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Daily Bafflements
March 06, 2015
• From Wired this week comes news of “A Smartwatch App That Lets Your Boss Track You Constantly.” Oh hey, cool! “It’s meant to be a social app, where people digitally ‘nudge’ each other to pick up the pace and congratulate colleagues when the ...

A Work in Progress
March 05, 2015
It took about thirty years for the major temples of the Acropolis in Athens to be built in the fifth century BCE. It has been forty years since the Acropolis Restoration Project was founded, and it is not known when its work will be completed. What the casual visitor sees on the ...

For Love of Country (and Money)
March 05, 2015
“I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Rudy Giuliani said recently to a room of right-leaning businessmen at Manhattan’s 21 Club. ”He doesn’t love you, and he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way ...

Daily Bafflements
March 05, 2015
• Headline of the Day, from the Washington Post: “Awash in cash, Bush asks donors not to give more than $1 million – for now.” • In case you missed it, Baffler contributing editor David Graeber talked about the history of debt for a radio series on BBC, ...

Project Management for the Soul
March 04, 2015
There’s a divide that runs through the self-help market. On the one side there’s all the emotional, caring stuff—relationships, self-esteem, and healing. On the other, there’s all the macho business stuff, aimed at the gladiators of the executive boardroom. Split down ...

After Net Neutrality
March 04, 2015
It’s revealing that after passing net neutrality rules last week, one of FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s first stops was at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The MWC is one of the tech industry’s annual gadget bacchanals—a we’re-here-to-make-news confab on the order ...

Daily Bafflements
March 04, 2015
• Today in Billionaires’ Dreams Do Come True: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s luxury yacht, the M/Y Octopus, is equipped with an exploration submarine. Allen announced this week that all his deep-sea explorations had not been in vain: he had discovered the wreck ...

Utopia: The Final Frontier
March 03, 2015
Leonard Nimoy, who passed away this past Friday, was less an actor than an icon, an ever-present figure and a seemingly universal pop-culture touchstone. What struck me, upon hearing the news of his death, was that I’d somehow assumed he couldn’t die. It seemed as if Leonard ...

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 ...