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Daily Bafflements
July 01, 2015
• Today in Bespoke: Is your supercar failing to stand out in a sea of supercars? So make your supercar more super still! Here—let us direct you to the manufacturer now catering to that armor-plated circular thinking popularized by the superrich; it offers to ...

The Unbearable Emptiness of Politics as Code
June 30, 2015
Nothing inspires nihilism quite like physical proximity to a U.S. presidential campaign. Having attended my first pseudo-event of the 2016 election cycle in San Francisco, I must now banish the encroaching numbness by speaking its name. Evil, thy name is campaign ...

Show Those Pearly Whites
June 30, 2015
Officially, things have rebounded since Wall Street collapsed and the world’s wealthiest and most rugged individualists turned to Washington for a bailout. Corporate America is now raking in more money than ever before, and unemployment rates continue to fall, inching back ...

Daily Bafflements
June 30, 2015
• Got a startup and on the lookout for some seriously dubious career advice to internalize? Try this chunk of wisdom, from the FT: “To defy the startup odds, try pitching like a poet.” The similarity between startup entrepreneurs and poets are, of course, ...

The Branded, the Sponsored, and the Native
June 26, 2015
The name of Samsung’s new advertising campaign for its Galaxy 6 and 6 Edge devices coos with the consumer-soothing cadences of a practiced therapist, or masseuse: “The 30-Minute Recharge: Connectivity Without Concern.” In reality, though, the campaign has all ...

Daily Bafflements
June 26, 2015
• After two crashes, Elon Musk is “uncertain” whether his third Falcon 9 rocket will be able to make a successful landing on the drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You.” The Tesla CEO’s SpaceX venture aims to provide cheaper, privatized ...

It Sounds Like a Melody
June 25, 2015
Pope Francis’s recently released Laudato Si, or “Praise Be to You,” has been called “the climate encyclical” and “the environmental encyclical”—but while it’s true that the papal missive does address climate change, ...

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 ...