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Daily Bafflements
May 21, 2015
• Private bus service Leap has been ordered to cease and desist by the state of California, and is shutting down operations while navigating what it calls a final regulatory “hurdle.” For Leap’s unfortunate commuters, it means no more “polished wood, black ...

Hell’s Pundits
May 20, 2015
When the news broke this weekend that a violent biker melee at a theme restaurant in Waco claimed nine lives and otherwise injured 18, there were all sorts of solemn topics available to the interlocuters of pundit discourse.  There was the awkward contrast of the Waco episode ...

Daily Bafflements
May 20, 2015
 • Sister Megan Rice, the 85-year-old nun who humiliated the government by creeping into Tennessee’s “Fort Knox of Uranium,” with bolt cutters and a Bible, has been released from her three-year prison term. The appeals court deemed that “vague platitudes about a ...

Nausea in the UK
May 19, 2015
It still feels like the morning after. People still have headaches, feel dizzy, nauseous, confused. What happened? A party controlled by inept bullies has been swept into power with a parliamentary majority of 51%. Stalwart objectors point out that under the UK’s ...

Daily Bafflements
May 19, 2015
• Today in apps: IBM has created a new foodie web app, Chef Watson, which uses “cognitive cooking technology” to suggest recipes that are, well . . . innovative. As Rex Huppke opines in the Chicago Tribune, the app generates “recipes that transform perfectly ...

America: Dangerous Curve Ahead
May 18, 2015
At some point in the early 1980s, a large yellow placard began turning up in the back window of cars proclaiming “Baby on Board.” At first it seemed a joke, an inadvertent high-sign that the driver was someone who took this parenthood thing a little too seriously. Even as ...

Daily Bafflements
May 18, 2015
  • From Henry James’s speculation that Roosevelt’s initials stood for Theodore Rex to the Emperor-like Obama: Is the United States a monarchy? “In the words of one late 19th Century American newspaper: ‘Great Britain is a republic, with a hereditary president, ...

Spare Change
May 15, 2015
Roll over, Andrew Jackson, and tell Frederick Douglass the news. That, in essence, was the upshot of a feverishly buzzed-over online poll conducted earlier this week—except that the African American eminence selected to replace our redoubtably racist and ...

Daily Bafflements
May 15, 2015
•  In an exhaustively reported story, Bloomberg Business details how Elon Musk’s SpaceX ambitions nearly cost him his terrestrial company, Tesla. As one fellow executive recalls, “Elon showed up . . . and started telling us it was his destiny to launch things into ...

The Empire Strikes Back
May 14, 2015
Seymour Hersh is a pioneer of investigative journalism, the modern iteration of which he fashioned almost singlehandedly by uncovering the 1968 My Lai massacre, during the Vietnam War. Americans had opposed the war before My Lai—everyone knew what the American government was ...

Daily Bafflements
May 14, 2015
• Leah Hunt-Hendrix is here with a lesson in “effective philanthropism,” which doesn’t sound so different from the “venture philanthropy” skewered by Rhonda Lieberman in Baffler No. 24. • The “Startup Castle” in Woodside, CA, is ...

Tweet If You Love the Sweet Sound of Advertising
May 13, 2015
According to Wall Street, we haven’t been clicking and tweeting nearly enough. Twitter’s 300 million unpaid laborers are underperforming, or so we’ve heard this spring.  Twitter, by some financial measures, is struggling. In early April, the company’s stock price ...