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Daily Bafflements
August 04, 2015
• Today in Billionaires: Bill Gates has fallen foul of an onion advisory committee, after it was noticed that the Vidalia onions he was growing (why?) were getting to market before other, better equipped farmers’ Vidalias. For a more layered account of this ...

Daily Bafflements
August 03, 2015
• The Baffler was recently flattered with the fine title of  “America’s most pugnacious magazine,” but if there is one publication that gives us a run for our money in this respect, it’s surely the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, ...

Daily Bafflements
July 31, 2015
• In the mystical valleys of startup kingdom, V.C. firms are on the hunt for unicorns (startups with a valuation of a $1 billion or higher, even if those valuations are based on wild speculation). But as many have suspected, the unicorn whisperers are not necessarily the ...

Daily Bafflements
July 30, 2015
• In the boundless playground of innovation, developers and venture capitalists seek to better colonize a small but valuable piece of real estate—your ears, soon to be worth $5 billion. Apparently “earworn wearable” tech is where the big bucks are. In ...

Daily Bafflements
July 29, 2015
• The Federal Bureau of Investigation thinks it’s wonderful that you love the environment, really and truly it is—but, and there is a but, “only if you do it in benign ways that don’t threaten industry.” However if you ...

Daily Bafflements
July 28, 2015
• Using the cuteness of dogs to encourage people to “self-profile”— are you a party-loving mastiff or a sheepdog who “loves to plan”?—in order to maximize company productivity is probably considered a brilliant idea within the ...

Daily Bafflements
July 27, 2015
• Now that the Greek fire sale is on (anyone want to buy the Hellenic post? How about Athens’s water supply?), it’s worth noting that selling off services hasn’t worked out for Greece in the past. In the LRB, Tariq Ali writes: “the largest tax ...

Daily Bafflements
July 24, 2015
• Dmail, a new email service, offers to self-destruct those emails you regret as soon as you hit send. Unlike Gmail’s “unsend” feature and others like it, Dmail offers you the option to revoke your missives at any point in the future, leaving the ...

How to Move an Island
July 24, 2015
Time was, the military stuck to blowing things up—just ask the spirit of Elugelab, part of Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Elugelab was vaporized by the first ever test of an H-bomb on All Saints’ Day 1952, ascending to heaven and leaving behind only a deep ...

Daily Bafflements
July 23, 2015
• After The Huffington Post announced its decision to cover Donald Trump’s campaign only under the banner of entertainment news, the mogul faced another bump in the road when border patrol agents refused to accompany him on a planned trip to the Texas-Mexico ...

The Novel in Analog: Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers
July 22, 2015
Reviewers are having a hard time with Book of Numbers, the latest novel from the incorrigibly ambitious and graphomaniacal Joshua Cohen. Responses have ranged from dismissive to enraptured, with most both at once. The book is “a mess,” writes the New York ...

Daily Bafflements
July 22, 2015
• Progress in the manufacture of flying cars is agonizingly slow! One Massachusetts company has announced it might take another few years of testing miniature scale models in the MIT Wright Brothers wind tunnel “to measure drag, lift and thrust forces while ...