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Daily Bafflements
June 25, 2015
• With its new venture, Sidewalk Labs, Google is making its terrifying entrance into the world of urban planning. According to Susie Cagle, the company seems to be taking as its model its own sprawling corporate campus, whose expansion was blocked because of a frightening ...

Not the People’s Uber
June 24, 2015
“The idea of a discount luxury is an oxymoron,” Sarah Maslin Nir said recently on the Longform podcast. “And it’s an oxymoron for a reason: because somebody’s bearing the cost of that discount.”  In this case, Maslin Nir was referring to ...

Daily Bafflements
June 24, 2015
• Linkin Park, of “In the End” and “Numb” fame, is taking the path less traveled from band to venture capital fund. Though established enough to have sold 60 million records, Linkin Park have declared they would rather be a tech startup (high on ...

Friedrich Hayek and the Void-oids
June 23, 2015
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, are argumentative. People like to point this out about the men who have been playing chicken with Europe and the IMF for the last five months, with the latest deadline for a Greek default looming. ...

Daily Bafflements
June 23, 2015
• Beta Boston takes stock of Kendall Square’s five-year vibrancy binge—last week Royal Philips moved in to join Amazon, Biogen, Pfizer et al—or, rather, just unquestioningly calls the area’s fast-tracked evolution ...

Bloomberg’s Baby Davos
June 22, 2015
 In January 2012, when he was still mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg announced that he would spend the year mastering the lucrative but laborious work of computer programming, and that his tutor would be an internet startup called Codecademy. Later, he invested in that ...

Daily Bafflements
June 22, 2015
• This weekend saw Narendra Modi lead the first International Yoga Day, with the controversial Indian prime minister playing up the benefits of yogic exercises to the realms of health, happiness, and national unity, as well as yoga’s role in fighting ...

Ritualized Denial
June 19, 2015
By now, some of the basic details are clear: on Wednesday night, nine people (six women, three men) were murdered in the basement sanctuary of “Mother” Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, during a bible study service. Victims include ...

Daily Bafflements
June 19, 2015
• Pundits warn that tech workers could soon become “as hated as bankers” for their industry’s current boom and the havoc their newfound profits are wreaking on cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, and Austin. For an in-depth look at the mess ...

No Big Chill for Us
June 18, 2015
“Only the young bring anything in—and they are not young very long,” said William Burroughs of American culture. This is obviously a warning, and not a dull truism, since Burroughs isn’t only referencing literal age, but also the co-opting of adolescent disdain for ...

Daily Bafflements
June 18, 2015
• Proving that a company can never be too big to pull off that hip, startup vibe, CVS opened a new “digital innovation lab” this week. According to one CVS exec, These not-at-all-terrifying projects will be carried out in a sleek new office in Boston’s ...

Made to Measure
June 17, 2015
In the latest season of Orange Is the New Black, an eligibility test sends the inmates of Litchfield Penitentiary into a multiple-choice frenzy. High-scorers will supposedly land better paying jobs—no one knows what kind, although the $1-per-hour wage is incentive enough—but ...