Bill Gates and David Christian speaking about the "Big History" project at TED in 2011 / Photo by Steve Jurvetson
The Baffler,  September 8, 2014

Daily Bafflements

Bill Gates and David Christian speaking about the "Big History" project at TED in 2011 / Photo by Steve Jurvetson
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• “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. “How does one go about it? What did the guy who liked biology—who did he call and say, ‘Hey, we should have biology in high school?’ It was pretty uncharted territory. But it was pretty cool.”

• There have been some important victories for labor in the California legislature, says the Los Angeles Times. The Midwest, however is not looking so good.

• Today in Bespoke: “British sports car manufacturer Morgan has discovered the lucrative business of bespoke special projects and its first entry into the world of tailor-made products is called SP1,” reports Carscoops. In the bespoke car featured in this carscoop, the custom-made one-off car includes a wooden frame that is “constructed using Ash Wood, combined with African Bubinga Red Hardwood. These materials have been chosen by the client ‘to represent his business life spent on that continent.'”

• Fortune recently ran a big profile of Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, libertarian, VC investor, and philanthropist. Learn all about him there before you see him debate Baffler contributing editor David Graeber in New York next Friday. (The magazine article, by the way, is entitled “Peter Thiel disagrees with you.”)

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