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Daily Bafflements

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Daily Bafflements
December 10, 2015
• In spite of our cultural obsession with happiness, a new study shows that being happy doesn’t, in fact, make you live any longer. • Ol’ Dirty Pharma: Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical exec who recently made headlines for raising the price of the AIDS ...

Daily Bafflements
December 09, 2015
• She may have already been named the world’s most powerful woman—now, though, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is TIME’s Person of the Year for 2015. In a way, it’s not hard to see why. Twenty-six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Merkel’s ...

Daily Bafflements
December 08, 2015
• The field of “public-school consultancy” is booming, writes Alissa Quart in The Atlantic, an example of how, though “on the surface, public schools can seem egalitarian, especially with their websites’ emphasis on words such as ...

Daily Bafflements
December 07, 2015
• Chefs’ memoirs, restaurant reviews, and cookbooks are everywhere, and yet the “creepy, and classist, and outdated” field of food writing—from Yelp to the New York Times—insistently ignores the millions of service employees who ...

Daily Bafflements
December 04, 2015
• The Verge brings us a lovingly crafted five-part feature on The Baffler’s favorite presidential candidate, the transhumanist, coffin-bus-driving Zoltan Istvan. • Pantone has picked its 2016 colors of the year. The company made waves by selecting two colors, ...

Daily Bafflements
December 03, 2015
• Movie columnists Grierson and Leitch are leaving their perch at Deadspin for a new home at The New Republic, and recalling their previous flight from Yahoo, whose decline and fall our own Chris Lehmann charted in The Baffler. • Same old shit, brand new outrage? On ...

Daily Bafflements
December 02, 2015
• Today in billionaires: Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, will be donating 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charitable purposes within their lifetimes. The announcement came in the form of a ...

Daily Bafflements
December 01, 2015
• Over at The New Republic Peter Moskowitz details how apps “enable neighborhoods to retain their real estate value without having any local value,” starting with the fact they make it possible for neighborhoods to “function without having to work at ...

Daily Bafflements
November 30, 2015
• After much begging and pleading with the Federal Aviation Administration to let it use drones to deliver packages, and setting up a special taskforce, Amazon hasn’t yet been able to find a safe way to do it. But that hasn’t prevented the company ...

Daily Bafflements
November 24, 2015
• “Fast casuals,” fast food chains of a perceived higher quality, such as Chipotle, haven’t yet been the focus of movements like the Fight for $15, but that’s not to say they treat their employees any better than franchises like McDonalds. ...

Daily Bafflements
November 23, 2015
• “Burn Down the House of Commons in Your Brand New Shoes” was Keith White’s ode to Details, which shuttered last week. And it started: May there be a place for it in paradise, where it will be ministered to by winged and be-haloed Orlando Blooms for ...

Daily Bafflements
November 20, 2015
• As the song goes, breaking up is hard to do, but Mark Zuckerberg thinks he can ease the pain for you. Facebook is testing out a new set of tools called “take a break,” which quickly offer coupled users who change their relationship status the chance to see ...