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Daily Bafflements
September 02, 2015
• On the side effects of an addiction: “Coloring”—that’s right, coloring—“is not for cowards. Three months since Jones began, the calluses on her fingers are just the surface symptoms of her devotion to her hobby.” But fear ...

Daily Bafflements
September 01, 2015
• In Baffler no. 24, Gene Seymour took an interest in—OK, a well-deserved swipe at—the “[Jeff] Bezos vanity project” that is “the construction of a mammoth timepiece that will tick off the next ten thousand years of life on this ...

Daily Bafflements
August 31, 2015
• Stephen King opines that a novelist can be too prolific for critics, but—then again—that it’s suspicious if a novelist isn’t producing some excess work. Of the “recently retired” Philip Roth, King notes: “Our Gang was pretty ...

Daily Bafflements
August 28, 2015
• Today in billionaires: Top-tier donor Dan Loeb gets caught in the Ashley Madison hackers’ net, and Matthew Yglesias posits that it’s not Trump’s antics that are making waves, it’s his policy positions, popular amongst the Republican rank and file, ...

Daily Bafflements
August 27, 2015
• Facebook’s new tool, ominously called “M,” claims to differentiate Facebook Messenger from other chat apps by offering you a built-in personal assistant, powered—for now—by actual human beings. Facebook has avoided the slow advances in artificial ...

Daily Bafflements
August 26, 2015
• There’s something familiar about the new features that Uber is rolling out—“pre-determined routes with fixed pickup points and continuous passenger pickups—it sounds remarkably like a gently optimized version of currently existing mass ...

Daily Bafflements
August 25, 2015
• “Now we finally know who John Galt is,” Slavoj Žižek writes of Ayn Rand’s individualist, “the idiot responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown and, consequentially, for the threat of the shutdown of state apparatuses.” Remember, ...

Daily Bafflements
August 24, 2015
• Banksy has opened a “Bemusement Park” called Dismaland, replete with a water-cannon fountain, a castle with a dead Princess Diana inside, and two rounds of security (one real, one joke). It falls flat. “All the graffiti in Dismaland is official ...

Daily Bafflements
August 21, 2015
• Today in billionaires: over $1.6 billion has been promised for unbuilt apartments at 220 Central Park South, a building that’s been nicknamed the “Billionaire’s Bunker.” One of these apartments might set you back anywhere from $30 million to $160 ...

Daily Bafflements
August 20, 2015
• Today in plutocrat interior design: one British property developer is under fire for decorating a historic Welsh mansion with the one-hundred-fifty-year-old gravestones of small children, culled from a nearby cemetery. Kim Davies faces fines of up to £300,000 for ...

Daily Bafflements
August 19, 2015
• This year, a slew of white, male, right-wing writers have been nominated for the World Science Fiction Society’s prestigious Hugo awards—and they’re complaining that in recent years the Hugos have become “an affirmative action ...

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 ...