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Daily Bafflements

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Daily Bafflements
August 31, 2015
• Stephen King opines that a novelist can be too prolific for critics, but—then again—that it’s suspicious if a novelist isn’t producing some excess work. Of the “recently retired” Philip Roth, King notes: “Our Gang was pretty ...

Daily Bafflements
August 28, 2015
• Today in billionaires: Top-tier donor Dan Loeb gets caught in the Ashley Madison hackers’ net, and Matthew Yglesias posits that it’s not Trump’s antics that are making waves, it’s his policy positions, popular amongst the Republican rank and file, ...

Daily Bafflements
August 27, 2015
• Facebook’s new tool, ominously called “M,” claims to differentiate Facebook Messenger from other chat apps by offering you a built-in personal assistant, powered—for now—by actual human beings. Facebook has avoided the slow advances in artificial ...

Daily Bafflements
August 26, 2015
• There’s something familiar about the new features that Uber is rolling out—“pre-determined routes with fixed pickup points and continuous passenger pickups—it sounds remarkably like a gently optimized version of currently existing mass ...

Daily Bafflements
August 25, 2015
• “Now we finally know who John Galt is,” Slavoj Žižek writes of Ayn Rand’s individualist, “the idiot responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown and, consequentially, for the threat of the shutdown of state apparatuses.” Remember, ...

Daily Bafflements
August 24, 2015
• Banksy has opened a “Bemusement Park” called Dismaland, replete with a water-cannon fountain, a castle with a dead Princess Diana inside, and two rounds of security (one real, one joke). It falls flat. “All the graffiti in Dismaland is official ...

Daily Bafflements
August 21, 2015
• Today in billionaires: over $1.6 billion has been promised for unbuilt apartments at 220 Central Park South, a building that’s been nicknamed the “Billionaire’s Bunker.” One of these apartments might set you back anywhere from $30 million to $160 ...

Daily Bafflements
August 19, 2015
• This year, a slew of white, male, right-wing writers have been nominated for the World Science Fiction Society’s prestigious Hugo awards—and they’re complaining that in recent years the Hugos have become “an affirmative action ...

Daily Bafflements
August 18, 2015
• Is it time to close the Vatican bank, whose ATMs flash options at users in Latin? And that’s the least of its problems: “Much of the money is sent covertly to churches and voluntary groups in poor countries and failed states without functioning ...

Daily Bafflements
August 17, 2015
• “Why are the Cambridge equivalent of rock stars coming out for the retirement party of a Harvard clerk—the guy who books rooms as a scheduling assistant for Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies?” asks Cambridge Day, at the ...

Daily Bafflements
August 14, 2015
• The last unicorn? Hardly likely in the startup world, where there are now more than 120 companies bearing the moniker for a firm valued (perhaps falsely) at over $1 billion. Since the field is getting crowded, the industry lingo has now expanded to include ponies, ...

Daily Bafflements
August 13, 2015
• In the scary world of innovation and its discontents, one Harvard student is mourning a lost opportunity to join the evil empire after Facebook rescinded his summer internship offer. The company reneged on their offer after discovering “Marauder’s Map,” ...