The Baffler

• A professor at the University of Southern California is starting an academic journal called BuzzAdemia, for “Buzzfeed-style scholarship” (listicles written by academics) to be published on sites like Buzzfeed, Gawker, and Reddit. “Scholarly merit will be ...

• Americans are taking the least amount of vacation time in forty years, reports the Guardian. They’re forfeiting billions of dollars worth of vacation days without getting raises, nor scoring “points with their bosses” for the sacrifice. (Via Jordan ...

• This is great. Pocket Money Loans, Payday Loans for Kids! From the site’s FAQ: “Q: What does APR mean? / A: It stands for Annual Percentage Rate and it’s really confusing and boring. / Q: I’m worried that getting a pocket money loan will put me in ...

• Chapman University has conducted a nationwide poll about what Americans fear most. The fears they ranked include hurricanes, identity theft on the Internet, clowns, child abduction, and public speaking, among many others. Fun fact: Americans are more afraid of Obamacare ...

• Yesterday brought two intriguing developments in the future availability of indigent legal defense. From Capital came the news that “New York State has settled a lawsuit with the New York Civil Liberties Union, and agreed to ensure new standards for legal ...

• Rich idiots are bathing in wine and sand, and paying extra for fancy ice. (Thanks to Ben Walsh for that sand one.) • From this New Yorker piece about Janet Yellen’s recent speech we learn that “In 1989, the bottom half of the distribution owned just three per ...

• A Fox News reporter, interviewing State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf on Friday about the global Ebola crisis, very earnestly asked why the government has not yet considered launching an “ice bucket challenge” to combat the disease. • Today in ...

• The nonpartisan group Crowdpac has compiled the most common first names of conservative and liberal political donors, with interesting results. As Katherine Miller of BuzzFeed puts it, “The liberal names generally sound like a group of women in their late 20s; the ...