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Taking a Cat Photo Approach to History
March 27, 2015
In the midst of chaos and tragedy of the 2014 Ferguson riots, a white cop embraced a black youth. It was a moment of harmony within a storm of racial conflict. It was a beautiful photograph. No wonder we made it the defining image of the riots by sharing it 400,000 times on ...

Daily Bafflements
March 27, 2015
• The investigator becomes the investigated: NYU professor and human rights activist Andrew Ross, who wrote in The Baffler about his travels and travails fighting for migrant worker rights in the United Arab Emirates, is now apparently the target of a “murky ...

Freedom Fries: McDonald’s and the Fourteenth Amendment
March 26, 2015
In his book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser demonstrates the dominance of McDonald’s, not just in the context of the history of the fast food industry, but in the history of all industry. McDonald’s is the largest owner of retail property in the world. The company trains ...

No Sympathy for Poors from the Silver Hordes
March 26, 2015
According to a new Brookings Institution study, the majority of America’s elderly don’t want the government to help poor people. And they sure as hell don’t want the government to provide them with health insurance. (Get our government hands off their Medicaid?) The ...

Daily Bafflements
March 26, 2015
• Franco Moretti and Dominique Pestre apply quantitative linguistic analysis to World Bank Reports over the decades, in a piece called “Bankspeak.” An excerpt: “the semantic cluster of governance includes a series of terms which express a sense of compassion, ...

Time Is Money Is Work Is Virtue
March 25, 2015
“In addition to showing you the time, Apple Watch actually understands what time means to you,” Apple’s website declares about the company’s latest object of desire, which goes on sale next month. “It helps you be more productive and efficient. So you get more out of ...

Google: Too Big to Derail
March 25, 2015
It seems handily coincidental that one week after we learned that Google survived an FTC anti-trust investigation without much consequence, the search company announced the hiring of a new CFO, this one plucked from Morgan Stanley. The finance industry, after all, is the ...

Daily Bafflements
March 25, 2015
• Following the Forbes bracket for startup jargon, Re/code now has a guide to VC jargon, from “magnet skills” to “power alley” to “too native.” Woof. (Via Kyle Chayka.) • “Stung by recent polling that showed only a third of Boston ...

Cinderella Is Dead
March 24, 2015
In Disney’s newest Cinderella—a live-action reboot of its 1950 animated movie—not much has changed, but the ticket sales and potential for new merchandise are fresh. This latest iteration of the famous fable raises an important question: is it possible to kill the princess ...

Daily Bafflements
March 24, 2015
• Brokelyn continues to report on Brooklyn’s “preschool for adults,” for folks who are so oppressed by the ills of adult life that they are willing to spend several hundred dollars to join other similarly oppressed adults in games of musical chairs and ...

Focus Group-ing Our Way to Prosperity
March 23, 2015
Paul Tudor Jones, the hedge fund star who is the founder of the Tudor Investment Corporation, says he’s concerned about inequality. And since he’s worth an estimated $4.6 billion, he got to share his ideas on how to alleviate it, on the stage at of TED15 in Vancouver last ...

Daily Bafflements
March 23, 2015
• Today in Bespoke: the best part of this New York Times article about high-end perfume designed and manufactured for you and you alone (which will cost you around $30,000 to $50,000 at Jean Patou) is the staged photo up top. • The dress code for the extras in Ted ...