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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 ...

Daily Bafflements
April 08, 2015
• In The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner writes on our “corporate saviors,” and why we should be skeptical of big corporations’ investment in social change. • Allentown, PA becomes the latest city to welcome an “innovation district” to its ...

He’s the King of Saving the World
April 07, 2015
Let us pause for a moment to recognize how much we as a society owe to Leonardo DiCaprio. I myself became aware of DiCaprio in the glory days of the 1990s, when he ushered “I’m the king of the world!” into our shared vocabulary—his earliest, and perhaps greatest, social ...

Daily Bafflements
April 07, 2015
• San Francisco-based Tasty Ties has rolled out a line of bow ties representing San Francisco neighborhoods, including an adorable saxophone tie to represent Fillmore Street—and a tie emblazoned with a handgun to represent Hunter’s Point. The offensive bow tie retails ...

California, by the Nuts
April 06, 2015
In response to the four-year-old California drought, Governor Jerry Brown ordered a 25 percent cut in water use by municipalities across the state last week. The edict has led to a familiar ring of selective fault-finding that displaces a major system failure—such that ...