The Baffler

• Dealbook of the Day (read this out loud): “Dollar General said on Wednesday that it was taking its $9.1 billion offer for Family Dollar directly to shareholders. The move further complicates Family Dollar’s agreed upon deal to sell itself to Dollar Tree for $8.5 ...

• News from our fair city: Harvard has just received the largest gift in its history, $350 million to the School of Public Health. “I brought this up to Bill [Lee, of the Harvard Corporation] to see if it was doable, to see if it was interesting,” the donor, Gerald ...

• “We didn’t know when the last time was that somebody introduced a new course into high school,” Gates told Andrew Ross Sorkin in a New York Times Magazine article about Gates’s efforts to change how history is taught in American high schools. ...

• The fast-food strike spread to over 150 cities yesterday, and hundreds of protesters were arrested, including a congresswoman from Wisconsin. • Here is a totally bonkers corporate songbook from IBM in 1937, with “hymnals” that deifty the corporate leaders. ...

• Washington City Paper today has a very comprehensive guide to D.C. etiquette, including such entries as “How to Offer—and Ask for—Marijuana at a Party” and “Go Ahead, Ask Someone What He or She Does for a Living When You’ve Just Met,” and, of ...

• “Hofstadter definitely does not see anti-intellectualism as the corrupting serpent in the American Eden. Instead, as he demonstrates, it has been deeply ingrained in the national culture from the very beginning.” – Nicholas Lemann gives Richard ...

• We’ve all heard about how the changes in the music industry are going to be okay for artists in the end. Check out “20 Artists Who Make a Killing Off of T-shirt Sales.” • Here’s a sobering post-Labor-Day reminder that our ...

• “Suddenly a generation of lonely basement kids had marketers whispering in their ears that they were the most important commercial demographic of all time. Suddenly they started wearing shiny blouses and pinning bikini babes onto everything they made, started making games ...