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Daily Bafflements

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Daily Bafflements
October 21, 2014
• Rich idiots are bathing in wine and sand, and paying extra for fancy ice. (Thanks to Ben Walsh for that sand one.) • From this New Yorker piece about Janet Yellen’s recent speech we learn that “In 1989, the bottom half of the distribution owned just three per ...

Daily Bafflements
October 20, 2014
• A Fox News reporter, interviewing State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf on Friday about the global Ebola crisis, very earnestly asked why the government has not yet considered launching an “ice bucket challenge” to combat the disease. • Today in ...

Daily Bafflements
October 17, 2014
• The nonpartisan group Crowdpac has compiled the most common first names of conservative and liberal political donors, with interesting results. As Katherine Miller of BuzzFeed puts it, “The liberal names generally sound like a group of women in their late 20s; the ...

Daily Bafflements
October 16, 2014
• New York’s attorney general is releasing a report today declaring that nearly three-quarters of all Airbnb listings in the city are illegal. “Commercial operators, not hard-luck residents, supply more than a third of the units and generate more than a third of ...

Daily Bafflements
October 15, 2014
• Our reader @divya alerted us to this Independent article about how the CIA’s covert funding of abstract art in the mid-twentieth century and asked if The Baffler has ever been a beneficiary. Next question! • A man who checked into a U.S. Navy program for alcoholism ...

Daily Bafflements
October 14, 2014
• Customers who have recently bought the iconic Hermès “Birkin” bags (for $20,000 or more) are returning them with complaints that they smell like marijuana, or skunks. The New York Post reports that Hermès is blaming a “badly tanned” batch of ...

Daily Bafflements
October 10, 2014
• In a past issue of The Baffler, David Graeber asked, where are all the flying cars? This week Elon Musk (he of autopilot electric car fame) expressed ambivalence about the idea: “If the sky was full of cars flying all over the place, it would affect how things ...

Daily Bafflements
October 09, 2014
• Today in Labor Strikes: teachers in Texas, Foxconn workers in China, airline cabin crews in New York who fear exposure to Ebola, and (maybe) Tube workers in London next week. • USA Discounters, a retailer that gained some less than favorable attention this summer for ...

Daily Bafflements
October 08, 2014
• Amazon and its workers are heading to the Supreme Court today with a battle over whether workers should be paid for the time they spend waiting in the security lines they are required to go through after they finish their shifts. Former Amazon warehouse workers in Nevada ...

Daily Bafflements
October 06, 2014
• For all the attention Virgin and Netflix have received recently for their “unlimited vacation” policies for employees, that’s certainly not a reality for most of the country’s workers. In fact, half of America hasn’t taken a single vacation day ...

Daily Bafflements
October 03, 2014
• Margaret Hartmann at New York has a roundup of the most terrifying warnings politicians have uttered about Ebola. For instance, Rand Paul, speaking about President Obama’s plan to send 3,000 U.S. soldiers to West Africa to help, said: “You also have to be ...

Daily Bafflements
October 02, 2014
• Power corrupts everyone eventually, even the most honest of us. It’s science. • Headline of the Day, via Huffington Post: “Pro-Union Burger King Worker Disciplined for Poor Pickle Placement.” (Runner-up: “Facebook apologizes to drag ...