Skip to content

Daily Bafflements

Lego guns

• “The National Rifle Association (NRA) has launched a new web series designed to appeal to millennials,” reports Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason. “Called Noir, it features an interracial pair of flawless, ambiguously aged young folks mixing standard conservative talking points with jarringly gratuitous references to clothing brands, celebrities, and trends.”

• Harvard’s Kennedy School for Government have added a session on “power and privilege” to its incoming-student orientation program, says New York magazine—news which will now probably attract more attention than it normally would have because of Princeton’s Tal Fortang flap. “If what you’ve been told all your life is you’re really talented and you deserve what you have, it’s going to be really hard to find out Maybe I don’t deserve it, and all these other people equally deserve it but never even had a shot,” says Reetu Mody, a campus activist. “Schools are not giving students a space to manage that loss of identity.”

• An update to yesterday’s update to a previous bafflement: Chelsea Manning does not actually want to be transferred to a civilian prison, and Manning’s attorney calls Wednesday’s announcement a “strategic leak” by the Pentagon that was designed to pressure Manning to drop her request for hormone therapy treatment. This latest comes from Time’s Denver Nicks, who literally wrote the book on Manning, so.

• Today in minimum wage news: waitresses and waiters are still getting screwed. And today in “pointless article with question headline that distracts from the important issues at hand” news, “Does a higher minimum wage make people happier?