Daily Bafflements

• Mark Zuckerberg is reading world-renowned war criminal Henry Kissinger’s latest book, World Order—and he thinks you should too! The naive Zuckerberg explains, “[It’s] about foreign relations and how we can build peaceful relationships throughout the world. This is important for creating the world we all want for our children, and that’s what I’m thinking about these days.” For Kissinger, that peaceful world appears to be one where New York Times reporters ask him no questions, even utterly mundane ones. 

• The Powerball is up to $450 million, making it the sixth-largest jackpot ever in North America. It’s tempting to sneer at the lottery as a tax on ignorance, but as Kim Phillips-Fein explained in issue no. 7,

claiming that people who play the lottery are poor fools, deluded and uneducated, manipulated into buying false promises of wealth, fame and glory, bypasses the possibility that maybe poor people actually have a good understanding of what their life chances are; maybe lottery players are right. At issue here is not the lottery per se but the chance of personal mobility, the question of how far you can get in life by working industriously; the lottery should make sense to anyone for whom the answer is nowhere. Lottery tickets aren’t like investments in the stock market; they are tickets to a dramatically different kind of life, the kind of life you’ll never be able to save up to just by working nine to five.

• Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, thinks we shouldn’t legalize marijuana because of the heroin epidemic. 

• Obama’s gun control is an executive action, not an executive order. Yes, there’s a difference. Whether these measures will have any effect on U.S. gun culture—which, as Chase Madar pointed out in issue no. 28, runs exceptionally deep—remains to be seen.