Daily Bafflements

• With its new venture, Sidewalk Labs, Google is making its terrifying entrance into the world of urban planning. According to Susie Cagle, the company seems to be taking as its model its own sprawling corporate campus, whose expansion was blocked because of a frightening proposal to include on-site housing projects. Still, a city can’t be that much harder to build than any other innovation: just steamroll the wishes of the public and add “a vague tinge of eco-friendly progressive ethos.”

• New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has unveiled a new collaboration with Warby Parker to bring free eye exams and glasses to students in the city’s community schools. The company has promised that the glasses will be manufactured to the same standards as those it offers commercially, and de Blasio and other city officials were quick to add how fashionable the students’ new frames would be, proving they know exactly what’s in with the kids these days—you know, beyond the gift of sight.

• Elsewhere in the Big Apple, a new study shows that employment in the “creative professions” has skyrocketed in the city. However, since income in these fields hasn’t kept pace with the metropole’s exorbitant cost of living, the creatives aren’t any better off, just more numerous.

• Today in big banks: Ad Age details the quest of even the largest financial institutions to successfully market to the elusive Millennial. The magazine thinks they’ve hit on some buzzwords that will win big with the young’uns—words like “authenticity,” “purpose,” and “mobility.” But we think there’s a much simpler marketing strategy. Wanna score big with the kids? Just don’t destabilize the global economy and then blame them for it.