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Daily Bafflements

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Daily Bafflements
August 11, 2015
• The Oath Keepers have shown up in Ferguson, again, to monitor the riots following the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown. How this squares with the organization’s stated intention to “NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of ...

Daily Bafflements
August 10, 2015
• “Hopelessly insecure” and “inherently weak” are two of the cheerful ways experts describe the 1980s networking technology almost all cars use, which is now being connected to the web by Internet of Things pioneers. As we saw last month, attaching ...

Daily Bafflements
August 07, 2015
• Jon Stewart’s run as host of The Daily Show came to an end last night, carried off on the wings of a thousand think pieces. As an op-ed from WBUR said this week, “His anger — righteous, moral, though rarely overt — has been the key to Stewart’s ...

Daily Bafflements
August 06, 2015
• Today in the Guardian, Baffler contributing editor Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the contemporary challenges of journalists compelled to write on poverty, but too poor themselves to do so. Reflecting that it was her financial success (with her groundbreaking work ...

Daily Bafflements
August 05, 2015
• What with so many futurists being white men, “the questions that many people face about their futures”—childcare, water-access, police brutality, and so on—“are lost in the futures being imagined,” argues Rose Eveleth over at ...

Daily Bafflements
August 04, 2015
• Today in Billionaires: Bill Gates has fallen foul of an onion advisory committee, after it was noticed that the Vidalia onions he was growing (why?) were getting to market before other, better equipped farmers’ Vidalias. For a more layered account of this ...

Daily Bafflements
August 03, 2015
• The Baffler was recently flattered with the fine title of  “America’s most pugnacious magazine,” but if there is one publication that gives us a run for our money in this respect, it’s surely the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, ...

Daily Bafflements
July 31, 2015
• In the mystical valleys of startup kingdom, V.C. firms are on the hunt for unicorns (startups with a valuation of a $1 billion or higher, even if those valuations are based on wild speculation). But as many have suspected, the unicorn whisperers are not necessarily the ...

Daily Bafflements
July 30, 2015
• In the boundless playground of innovation, developers and venture capitalists seek to better colonize a small but valuable piece of real estate—your ears, soon to be worth $5 billion. Apparently “earworn wearable” tech is where the big bucks are. In ...

Daily Bafflements
July 29, 2015
• The Federal Bureau of Investigation thinks it’s wonderful that you love the environment, really and truly it is—but, and there is a but, “only if you do it in benign ways that don’t threaten industry.” However if you ...

Daily Bafflements
July 28, 2015
• Using the cuteness of dogs to encourage people to “self-profile”— are you a party-loving mastiff or a sheepdog who “loves to plan”?—in order to maximize company productivity is probably considered a brilliant idea within the ...

Daily Bafflements
July 27, 2015
• Now that the Greek fire sale is on (anyone want to buy the Hellenic post? How about Athens’s water supply?), it’s worth noting that selling off services hasn’t worked out for Greece in the past. In the LRB, Tariq Ali writes: “the largest tax ...