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Daily Bafflements

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Daily Bafflements
April 22, 2015
• This week in Billionaires: Justine Musk (ex-wife of Elon, the Paypal founder) posted advice on online forum Quora, as is her wont. In the past she has put out such fires as “How can I be as great as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson?” and “What ...

Daily Bafflements
April 21, 2015
   • Over at the LRB blog, Deborah Friedell reminds us that the way to get into hidebound Harvard is to make it, in the words of its director of admissions, “a happier place.” For one senior Sony exec, the road to happiness is paved with donations “at the $1mm ...

Daily Bafflements
April 20, 2015
• Nothing seems to baffle the media more these days than the strange and elusive Millennial. Here, from Newsweek, a piece on how the generation full of digital natives is changing “hobo culture.” • Nneka Samuel asks, “Has crowdfunding gone too far?” ...

Daily Bafflements
April 17, 2015
• Gawker editorial employees are taking steps to unionize. Hamilton Nolan writes that “Generally speaking, Gawker Media is a very good place to work,” but that employees desire greater transparency and fairness in salary decisions. Nolan notes that • The Observer ...

Daily Bafflements
April 15, 2015
• One Seattle-based credit card processing company is making headlines by raising its lowest paid employees’ salaries to $70,000/year. • Elon Musk’s much acclaimed SpaceX program is off with a bang, sending a resupply mission to the International Space Station, ...

Daily Bafflements
April 14, 2015
• In an impassioned defense of “unicorns,” Dave McClure, a prominent angel investor, writing for Medium, says that talk about the overvaluation of startups is cheap, and argues that many public companies are also substantially overvalued. • The Broad, LA’s ...

Daily Bafflements
April 13, 2015
• The Washington Post reports that the NIH is spending $5 million on a campaign to convince hipsters that “styling your sweet mustache” is a good alternative to smoking. • The Baffler’s favorite v-word comes to Grand Forks, North Carolina, where “vibrancy ...

Daily Bafflements
April 10, 2015
• The much touted (and well-funded) Start-Up New York Program created only 76 jobs last year, instead of the originally announced 2,300, according to news from the Cuomo administration. • REVOLVE clothing is offering same-day delivery service for fashion-minded ...

Daily Bafflements
April 09, 2015
• Richard Nixon’s “Western White House” is on the market for $75 million. Unfortunately for prospective buyers of the San Clemente, California estate, you won’t be able to fill the pool or the fountain any time soon. • In Maharashtra, India, where ...

Daily Bafflements
April 08, 2015
• In The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner writes on our “corporate saviors,” and why we should be skeptical of big corporations’ investment in social change. • Allentown, PA becomes the latest city to welcome an “innovation district” to its ...

Daily Bafflements
April 07, 2015
• San Francisco-based Tasty Ties has rolled out a line of bow ties representing San Francisco neighborhoods, including an adorable saxophone tie to represent Fillmore Street—and a tie emblazoned with a handgun to represent Hunter’s Point. The offensive bow tie retails ...

Daily Bafflements
April 06, 2015
• A new “luxury apartment hotel” in Philadelphia aims to make long-term hotel stays a glamorous commodity for the plutocrat on the go, and not just a reminder that you’ve probably been kicked out of your house. As Megan Ritchie Jooste writes in Curbed, ...