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Daily Bafflements
October 29, 2015
• After a decade of legal proceedings, Google has won the right to scan the 129,864,880 books of the world into its searchable Google Books database. What does this mean for publishing? Most have stopped worrying about it by now, reports Jonathan Sturgeon, but Roberto ...

Daily Bafflements
October 28, 2015
• Each year six different dogs shoot six different people. Not deliberately. More dogs are shot by humans than humans by dogs. Dogs rarely fatally shoot humans. Only one cat has ever shot its owner. (Chase Madar wrote about human-on-human gun violence in his ...

Daily Bafflements
October 27, 2015
• These charts, assembled by Matt Daniels of polygraph, which map the durability (or otherwise) of pop songs past and present, are by turns surprising, depressing, and vindicating. According to the data from Spotify, Biggie was the big winner of the nineties, in ...

Daily Bafflements
October 26, 2015
• A win for safety is a loss for PR, according to one Japanese gangster ring: “A low-ranking underboss” from the Yamaguchi-gumi has declared that the group is not indulging neighborhood children with treats this Halloween. “Trouble is brewing with ...

Daily Bafflements
October 23, 2015
• Today in billionaires: Bill Gates was briefly overthrown as the world’s richest man by Spanish billionaire Amancio Ortega, though the Microsoft founder was back on top within twenty-four hours. No word yet on how Gates spent his brief layover down amongst us common ...

Daily Bafflements
October 22, 2015
• New research theorizes that one’s youthful entertainment choices may have a lot to do with one’s political ideology, leading Pacific Standard to ask, “Are right-wingers raised on Rambo?” • Today in innovation: Elon Musk’s recent Tesla ...

Daily Bafflements
October 21, 2015
• As Vox runs explainers on why we should be suspicious of a rare woman-run $10 billion startup, Elle takes another look at the landscape that technologically-oriented women are subsisting in: However much we’d all love Theranos to be clean as a ...

Daily Bafflements
October 20, 2015
• The police have brilliant new technology to disappear us with, literally. Their new X-ray vans can see right through buildings and trucks, and New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton won’t answer whether they will use them to see through people: ...

Daily Bafflements
October 19, 2015
• Here’s The New Yorker getting in on a major trend by profiling everyone’s favorite hair-shirted Baffler contributing editor, George Scialabba. (Apparently, the do we threw him for his retirement was “campy,” “quaint,” and “extravagant.” Very ...

Daily Bafflements
October 15, 2015
• Today in innovation trials and (mainly) tribulations: pity the poor startup tycoons behind the Skarp Laser Razor (say that three times fast.) Their much-ballyhooed razor, which promised customers they’d never need to buy blades again, raised $4 million on Kickstarter ...

Daily Bafflements
October 14, 2015
• All San Francisco’s chickens have come home to roost! The rapidly gentrifying and tech-savvy city has invented an app to report homeless people. They’ve called it “Snitch.” We’ll say no more.  • Feeling unfortunate, ...

Daily Bafflements
October 13, 2015
• Persecution of Christians has taken a number of different forms over the years, from being burned alive, stoned to death, crucified (both then and now), and perhaps the most sinister of them all, asked awkward questions over brunch. Yes, that’s ...