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The Most Contaminated Place in the World
April 16, 2015
One of the more tragic results of the Information Age’s ballyhooed shrinking (or flattening or scrunching or crumpling) of the world is that we’re better apprised of international tragedies while also feeling less able to do anything about them. There’s an ethereal, ...

BuzzFeed Among the Brands
April 15, 2015
On the social web, all roads lead to brands, so let’s start with a story of a #brand. Five years ago, Domino’s acknowledged what most of us already knew: they made shit pizza. So the company launched an advertising campaign in which it offered a mea culpa and promised better ...

Daily Bafflements
April 15, 2015
• One Seattle-based credit card processing company is making headlines by raising its lowest paid employees’ salaries to $70,000/year. • Elon Musk’s much acclaimed SpaceX program is off with a bang, sending a resupply mission to the International Space Station, ...

Game of Thrones, Meet Tony Robbins
April 14, 2015
I admit it: Game of Thrones’ massive popularity took me by surprise. When I first read George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, I frankly could not understand how it managed to capture its legions of fans. Like many “dark fantasy” writers of the 1980s and ...

Daily Bafflements
April 14, 2015
• In an impassioned defense of “unicorns,” Dave McClure, a prominent angel investor, writing for Medium, says that talk about the overvaluation of startups is cheap, and argues that many public companies are also substantially overvalued. • The Broad, LA’s ...

The Humane Thing to Do
April 13, 2015
Let’s say your husband got fired from his job as a police officer after he was indicted for murder, when video surfaced of him firing eight shots at the back of a unarmed African American man—who fled when he feared arrest for owing back child support—hitting him five ...

Daily Bafflements
April 13, 2015
• The Washington Post reports that the NIH is spending $5 million on a campaign to convince hipsters that “styling your sweet mustache” is a good alternative to smoking. • The Baffler’s favorite v-word comes to Grand Forks, North Carolina, where “vibrancy ...

Town Without Purpose
April 10, 2015
Call it The Real World: Whatever. That’s the queasy image conjured by the recently announced partnership between Bud Light and Tinder, to amp up the promotional force of the grog merchant’s pop-up party hub “Whatever, USA”—the kind of promotional stunt that Roland ...

Daily Bafflements
April 10, 2015
• The much touted (and well-funded) Start-Up New York Program created only 76 jobs last year, instead of the originally announced 2,300, according to news from the Cuomo administration. • REVOLVE clothing is offering same-day delivery service for fashion-minded ...

Spinner in Chief
April 09, 2015
Last week, the New York Times offered an invaluable preview of the rote and banal veneration that Hillary Clinton’s all-but-official presidential run will elicit, again and again, in our neoliberal media. In a bravura survey of media metanarratives—all presented, of course, ...

Daily Bafflements
April 09, 2015
• Richard Nixon’s “Western White House” is on the market for $75 million. Unfortunately for prospective buyers of the San Clemente, California estate, you won’t be able to fill the pool or the fountain any time soon. • In Maharashtra, India, where ...

Why Is Twitter Aiding Turkish Censorship?
April 08, 2015
Corporations, like nation states, act out of self-interest. So it pays to be suspicious when a company claims to be on the side of social progress. Markets, with their inherent sociopathy, just don’t value things like justice and equity (well, not that kind of ...