to financial instability as a threat: Koliony have exposed a very serious problemthe absence of responsibility of economic institutions of the statethe Central Bank, Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economic Developmentwhen it comes to the periodic economic and financial crises faced by Russia, and their consequences. (Thanks Open Democracy!)

• Are you among the hordes of millennial “influencers” with someone to impress but nowhere to entertain them? Over at The Awl, Brendan O’Connor looks at the penthouse rented year-round for the likes of you, and you even get a quintessentially American status symbol: The original idea behind Magnises had been to provide twenty-somethings with a more accessible (but still exclusive!) version of the invite-only American Express Centurion card.” See you (exclusive!) whippersnappers there.