The Baffler

• Referring to a new kind of technology that lets people broadcast live iPhone video to their Twitter followers, Dylan Byers at Politico declares 2016 “The Meerkat election,” writing that the app “debuted at South By Southwest last week and has now firmly ...

• Lee Fang in The Intercept reveals that “security staff at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota used a fake Facebook account to monitor local Black Lives Matter organizers, befriend them, and obtain their personal information and photographs without their ...

• The SEIU is still trying to get a $15 hourly wage out of McDonald’s. Meanwhile, McDonald’s workers in nineteen cities have filed a new complaint against the company for what they say are safety hazards. “Workers cite a persistent lack of gloves for ...

• Maybe the only good thing to come out of South by Southwest this week: flying cars? (Via John Byrne; see also David Graeber.) • If you haven’t seen it yet, this send-up of Silicon Valley’s thoughtless privilege-and-profit machine, “WellDeserved,” ...

• The National Journal has a funny little feature on conservative pols’ love affair with Chick-fil-a, the fast food that became a culture-war emblem when the chain’s CEO spoke out against same-sex marriage in 2012. Now, the chicken sandwiches are a must for ...

• Drivers in California for both Lyft and Uber are filing cases against their employers; the drivers object to the companies’ classifying them as “independent contractors” rather than employees so as to avoid paying overtime and the threat of unionization. ...

• It’s Jack Kerouac’s birthday today, a good time as any to re-read Maura Mahoney’s Baffler salvo from issue 5, way back in 1993, “Back in Black on the Beaten Path,” about Gap’s rather forced black trend and the commercial rediscovery of ...

• In Georgia, a sanitation worker got sentenced to thirty days in jail when residents of a wealthy neighborhood complained that he was picking up their garbage too early in the morning and waking them up, reports the Christian Science Monitor (emphasis on their garbage). ...