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Daily Bafflements
March 03, 2015
• At The Verge, Nitasha Tiku has a dispatch from the so-called “clean cannabis” movement, and in particular from a very silly-sounding, Gatsby-themed weed start-up launch party in a mansion made of redwood trees in the Berkeley hills. • Edgar Allan Poe was a ...

America Saves, America Shames
March 02, 2015
We’ve just concluded the ninth annual “America Saves Week,” such a wholesome-sounding event that it seems almost churlish to complain about it. As my pal Chuck Jaffe put it at Marketwatch, if the event’s name were accurate, it would be called “America Doesn’t Save ...

Daily Bafflements
March 02, 2015
• The San Jose Mercury News contributes to the “Before It Was Cool, Inc.” files: “Major companies are testing whether it would pay to tuck away their world famous logos in favor of more hipster guises” because “marketing experts say there’s ...

Leonard Nimoy was BAFFLED!
February 27, 2015
We lost a true American hero today. There are so many reasons to love the late, great Leonard Nimoy. The fact that he starred in an action-packed 1973 TV movie called Baffled! just happens to be ours. (IMDB.com description: “Race car driver suffers from visions where he ...

Bad Faith and Bull from ACA Critics
February 27, 2015
Bad Faith, from the French mauvaise foi, is a concept in existentialist thought used to describe people who are deceiving themselves by dutifully accepting larger social illusions of identity. One of the examples that Jean-Paul Sartre uses is a waiter who too self-consciously ...

Daily Bafflements
February 27, 2015
• Today in Bespoke: Australian artisan Dan Bolwell charges $3500 to $6000 (AUD) for his handmade penny farthing bikes, just like great-great-(great?)-grandpa used to ride. The prices range because “the purchaser can inject their personality into the design by adding ...

Dangerous Designs on (AP) American History
February 26, 2015
Any city upon a hill invariably rests on a mound of bullshit, and the extent to which one knows it depends largely on one’s willingness to inhale through his or her nose. In this sense, we might simplify the ongoing debate over the College Board’s updated AP U.S. History ...

Daily Bafflements
February 26, 2015
• Today in Billionaires: Fortune reports that Warren Buffett, 84 years old but going on 6, “stays youthful by drinking at least five Cokes a day,” three during the day and two at night. He is also really into Utz “potato stix,” and eats ice cream for ...

Hacks, Backdoors, and Cyberwars
February 25, 2015
You could be forgiven for thinking that the Oscar win by Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’s documentary about Edward Snowden, represented a symbolic capstone to our country’s surveillance story. Perhaps the well of new revelations had run dry, and we were now in the realm of ...

Daily Bafflements
February 25, 2015
• Chicagoans appear to be disillusioned; Rahm now faces a runoff. As the the AP puts it, “Emanuel discovered it wasn’t enough to spend millions of dollars on TV ads, earn the backing of the city’s business leaders, and secure the hometown endorsement of ...

Learning from Kanye: A Thought Experiment
February 24, 2015
Being a Kanye West defender in 2015 is a thankless task. Yeezy makes it hard: he’s frequently offensive and (I’m told) deeply unlikable. He’s been called arrogant, narcissistic, materialistic, pretentious, rude, insensitive, and insane. But this is exactly why I like him. ...