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Chronicle of a Creep
In his epic fifteen-page New Yorker tour through the career of hotelier and self-proclaimed sex researcher Gerald Foos, Gay Talese briefly entertains a moral quandary. Why should he, Talese—the big-picture chronicler of media empires and wayward human intimacies—take ...

Daily Bafflements
April 13, 2016
• Today in the slow, painful death of irony: Silicon Valley CEOs have been promising to “fix the world”—or, really, save us peons from ourselves—for a while. But thanks in part to the rapid rise of billionaire real estate mogul and ...

Daily Bafflements
April 08, 2016
• The AP Style Guide, never at the vanguard of gender justice, has officially done away with the term “mistress” for referring to a female party in an extramarital affair. Likewise, the armed forces are trying to bring their titles in line with recent DOD ...

Dox Populi: A Few Missing Links
What if they held a mammoth document leak and nobody came? That seems, with a slight allowance for hyperbole, the impact of the release of 2.6 terabytes of data from the inner sanctums of Mossack Fonseca, the high-rolling Panamanian law firm. Mossack Fonseca—which is, ...

Daily Bafflements
April 07, 2016
• As news breaks that David Cameron has personally intervened on behalf of fellow plutocrats in their battle to protect their offshore accounts from new EU tax rules, it is becoming more and more clear that the UK’s austerity policies are hardly the inevitability ...

Daily Bafflements
April 05, 2016
• Would you look at that! For only a few thousand dollars you can have lunch with the editor of that “senpai of seduction” and dubious etiquette peddler, Neil Strauss. It’s a rare opportunity to neg the man who could have saved us a lot of grief and tactfully ...

Daily Bafflements
April 04, 2016
• “I started my own career criticizing this genre; every now and then I wake up in the middle of the night absolutely certain that—as conventional modes of earning a living as an author dry up—I shall end my days contributing to it,” ...

Daily Bafflements
April 01, 2016
This morning, we got up early, on the right side of the bed, and had a strange new idea. We thought, just this once, we might showcase some of the good ideas the tech industry has proffered recently. After all, you’ve got to look at the bright side occasionally, ...

Sci-Hub vs. the Scarcity-Mongers
April 01, 2016
In his “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” information activist Aaron Swartz urged everyone to do their civic duty and take up piracy. “The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage . . . is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of ...