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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 ...

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 ...