The Baffler

• In Romania, imprisoned politicians, footballers, and pop stars are writing books to shorten their sentences, abusing a loophole in local law: Bad news, though! You won’t be able to lay your hands on these no doubt brilliant works—the publishers only tend ...

• Technologies like Uber and table-side computers in restaurants are turning us all into terrible bosses, reports The Verge. Josh Dzieza writes that “the rating systems used by these companies have turned customers into unwitting and sometimes unwittingly ruthless middle ...

• After a decade of legal proceedings, Google has won the right to scan the 129,864,880 books of the world into its searchable Google Books database. What does this mean for publishing? Most have stopped worrying about it by now, reports Jonathan Sturgeon, but Roberto ...

• Each year six different dogs shoot six different people. Not deliberately. More dogs are shot by humans than humans by dogs. Dogs rarely fatally shoot humans. Only one cat has ever shot its owner. (Chase Madar wrote about human-on-human gun violence in his ...

• These charts, assembled by Matt Daniels of polygraph, which map the durability (or otherwise) of pop songs past and present, are by turns surprising, depressing, and vindicating. According to the data from Spotify, Biggie was the big winner of the nineties, in ...

• A win for safety is a loss for PR, according to one Japanese gangster ring: “A low-ranking underboss” from the Yamaguchi-gumi has declared that the group is not indulging neighborhood children with treats this Halloween. “Trouble is brewing with ...

• Today in billionaires: Bill Gates was briefly overthrown as the world’s richest man by Spanish billionaire Amancio Ortega, though the Microsoft founder was back on top within twenty-four hours. No word yet on how Gates spent his brief layover down amongst us common ...

• New research theorizes that one’s youthful entertainment choices may have a lot to do with one’s political ideology, leading Pacific Standard to ask, “Are right-wingers raised on Rambo?” • Today in innovation: Elon Musk’s recent Tesla ...