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Nights of the Living Dread
May 01, 2015
This week, the luridly misleading media coverage of the Baltimore uprisings called to mind a fittingly grim narrative template from the entertainment world: shlocky action-horror fare. The strange alchemy by which reportage of Freddie Gray’s murder at the hands of six ...

Daily Bafflements
May 01, 2015
• App nauseum: TechCrunch reports on Dufl, an app-based service that will pack your suitcase for you, deliver it to your hotel, and ship it back home at the end of your trip. Now if only you could get it to sit next to that screaming baby on the plane for you. • Elon’s ...

Murder by Other Means
April 30, 2015
In a recent New York Times op-ed on the murder conviction handed out to four former Blackwater guards charged with killing seventeen Iraqi civilians in 2007, former paratrooper and mercenary Sean McFate offers a chillingly nihilistic endorsement of large-scale contract killing ...

Daily Bafflements
April 30, 2015
• Today in the sharing economy: CBC News reports that the popularity of “social dining apps,” companies that allow you to eat a home-cooked meal—in someone else’s home—is growing. Just book your meal with the app, take an Uber from your AirBnB sublet, and ...

Free Speech Culture Warriors of the World, Unite
April 29, 2015
It can be hard keeping track of all the awards that PEN America gives out. The organization, devoted to promoting freedom of expression, offers some two dozen, for translations, essays, novels, plays, and seemingly, every single other literary form. (There are two awards for ...

Daily Bafflements
April 29, 2015
• It is with a heavy heart that Bud Light said sorry for dubbing itself “The perfect beer for removing ‘No’ from your vocabulary for the night.” Part of its “Up for Whatever” campaign, this joke was, the company said, not a joke about ...

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby (Redux)
April 28, 2015
 Feminists of the world, rejoice! Now you can fulfill the grandest of your dreams: expressing your deep-rooted support for all women while also supporting and disguising your hideous, lumpy buttocks. How, you ask? Spanx. The much-derided corset of the twenty-first century is ...

Daily Bafflements
April 28, 2015
•Google has made a friendship pact with eight European newspapers. How nice! Essentially, the company is setting up a €150 million fund to promote, you guessed it, innovation. This follows arguments with publishers about its “anti-competitive” behavior (read: ...

Politics: You Lose, You Snooze
April 27, 2015
This past weekend, both Rick Perry and Ted Cruz went to Vegas, to kneel in homage—oops, I mean make their personal policy pitches—at gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson’s Republican Jewish Coalition spring meeting. You can think of it this way: While the political press was ...

Sliced, Diced, and Crusading: The State of Indiana
April 27, 2015
Sleight-of-hand revisionism is the favorite trick of pundits. Rarely, however, have we seen it done so well, or in so brazenly ahistorical a fashion, as it was last month in Indiana. As legislators there pursued an evangelical culture crusade against gay marriage, conservative ...

Daily Bafflements
April 27, 2015
• Corinthian Colleges, the vast, for-profit education company, has closed the twenty-eight schools it had left. The historic overnight shutdown operation leaves 16,000 students in the lurch (and in debt). • Vice Media has launched a little something to keep you ...

An American Marriage, Revisited
April 24, 2015
Limited Partnership, a new documentary about one of the nation’s first gay couples to be lawfully married, begins with a scene you might find in a legal thriller: an establishing shot of gray-slate courthouse columns gives way to a scrum of reporters positioned nearby. ...