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Daily Bafflements
June 01, 2015
• Happy first of National Homeownership Month! Celebrate with this new survey by the American Institute of CPAs, which finds that retirement has replaced home ownership as the touchstone of the American dream: “The US homeownership rate has now reached a 20-year low,” ...

The Fantastic Four Under Fire
May 29, 2015
Only in America can the skin color of someone who spends much of his waking life on fire supply the basis for a spirited pop-culture controversy. That’s the grim lesson of the media run-up to the latest in the long line of lumbering comics franchises’ superhero cash-cows ...

Daily Bafflements
May 29, 2015
• Continuing its Google Glass-style experiments in making users look silly in public, the tech giant has introduced the attractively low-fi Google Cardboard, a virtual reality “viewer” you can fit over your smartphone. Google says the low price (under $20) will ...

It’s Always Mourning in America
May 28, 2015
For the most part, Memorial Day was celebrated in Washington with the usual cynical platitudes. Senator Tom Cotton, in a discharge of vacuity, sentimentalized the cost of combat while ever pushing for more of it. Par for the course in D.C. Some, however, considered this most ...

Daily Bafflements
May 28, 2015
• A group of Army lab workers is receiving preventative post-exposure treatment after the Army accidentally shipped live anthrax samples via FedEx. Doing a better sterilization job than U.S. army scientists, FedEx spokesman Jim McCluskey commented: “FedEx is committed to ...

For the Love of Bug Bounty
May 27, 2015
Chris Roberts, suddenly the nation’s most notorious computer security researcher, has had an exciting couple of months, ping-ponging between industry martyr and villain. In April, FBI agents yanked him off a Boeing 737 as soon as it landed in Syracuse; apparently they ...

Daily Bafflements
May 27, 2015
• Tom Hayes, who took the lead in rigging Libor rates (a.k.a. “the most important numbers in the world”) is facing trial in London. The press is celebrating with pirate jokes: Man the rigging! Walk the plank! Back in 2012’s Baffler No. 21, Christian Lorentzen documented ...

Freedom of Choice Degree Zero
May 26, 2015
Soon there will only be two kinds of ads on broadcast TV: commercials for things that make you sick and commercials for things that cure the illnesses caused by the things that make you sick. That’s why fast-food ads are stocked with images of youth living it up, while Big ...

Daily Bafflements
May 26, 2015
• George Clooney’s latest blockbuster Tomorrowland disappoints at the box office, and the Times diagnoses the flaws in its ambition: “Mr. Bird wanted to offer a more optimistic portrait of the future. But there is a reason studios continue to churn out dystopian fare.” ...

Victor Serge, The Unconquered
May 25, 2015
Some writers are destined to have two deaths—the first in life, and the second in memory. The lucky ones can be resurrected from that second death by cultural circumstance and the aid of overseeing angels, irked by injustice, believing these Lazaruses should be helped from ...

Daily Bafflements
May 25, 2015
• Over at The Nation, Moira Wegel imagines the effects of digital humanism, or those “digital tools [that] promise to give dusty humanities courses a fresh sheen of Silicon Valley sex appeal for the undergraduates who might not otherwise take them.” Also known as pie ...

Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack.
May 22, 2015
This Monday, President Obama joined Twitter. That, clearly, was his first mistake. In short order, a barrage of racist tweets greeted our first African American president. The whole contretemps called to mind the premise of the popular “Obama’s Anger ...