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Surge Pricing for Your Entire Life
April 22, 2015
Sometimes, the darkest timeline comes quicker than you expect. Last year, Jathan Sadowski noted that insurance companies were fawning over the Internet of Things—smartphones, fitness monitors, wearable computers, and anything else with a sensor and WiFi—with an eye to ...

Daily Bafflements
April 22, 2015
• This week in Billionaires: Justine Musk (ex-wife of Elon, the Paypal founder) posted advice on online forum Quora, as is her wont. In the past she has put out such fires as “How can I be as great as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson?” and “What ...

“Some Other Woman” for President 2016
April 21, 2015
When Hillary Clinton announced her presidential candidacy, it wasn’t surprising. But I was surprised by my own reaction. For the last week and a half now, I’ve been fighting back an overwhelming sense of dread. It isn’t dread of Hillary. I may have Bernie Sanders politics, ...

Daily Bafflements
April 21, 2015
   • Over at the LRB blog, Deborah Friedell reminds us that the way to get into hidebound Harvard is to make it, in the words of its director of admissions, “a happier place.” For one senior Sony exec, the road to happiness is paved with donations “at the $1mm ...

The University of Nowhere
April 20, 2015
A cursory look at recent jeremiads on higher education resembles a thesaurus entry for “doom”: Academically Adrift. Education Disrupted. College Unbound. Degrees of Inequality. The Last Professors. It’s no surprise that the latest entry in the field, by Kevin Carey, a ...

Daily Bafflements
April 20, 2015
• Nothing seems to baffle the media more these days than the strange and elusive Millennial. Here, from Newsweek, a piece on how the generation full of digital natives is changing “hobo culture.” • Nneka Samuel asks, “Has crowdfunding gone too far?” ...

The One That Brings You Choices
April 17, 2015
Sizzler has provided white-bread fare above and beyond the cheesy toast you can always find beckoning to you at the self-serve chain’s salad bar. The brand managers at Sizzler HQ also want to remind you that the restaurant is a miniature consumer’s republic in its own ...

Daily Bafflements
April 17, 2015
• Gawker editorial employees are taking steps to unionize. Hamilton Nolan writes that “Generally speaking, Gawker Media is a very good place to work,” but that employees desire greater transparency and fairness in salary decisions. Nolan notes that • The Observer ...

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 ...