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Daily Bafflements
March 17, 2015
• Maybe the only good thing to come out of South by Southwest this week: flying cars? (Via John Byrne; see also David Graeber.) • If you haven’t seen it yet, this send-up of Silicon Valley’s thoughtless privilege-and-profit machine, “WellDeserved,” ...

Poor Stories from Brooks and Douthat
March 16, 2015
In the past week, New York Times columnists David Brooks and Ross Douthat have taken on the issues of personal behavior and social norms among people less economically fortunate than themselves. That’s not how they put it, of course. Douthat wants to address “the social ...

Daily Bafflements
March 16, 2015
• The National Journal has a funny little feature on conservative pols’ love affair with Chick-fil-a, the fast food that became a culture-war emblem when the chain’s CEO spoke out against same-sex marriage in 2012. Now, the chicken sandwiches are a must for ...

The Irrational Exuberance of New York Real Estate
March 13, 2015
Now is the winter of our discount rent. Enjoy it while you can. On June 15, New York City’s rent regulations expire. One day later, the city’s 421a tax incentive program expires. In a city where housing advocates and housing developers already love doomsday rhetoric (either ...

Daily Bafflements
March 13, 2015
• Drivers in California for both Lyft and Uber are filing cases against their employers; the drivers object to the companies’ classifying them as “independent contractors” rather than employees so as to avoid paying overtime and the threat of unionization. ...

The Iran Letter: Explaining the Joke
March 12, 2015
By now everyone’s familiar with the infamous and outrageously embarrassing open letter signed by forty-seven Republican senators that condescendingly warns Iran that any nuclear agreement it reaches with the West will die once Obama is out of office. It not only seeks to ...

Daily Bafflements
March 12, 2015
• It’s Jack Kerouac’s birthday today, a good time as any to re-read Maura Mahoney’s Baffler salvo from issue 5, way back in 1993, “Back in Black on the Beaten Path,” about Gap’s rather forced black trend and the commercial rediscovery of ...

Watching the #Watch Watch
March 11, 2015
Any publicly traded company must show continued growth year after year, evidence of its cancerous appetite for new markets. In the hydrocarbons industry, billions are bet on the basis of “proved reserves,” oil and gas deposits that a company can be reasonably sure it can ...

Daily Bafflements
March 11, 2015
• In Georgia, a sanitation worker got sentenced to thirty days in jail when residents of a wealthy neighborhood complained that he was picking up their garbage too early in the morning and waking them up, reports the Christian Science Monitor (emphasis on their garbage). ...

On Clinton’s Emails and Kissinger’s Vault
March 10, 2015
It’s been almost a decade since the last Clinton-related archival scandal; here we go again. First, the New York Times reported that Hillary Clinton, while Secretary of State, used a non-official email to conduct government business. Soon after, the AP ...

Breaking Sitcom Habits with Kimmy Schmidt
March 10, 2015
There were times, watching the new Netflix series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, when I was convinced that it was going to be the salvation of the sitcom as we know it—not least because it is committed to finding humor and compassion in the lives of people that most TV shows ...

Daily Bafflements
March 10, 2015
• Oh good heavens, Boston now has a “Startup Czar.” • The Apple Watch is fueling our class anxieties, while Apple’s CEO is fueling all of our other anxieties. • Wikipedia, along with eight other organizations, is suing the NSA over the mass surveillance ...