Daily Bafflements

• We all know that Hillary is fun, and it is also lodged in our collective cortex that Obama is “cool”—even meta-cool. And so would you be, if you’d spent a year “running wild” with Bear Grylls, “talking sports” with Bill Simmons, and taking Kanye West’s “presidential bid” seriously. Eugenia Williamson caught a whiff of meta-indifference in the trend for powerful men to dress like hipsters last year: “Mark Zuckerberg, too, has made a habit of dressing in bad denim, most famously when meeting with fellow mom-jean enthusiast Obama. That meeting, though, pointed up one important difference: instead of pandering to Middle America, the mom-jean-wearing tech CEO flaunts his indifference to it.”

• Baffler contributing editor George Scialabba settles for Shakespeare in a lovely piece over at Book Critics: “Taste, like morality, is an expression of temperament and circumstance.”

• What was David Bowie doing at your age? (At twenty-four he was about to release The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. At fifty-six, he refused a knighthood from the queen. At fifty-seven he was “struck in the eye by a lollipop during a gig in Oslo, Norway. The lollipop was lodged there until removed by a member of his crew. David Bowie continued with the show.”)