Daily Bafflements

• In Cambridge, MA, right in The Baffler’s backyard, a new combination teahouse and coworking space will feature an in-house venture capital fund. While InTeahouse may sound a bit odd, the tearoom and $30 million VC operation isn’t much of a surprise in Cambridge’s Central Square, a neighborhood transformed in recent years into a playground for innovation and its discontents, as described in John Summers’s Baffler no. 24 salvo.

• Spawning a rash of unfortunate slogan-slinging from financial reporters for their “supersized problems,” McDonald’s franchisees have expressed a lack of faith in the chain as sales slump worldwide. In a recent survey, the store owners were pessimistic about the menu and the direction taken by top brass at the fast food giant. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, bars are responding to the hip consumer’s sense that PBR has become just too expensive and mainstream, man. Remarks the New York Post, “the reign of PBR in NYC may finally PB-over.” What’s a brand to do?

• Today in signs of the end-times: Apple has filed for a patent on a software that would allow it to check your bank balance before choosing product ads for you, allowing marketers to target customers based on their price range and credit limits. The patent, along with several other business maneuvers, runs counter to CEO Tim Cook’s comments that competing tech companies are “gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it . . . We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”