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Daily Bafflements
July 17, 2015
• In Cambridge, MA, right in The Baffler’s backyard, a new combination teahouse and coworking space will feature an in-house venture capital fund. While InTeahouse may sound a bit odd, the tearoom and $30 million VC operation isn’t much of a surprise in ...

Daily Bafflements
July 16, 2015
• Today in billionaire dads: tech mogul Marc Cuban, of Shark Tank fame, gives parenting advice in Entrepreneur magazine. Telling an interviewer that he doesn’t want his kids to be “materialistic,” the owner of a $40 million private jet swears that ...

Daily Bafflements
July 15, 2015
• The “Guignols de l’Info” is a subversive French TV puppet show that satirizes politicians and regularly presents president Hollande as a nebbishy coward. It has allegedly fallen foul of the industrialist that owns the channel—and ...

Daily Bafflements
July 14, 2015
• A group of jumped-up, self-directed micro-entrepreneurs with the temerity to claim to be Uber employees, since Uber’s business model is predicated on their labor, have taken the company to court. They want benefits, they want reembursement, they might even want insurance. ...

Daily Bafflements
July 13, 2015
• Today in Billionaires: Ty Warner, the “Beanie Baby billionaire” who admitted to hiding millions of dollars in Switzerland to evade tax, has been let off a jail term because, according to the judge, he demonstrated a “depth of humanity” that ...

Daily Bafflements
July 10, 2015
• Oakland photographer Matt Takaichi was recently interviewed by Vice on his new project, “Developers,” which seeks to expose the more banal side of Silicon Valley, eschewing the usual neatly coiffed, bike-riding, HBO-ready programmers in favor of the “old ...

Daily Bafflements
July 09, 2015
• A new report from the Urban Institute brings us the shocking news that “high wealth and income in big commuting zones do not trickle down,” analyzing the ways that exclusionary zoning turns urban neighborhoods and even entire towns into “private country ...

Metrics All the Way Down
July 08, 2015
According to Spotify, the value of one play of a Willie Nelson song in an Ole Miss dorm room at 4 a.m. is around 0.68 cents, but why stop there? When everything is data and data can be called down through the air, “song” and “book” and “movie” ...

Daily Bafflements
July 08, 2015
• The $5 iPhone cover that looks like a gun was unsurprisingly called “a terrible idea” by police, according to the the Times. High demand from nonetheless-undeterred consumers has led shipping to slow and developers to add more features to ...

Daily Bafflements
July 07, 2015
• For havoc, bloodletting, and all things uncivilized, may we direct you to The Baffler no. 28—our longest yet! —which arrives on newsstands today. In it, we’ve salvos by David Graeber, Heather Havrilesky, and A. S. Hamrah to offer, as well as a ...

Daily Bafflements
July 06, 2015
• The Greeks say, “two watermelons cannot fit under the same armpit” when someone bites off more than they can chew. For example, when Latvian “Mr Euro” Valdis Dombrovskis attempted to argue that the Greek referendum “neither legally nor ...

The Joys of Consumption
July 03, 2015
In the 1970s, when the New Deal consensus began to erode, something unexpected started to play a role in popular culture. It was the decade after the industry-approved release of The Pawnbroker (1964), the first Hollywood film to show women’s bare breasts, and all the old ...