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Silicon Valley’s Cult of Nothing
February 17, 2015
If Silicon Valley worships anything, it worships nothing. It excels in the manufacture of the immaterial and the incorporeal. It creates ideas to fill Thought Leader columns, TED talks, and conference circuits. It creates stock market flotations based on shareholder belief, and ...

Daily Bafflements
February 17, 2015
• “A survey from the American Management Association found that 66 percent of employers monitor the Internet use of their employees, 45 percent track employee keystrokes, and 43 percent monitor employee email,” reports Esther Kaplan in Harper’s. “Only two ...

The Nuances of Nonbelief
February 13, 2015
The fact that alleged Chapel Hill shooter Craig Hicks is a professed atheist, according to mostly unrequited and pathetic overtures on his Facebook page, has overwhelmed media outlets with giddy fascination. It has also exposed troubling contradictions in how the media often ...

The True Cost of “Hollywood South”
February 13, 2015
It only took Louisiana eleven years and $1 billion to buy the title it’s always wanted—“Hollywood South,” the movie-making capital of the world. In 2013, it surpassed the film industry’s old standbys, California and Canada, by having eighteen major-studio releases shot ...

Daily Bafflements
February 13, 2015
• Today in Labor Strikes: Workers at twenty-nine sea ports along the West Coast, from Bellingham to San Diego. Here’s a timeline of the long-running contract dispute. • Today in Billionaires: Bachelor billionaires, just in time for Valentine’s ...

The Well-Trod Path: Nick Kristof at Home
February 12, 2015
Having liberated the “better half” of the developing world from gender-based oppression and poverty, the New York Times’s fave do-gooder Nicholas Kristof and his trusty investment-banker sidekick Sheryl WuDunn have set their sights closer to home. Folks on the war-torn ...

Obama in the Land of the Blind
February 12, 2015
Last Friday the White House released its 2015 National Security Strategy, outlining President Obama’s vision for the future of national defense. It’s no surprise that there’s a lot of fluff in there. (“Our economy is the largest, most open, and most innovative in the ...

Daily Bafflements
February 12, 2015
• Your uncle with all the conspiracy theories are right; the Department of Homeland Security does have a secret “kill switch” for the Internet, and a D.C. court has just ruled that it can remain secret. • You may have seen the news this week that the vile ...

Trashing the University of Athens
February 11, 2015
Don’t get me wrong. Most of Athens is fairly clean. The subway stations are spotless. Trash is picked up and the streets are swept. But then you stumble across something like this: a hallway of the huge, nine-story School of Philosophy building in the University of Athens, ...

Your Snitching Gadgets
February 11, 2015
Your gadgets are spying on you. And not just in the ways you’ve become uncomfortably familiar with, like forking over personal information to the data-mining mill in return for ads for discount florists. A new generation of always-listening devices is now collecting ...

Daily Bafflements
February 11, 2015
• Oh, brands! Red Bull has filed an opposition with the Patent and Trademark Office against a little tiny craft brewery in Ashburn, Virginia called Old Ox Brewery. For trademark infringement. Red Bull argues “that an ox and a bull are ‘virtually indistinguishable ...

The Woman in the Room
February 10, 2015
Every woman who’s worked in an office knew that Sony co-chair Amy Pascal was going to lose her job. Though the announcement only came last week, we knew it was coming months ago, when the Sony hacks first hit and an unprecedented wave of stolen emails started flooding ...