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Daily Bafflements
August 18, 2015
• Is it time to close the Vatican bank, whose ATMs flash options at users in Latin? And that’s the least of its problems: “Much of the money is sent covertly to churches and voluntary groups in poor countries and failed states without functioning ...

Daily Bafflements
August 17, 2015
• “Why are the Cambridge equivalent of rock stars coming out for the retirement party of a Harvard clerk—the guy who books rooms as a scheduling assistant for Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies?” asks Cambridge Day, at the ...

Daily Bafflements
August 14, 2015
• The last unicorn? Hardly likely in the startup world, where there are now more than 120 companies bearing the moniker for a firm valued (perhaps falsely) at over $1 billion. Since the field is getting crowded, the industry lingo has now expanded to include ponies, ...

Daily Bafflements
August 13, 2015
• In the scary world of innovation and its discontents, one Harvard student is mourning a lost opportunity to join the evil empire after Facebook rescinded his summer internship offer. The company reneged on their offer after discovering “Marauder’s Map,” ...

Daily Bafflements
August 12, 2015
• Over at the MIT Technology Review, Amanda Schaffer writes that outmoded “great man” versions of history have been dropped in most fields, but still abound in the tech industry. Our willingness to indulge the concept of the mountain-moving ...

Daily Bafflements
August 11, 2015
• The Oath Keepers have shown up in Ferguson, again, to monitor the riots following the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown. How this squares with the organization’s stated intention to “NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of ...

Daily Bafflements
August 10, 2015
• “Hopelessly insecure” and “inherently weak” are two of the cheerful ways experts describe the 1980s networking technology almost all cars use, which is now being connected to the web by Internet of Things pioneers. As we saw last month, attaching ...

Daily Bafflements
August 07, 2015
• Jon Stewart’s run as host of The Daily Show came to an end last night, carried off on the wings of a thousand think pieces. As an op-ed from WBUR said this week, “His anger — righteous, moral, though rarely overt — has been the key to Stewart’s ...

Daily Bafflements
August 06, 2015
• Today in the Guardian, Baffler contributing editor Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the contemporary challenges of journalists compelled to write on poverty, but too poor themselves to do so. Reflecting that it was her financial success (with her groundbreaking work ...

Daily Bafflements
August 05, 2015
• What with so many futurists being white men, “the questions that many people face about their futures”—childcare, water-access, police brutality, and so on—“are lost in the futures being imagined,” argues Rose Eveleth over at ...

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 ...