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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 ...

Feeding the Social Media Slot Machine
March 20, 2015
When Andrew Sullivan, the big bearded granddad of political blogging, announced his retirement in February, the Internet was quick to perform an autopsy—as usual, slightly before its patient had died. Blogging was finished, everyone agreed, or at least it was looking wan and ...

Peer-to-Peer Pressure
March 20, 2015
There’s a telling scene near the end of The Social Network. Punching air as they watch the company pass the millionth user threshold on a large overhead screen, the young Facebook founders suddenly resemble the victors of another kind of bubble economy—NYSE brokers watching ...

Daily Bafflements
March 20, 2015
• Referring to a new kind of technology that lets people broadcast live iPhone video to their Twitter followers, Dylan Byers at Politico declares 2016 “The Meerkat election,” writing that the app “debuted at South By Southwest last week and has now firmly ...

David Petraeus Does D.C.
March 19, 2015
It’s easy to get distracted by all the titillating details when we think about the David Petraeus story. There’s the suggestive title of his lover Paula Broadwell’s fawning biography, All In. There’s Broadwell’s penchant for showing off her well-toned arms, and their ...

Daily Bafflements
March 19, 2015
• Lee Fang in The Intercept reveals that “security staff at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota used a fake Facebook account to monitor local Black Lives Matter organizers, befriend them, and obtain their personal information and photographs without their ...

Starbucks’s Race to the Center of Civic Life
March 18, 2015
The next time you order one of those faux-Italian-named sweetened coffee drinks at a Starbucks store, you are likely to receive a cup with the hash-tagged words “Race Together” written on it, just above your misspelled name. If you ask the Starbucks employee what it’s ...

Daily Bafflements
March 18, 2015
• The SEIU is still trying to get a $15 hourly wage out of McDonald’s. Meanwhile, McDonald’s workers in nineteen cities have filed a new complaint against the company for what they say are safety hazards. “Workers cite a persistent lack of gloves for ...

Ban St. Patrick’s Day
March 17, 2015
Last week, I was struck by sheer terror when an online listicle about St. Patrick’s Day Parades caught my eye, and briefly made me think I had been caught out of the house on the dreaded holiday. Luckily, I still had several days to prepare, and hide. It shouldn’t be like ...