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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. ...

Daily Bafflements
April 24, 2015
• We’ve covered the problems with governor Jerry Brown’s measures for California drought relief. Luckily, William Shatner is here with a plan to save the day, and you’ll soon be able to back it on Kickstarter. The actor has started a website, Shatner’s ...

The Mall of American Progress
April 23, 2015
Malls may not be an American monopoly, but America’s not really thinkable without them. They’re where we come together, octogenarian mall walkers and teen Goths alike, as we aim for that perfect, elusive balance between over- and under-stimulation. They’re our own ...

Daily Bafflements
April 23, 2015
• Massachusetts has appointed Katie Stebbins as assistant secretary of innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship. In an interview, Stebbins tells of her plans to turn the whole state into an innovation district, a la Kendall Square. John Summers saw it coming in ...

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 ...