Skip to content

Daily Bafflements

Columns

Daily Bafflements
September 15, 2014
• In Chongqing city, China, cellphone texters get their own “lane” on the sidewalk (via Jennifer 8. Lee). • Brendan James at Talking Points Memo brings us the news that the discerning tastemakers at Urban Outfitters were briefly selling a “Vintage Kent ...

Daily Bafflements
September 12, 2014
• How adorable: the Guardian reports that two U.S. senators, Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM), will live together on a tropical island for six days, and all their adventures “as they spear fish and build shelter together” will be filmed for a Discovery ...

Daily Bafflements
September 11, 2014
• Leah Finnegan has written a quite definitive list for Gawker, “The Worst 100 White Men, Ranked.” (Check out #44.) • In that same vein, thank you Tom Hawking of Flavorwire for sending news of Actually… magazine, “a new home for all those cultural ...

Daily Bafflements
September 10, 2014
• Dealbook of the Day (read this out loud): “Dollar General said on Wednesday that it was taking its $9.1 billion offer for Family Dollar directly to shareholders. The move further complicates Family Dollar’s agreed upon deal to sell itself to Dollar Tree for $8.5 ...

Daily Bafflements
September 09, 2014
• News from our fair city: Harvard has just received the largest gift in its history, $350 million to the School of Public Health. “I brought this up to Bill [Lee, of the Harvard Corporation] to see if it was doable, to see if it was interesting,” the donor, Gerald ...

Daily Bafflements
September 08, 2014
• “We didn’t know when the last time was that somebody introduced a new course into high school,” Gates told Andrew Ross Sorkin in a New York Times Magazine article about Gates’s efforts to change how history is taught in American high schools. ...

Daily Bafflements
September 05, 2014
• The fast-food strike spread to over 150 cities yesterday, and hundreds of protesters were arrested, including a congresswoman from Wisconsin. • Here is a totally bonkers corporate songbook from IBM in 1937, with “hymnals” that deifty the corporate leaders. ...

Daily Bafflements
September 04, 2014
• Washington City Paper today has a very comprehensive guide to D.C. etiquette, including such entries as “How to Offer—and Ask for—Marijuana at a Party” and “Go Ahead, Ask Someone What He or She Does for a Living When You’ve Just Met,” and, of ...

Daily Bafflements
September 03, 2014
• “Hofstadter definitely does not see anti-intellectualism as the corrupting serpent in the American Eden. Instead, as he demonstrates, it has been deeply ingrained in the national culture from the very beginning.” – Nicholas Lemann gives Richard ...

Daily Bafflements
September 02, 2014
• We’ve all heard about how the changes in the music industry are going to be okay for artists in the end. Check out “20 Artists Who Make a Killing Off of T-shirt Sales.” • Here’s a sobering post-Labor-Day reminder that our ...

Daily Bafflements
August 29, 2014
• “Suddenly a generation of lonely basement kids had marketers whispering in their ears that they were the most important commercial demographic of all time. Suddenly they started wearing shiny blouses and pinning bikini babes onto everything they made, started making games ...

Daily Bafflements
August 28, 2014
• Today in Bespoke: Long Island-born duo Cody and Zachary Vichinsky have founded Bespoke Real Estate, an agency that deals exclusively with homes worth $10 million and above in the Hamptons. The real estate slump is over, they say; with a $147 million home selling earlier ...