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Hocus Pocus

Columns

What Piketty’s Neoliberal Critics Get Wrong
May 15, 2014
[Part 2 to Geier’s earlier post, “What Piketty’s Conservative Critics Get Wrong,” here. – ed.] As a genre, the reviews of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century have been fascinating in what they reveal about the status of the economic inequality debate ...

Zuckerberg Gets Schooled in Newark
May 15, 2014
Was the hoodied billionaire hoodwinked? That’s one conclusion one could reach after reading Dale Russakoff’s exhaustive piece in The New Yorker this week on Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million challenge grant investment designed to jumpstart the ...

Daily Bafflements
May 15, 2014
• “The National Rifle Association (NRA) has launched a new web series designed to appeal to millennials,” reports Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason. “Called Noir, it features an interracial pair of flawless, ambiguously aged young folks mixing standard conservative talking ...

Dispatch from the Narcissism Wars
May 14, 2014
It is worth recalling why some of us tasked with entering adulthood in the late 1970s found Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism to be a steadying tonic, an indispensible aid to bullshit detection. It was, of course, a time of institutional collapse, and both the ...

Glassholes at Work
May 14, 2014
If any single event thus far has perfectly encapsulated up the public’s relationship with Google Glass, it was the Bay Area bar fight which made Sarah Slocum a minor celebrity. A few months ago, Slocum made headlines by claiming she had been assaulted by anti-Glass zealots in ...

Daily Bafflements
May 14, 2014
Is this Internet? / Photo courtesy of the Boston Public Library • From Max Linsky comes a set of scanned pages from a handbook for a class about the Internet that his grandmother took in her retirement home in 1998. “How Big is the Internet? No one ...

The Domino Sugar Refinery and the Art of Real Estate
May 13, 2014
At the southern end of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the hipster epicenter of the world’s hipster epicenter, is the site of the century-old Domino Sugar Refinery, now a hulking shell of empty warehouses. Soon, thanks to the development company Two Trees (the people who invented the ...

Intern Nation is Bankrupt
May 13, 2014
Is there any hope for the lowly media intern? Is there any hope for the working stiffs whose wages are being driven down by an unending stream of upstarts who are ready and willing to work for free? Maybe. ProPublica, for one, is in the midst of a long-running investigation into ...

Daily Bafflements
May 13, 2014
• Regarding this piece from Business Insider entitled “10 First-Class Airplane Seats That Are Nicer Than Your Apartment”: Hey, Business Insider? You don’t know us. You don’t know whether or not our apartments feature marble shower spas, sheepskin mattresses, and ...

Child Care, Elder Care, and the Last Feminist Frontier
May 12, 2014
Last month, Jamie Nesbitt Golden published a post on her website entitled “Eldercare: The Forgotten Feminist Issue.” It is, in part, a moving personal essay about the struggles of caring for ill, aging parent whose cognitive facilities are slipping away. But it’s also, as ...

Hollywood’s Love Affair with Surveillance
May 12, 2014
One of the valences of the NSA leaks has been opinionators wringing their hands over the lack of anger and shock. Where’s the anger? The protests? Why are the people so complacent in the face of these revelations? Well, one reason might be that they’re not all that ...

Daily Bafflements
May 12, 2014
Robes for sale! / Photo by Calvin Ballantine • It’s not just congressional seats that are increasingly up for sale; judicial elections have also been flooded with cash. Judicial primary spending in North Carolina has broken a record at $1.3 million. • ...