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Student-Athletes of the World, Unite!
March 27, 2014
The National Labor Relations Board ruled on Wednesday that college football players had the right to unionize. The ruling states that, even though the players receive scholarships, they should be considered employees of the school they play (and work) for. The decision came in ...

Daily Bafflements
March 27, 2014
Behold, a fulfilling human connection being made in real time. /Phil Whitehouse • A study has found that it’s a bad idea to plan and shop for travel during business hours, because you’ll end up paying more for it. This seems particularly cruel, since that’s precisely ...

A Weasely Way to Fight a Law
March 26, 2014
A few blocks away from Tuesday’s Supreme Court culture war skirmish on access to contraceptives was a DC Circuit Court of Appeals hearing on another, less sexy Obamacare-related issue: a drafting error in the Affordable Care Act that could eventually damage the law’s ...

Daily Bafflements
March 26, 2014
Photo credit & birdhouse credit: 4RB • How did we miss this important billionaire-news update? Forbes announced on Monday that it would be tracking and ranking “more than 1,600” billionaires, each and every trading day. “We will update the value of individuals’ ...

Debates Outside the Dichotomy
March 25, 2014
We need to chart another axis. Americans are facing a conflict between authoritarians and counter-authoritarians, on both sides of the left-versus-right political spectrum. That conflict is usually obscured by the tiresome nature of politics that are trapped in a false ...

Candy Crushin’ All the Way to the Bank
March 25, 2014
Today King Digital Entertainment Plc, the video game company that makes the addictive game Candy Crush, and not much else, goes public. (The symbol is KING, for all you stock-watchers.) “At the top of the price range, King would be valued at $7.6 billion, or about 2.9 ...

Daily Bafflements
March 25, 2014
That’s one tall tower, bro. /Jennifer • Ukranian women are apparently Lysistrata-ing Russian men. • Over at Harper’s, Andrew Cockburn’s review of Bob Ivry’s new book, a “guide for tracking down the live villains and unburied bodies of the 2008 crash.” ...

It’s the Democratic Party’s Turn to Hate Nate Silver
March 24, 2014
Good for Nate Silver, finally getting his own fiefdom for “data journalism” at the new FiveThirtyEight.com, under the auspices of the Walt Disney Corporation. He’s famous. He deserves it! I, for one, don’t really care about a statistical breakdown of lines ...

Sit-Ups for Start-Ups
March 24, 2014
In the co-working area of Brooklyn Boulders Somerville, a rock-climbing gym outside of Boston that has more in common with a start-up office than a Crunch, is a sign emblazoned with a manifesto: “Physicality stimulates innovation and creativity.” A café-like space with ...

Daily Bafflements
March 24, 2014
A weem-a-way? /Appaloosa • At a New York Times-hosted conference on Friday about the state of the press in a post-Snowden era, Sen. Charles Schumer told the audience that a federal shield law would “very likely” pass the Senate this year. The version proposed last year ...

The Baffler’s Week That Was
March 21, 2014
Hi folks. In case you missed them, and are looking for some salvos to soothe your addled mind and soul this weekend, here are some things we’ve published this week, in the great Baffler Web Experiment of Early 2014. (Also, if you’d like, you can get an update just like this ...

The Right-Wing Book Market is Dying a Free-Market Death
March 21, 2014
The free market is a cruel beast, which is something the book publishing industry has been made acutely aware of in the past decade or two. But now, even in one arena where that industry had traditionally been doing well, right-wing conservative political books—as in, books ...