, November 4, 2015
Daily Bafflements
Silicon Valley employees unwilling to shell out for a thousand-dollar mindfulness training session may want to try punching computers to calm their nerves. / youngthousands
• This is Amazon’s week of delusion. Yesterday, the company known for steadily cutting off booksellers’ and publishers’ oxygen opened a brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle, according to the Seattle Times. And on Thursday, that same company, whose “bruising” office culture was exposed this summer, will be releasing a TV show about workers’ rights. (Thanks, Melville House.)
• Democrats are forgetting about the primacy of innovation, moans The Week, and instead they’re focusing on minor things that “may offend our sense of justice,” like income inequality! Hm . . .
• Katy Perry, Sting, and Jerry Seinfeld are performing at a concert to promote mindfulness tonight. Mindfulness is “Buddhism sliced up commodified,” wrote Barbara Ehrenreich in The Baffler no. 27, a “gym membership for the mind” that helps smug elites and stressed Silicon Valley employees alike reach “Wisdom 2.0.”
• Finally, a computer you can punch.