The Baffler

• Newspaper reporter has made the CareerCast “endangered jobs” list, alongside travel agent and meter reader. • Turns out the top one percent of earners in America are even richer than we previously thought. Neat! • Dorsey Shaw at Buzzfeed watches too much cable news, ...

• Today in Billionaires: venture capitalist Timothy Draper has been “agitating for months” for a ballot initiative to break California into six separate states, Reuters reports, adding that “the plan has raised bipartisan hackles.” Under Draper’s scheme, Silicon ...

• A look back at Studs Terkel’s Working on its fortieth anniversary. • Long Island workers are preparing for the possibility of the first massive railroad strike in twenty years. • Please just take note of this “I’m a Mrs.” deal on Amazon. • “It turns out we ...

• LEGO sells “police helicopter surveillance” kits for kids aged five to twelve. That is all. (Via Elizabeth Joh.) • Speaking of which, a slightly related Today in Billionaires: “As billionaires and dealmakers descend upon Sun Valley, Idaho, for the Allen & Co. ...

• Headline of the Day, from ABC News: “Google Co-Founder Says People Shouldn’t Have to Work So Much.” (Because, robots.) • From Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussein at First Look, a 2005 FBI document instructing spy-trainees how to format internal memos that includes a ...

• George Orwell reportedly “could thrive only in comparative adversity.” That may be why he moved to a distant, desolate, and weather-beaten Scottish island to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four. Islanders say he kept to himself and went by his given name, Eric Blair. (Via Roads ...

• Today in Broken Records: yet another Forbes columnist helpfully explaining why Raising the Minimum Wage is Not the Answer. We would paraphrase his argument, but it’s too boring to even try to decipher. • Today in Billionaires: Yet another eccentric Chinese ...

• Well, tomorrow is Independence Day, a day to celebrate our great nation with hotdogs and hangovers. Here’s something a little different: the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Washington, D.C., an actor will stage a reenactment of Douglass’s 1852 speech, ...