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Daily Bafflements

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Daily Bafflements
August 06, 2014
  • Over at the Nation, Kate Bahn, Joelle Gamble, Zillah Eisenstein, and Heather Boushey talk Pikettymania and gender. Baffler contributor Kathleen Geier moderates. • 2.3 million people still subscribe to AOL’s dial-up service. • Today in Things ...

Daily Bafflements
August 06, 2014
  • This, on the heels of the NLRB’s ruling: McDonald’s restaurants in South Florida are speeding up the production line. They’re handing out timers to drive-thru customers, and offering coupons if food isn’t ready in sixty seconds or less. • ...

Daily Bafflements
August 04, 2014
  • Here’s an epic road trip: visit the richest person in every U.S. state, with this handy map, courtesy Movoto, in tow. Score three for the Waltons: they’ve got Arkansas, Texas, and Wyoming.  • Today in stating the self-evident: “What someone is paid ...

Daily Bafflements
August 04, 2014
• With pretty much all our congresspeople headed to the Hamptons this week, it’s a perfect time to claw back some leisure from the work-leisure conglomerate. Make like the congressional leaders of Southern California, who “vacation like the rest of us”—with ...

Daily Bafflements
August 01, 2014
• We hereby endorse the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s “Stupid Patent of the Month,” the inaugural edition of which features a patent on the abstract idea of a patient communicating with his or her doctor through the intermediary of a telephone or ...

Daily Bafflements
July 31, 2014
• Today in Bespoke, just because: “‘Majestic Spirit,’ A bespoke collection of fine art Equine Photography.” • A new startup called Wevorce has raised 1.7 million “to make divorce fun,” reports The Verge. Christopher Mims calls it ...

Daily Bafflements
July 30, 2014
• The latest #innovation in designer jeans is for them to be mauled and shredded by lions, tigers, and bears before sale; Judith Thurman at The New Yorker connects this to the “sartorial slumming” that has been going on since before Count Tolstoy dressed like the ...

Daily Bafflements
July 29, 2014
• America’s elite schools and universities don’t need to worry about being “disrupted” by technology, according to Moody analysts (via Matt Phillips for Quartz). “The most vulnerable to the threat of online education are less selective schools ...

Daily Bafflements
July 28, 2014
• Today in Billionaires: Vincent Mehdizadeh, the inventor of a marijuana vending machine, has become legal weed’s first billionaire; read Adweek‘s interview with Mehdizadeh, in which he insists on referring to pot as “the medicine.” • Today in ...

Daily Bafflements
July 25, 2014
• Here is a tale of a journalist and a programmer who set out to make an interactive graphic of diversity in top editorial positions in American newsrooms, and failed. “As it turns out, there isn’t really enough data to make an interactive graphic about ...

Daily Bafflements
July 24, 2014
• Today in Billionaires, from the Guardian: The UK’s National Union of Journalists has dubbed Richard Desmond “Britain’s Greediest Billionaire” after the media company he owns proposed to cut a third of all editorial staffers from the Daily Express, ...

Daily Bafflements
July 23, 2014
•  “The City of New York approved a proposal by one of the largest real estate developers in the city to build in a ‘poor door’, or a separate door for residents living in affordable housing to enter their building,” writes the Daily Mail from New York Post ...