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Daily Bafflements

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Daily Bafflements
May 29, 2015
• Continuing its Google Glass-style experiments in making users look silly in public, the tech giant has introduced the attractively low-fi Google Cardboard, a virtual reality “viewer” you can fit over your smartphone. Google says the low price (under $20) will ...

Daily Bafflements
May 28, 2015
• A group of Army lab workers is receiving preventative post-exposure treatment after the Army accidentally shipped live anthrax samples via FedEx. Doing a better sterilization job than U.S. army scientists, FedEx spokesman Jim McCluskey commented: “FedEx is committed to ...

Daily Bafflements
May 27, 2015
• Tom Hayes, who took the lead in rigging Libor rates (a.k.a. “the most important numbers in the world”) is facing trial in London. The press is celebrating with pirate jokes: Man the rigging! Walk the plank! Back in 2012’s Baffler No. 21, Christian Lorentzen documented ...

Daily Bafflements
May 26, 2015
• George Clooney’s latest blockbuster Tomorrowland disappoints at the box office, and the Times diagnoses the flaws in its ambition: “Mr. Bird wanted to offer a more optimistic portrait of the future. But there is a reason studios continue to churn out dystopian fare.” ...

Daily Bafflements
May 25, 2015
• Over at The Nation, Moira Wegel imagines the effects of digital humanism, or those “digital tools [that] promise to give dusty humanities courses a fresh sheen of Silicon Valley sex appeal for the undergraduates who might not otherwise take them.” Also known as pie ...

Daily Bafflements
May 21, 2015
• Private bus service Leap has been ordered to cease and desist by the state of California, and is shutting down operations while navigating what it calls a final regulatory “hurdle.” For Leap’s unfortunate commuters, it means no more “polished wood, black ...

Daily Bafflements
May 20, 2015
 • Sister Megan Rice, the 85-year-old nun who humiliated the government by creeping into Tennessee’s “Fort Knox of Uranium,” with bolt cutters and a Bible, has been released from her three-year prison term. The appeals court deemed that “vague platitudes about a ...

Daily Bafflements
May 19, 2015
• Today in apps: IBM has created a new foodie web app, Chef Watson, which uses “cognitive cooking technology” to suggest recipes that are, well . . . innovative. As Rex Huppke opines in the Chicago Tribune, the app generates “recipes that transform perfectly ...

Daily Bafflements
May 18, 2015
  • From Henry James’s speculation that Roosevelt’s initials stood for Theodore Rex to the Emperor-like Obama: Is the United States a monarchy? “In the words of one late 19th Century American newspaper: ‘Great Britain is a republic, with a hereditary president, ...

Daily Bafflements
May 13, 2015
• Ira Glass states that “Public radio is ready for capitalism.” At a marketing event called “Hearing is Believing,” he ventured hopes that podcasts would “move away from a model of asking listeners for money and join the free market.” The Baffler has no more to ...

Daily Bafflements
May 12, 2015
• Verizon, the Benevolent Data Pillager that plays a prominent role in the NSA’s operations, is buying AOLwith the goal of “improving ads and Web video content.” Last year, Verizon launched a “tech blog” called SugarString, but hastily shut it down after reports ...

Daily Bafflements
May 11, 2015
• In The Nation this week, Baffler contributing editor Eugenia Williamson reviews Scott Timberg’s Culture Clash: “Unfortunately, Timberg’s argument is hampered significantly by his account of class . . . African-American jazz musicians able to afford college only through ...