Daily Bafflements

• Got a startup and on the lookout for some seriously dubious career advice to internalize? Try this chunk of wisdom, from the FT: “To defy the startup odds, try pitching like a poet.” The similarity between startup entrepreneurs and poets are, of course, legion: they are both rendered “solitary” by their “vision” and need for “creative freedom,” and both rely on “mentors.” (Perhaps “the normal rules of social engagement” don’t apply to both types, too.) “Practise your 13-second elevator pitch until it rolls off the tongue, like a beautiful sonnet,” the article quips. And hope your magnus opus© is recognized within your lifetime, we might add.

• Over at the LRB, Chase Madar looks at the role of human rights experts in advocating lethal violence, and points out that the work of Harold Koh, Samantha Power, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and others, “legitimated acts of military violence [with] human rights window dressing.”

• As he’s matured, Damien Hirst has stopped flashing art-world types, but he’s still much the exhibitionist Natasha Vargas-Cooper made him out to be in her salvo in Baffler no. 26, aiming to provoke “an aesthetic response that is little more than a fleeting revulsion.” In fact—to top it all—he’s writing his autobiography. But what we want to know is, will it be an “autocritography”? Or is it “‘self-reflexive, self-consciously academic act’ that accounts for the ‘individual, social, and institutional conditions that help to produce’” Hirst?

• The maker of the crowdfunder for Greece had to retract his offer to reward the donor of the full €1.6bn with a Greek island, as he had no such island to give. “I was only thinking something about the size of Inchmarnock off the coast of Scotland,” he clarifies in his apology.

• “What happens if someone gets a monthly amount without rules and controls?” wondered the people of Utrecht, the city that is testing out unconditional basic income.