Daily Bafflements

•Google has made a friendship pact with eight European newspapers. How nice! Essentially, the company is setting up a €150 million fund to promote, you guessed it, innovation. This follows arguments with publishers about its “anti-competitive” behavior (read: distorting search results), an EU antitrust probe, the European Parliament vote to break up Google’s search from its other services, the German link law, and Spanish link tax (neither of these last two really worked out). “We’re trying now to be more European,” lied Larry Page. We’ll believe it only when nudist beaches to start popping up in Mountain View.

•Yesterday Helaine Olen wrote about the starring role big donors will play in Election 2016 on the Baffler blog—in many ways, a role much like that of super fans, whose patronage is taking over the music industry.

•In his piece on Baltimore, Ta-Nehisi Coates draws attention to this September investigation into police brutality, from the Baltimore Sun, which includes a dropdown list of the $5.7 billion worth of settlements Baltimore police have paid in cases of false arrest.

•Today in Elites: the “dissident elite”; the literary elite; and “Downpour Hits Umbrella Stock” in an is-he-or-isn’t-he-a-proper-elite fiasco.