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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 ...

Selling the Wind
April 06, 2015
Would someone please tell the Guaraní of Guaraqueçaba in Brazil that their land is now a carbon “offset”? That’s ecological jargon for “get the hell out.” The Guaraní aren’t alone, either. Some of the Earth’s lowest carbon footprints are being wiped out in the ...

Daily Bafflements
April 06, 2015
• A new “luxury apartment hotel” in Philadelphia aims to make long-term hotel stays a glamorous commodity for the plutocrat on the go, and not just a reminder that you’ve probably been kicked out of your house. As Megan Ritchie Jooste writes in Curbed, ...

Viva El Jay
April 03, 2015
In his 2003 song “Public Service Announcement,” Jay Z claimed he was “Che Guevara with bling on”—a reference to a Che T-shirt he’d worn on an episode of MTV’s Unplugged. In both the MTV stunt and the song lyric, the rapper-cum-entertainment mogul ...

Daily Bafflements
April 03, 2015
• In yet another report on the federal government’s slipping “innovation score,” Reuters finds that millennials looking for government jobs are more likely to seek out departments they perceive as having a culture of innovation. Luckily, President Obama has a ...

Absent Reason
April 02, 2015
Bowe Bergdahl was once a hero. Long before federal prosecutors announced last week that they were trying the former prisoner of war on charges of “desertion” and “misbehavior before the enemy,” and prior to last year’s oddly controversial prisoner swap with the Taliban ...