Skip to content

Latest Posts

Web Exclusives

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 ...

Daily Bafflements
February 10, 2015
• Hey, you’re a busy businessman or woman, right? And you want to give your clients and customers the personal touch, but who has the time? Luckily, there is a new, thoughtful service called Bond that lets you text a robot to write people hand-written notes for you. ...

Media Misdeeds and Blind Spots
February 09, 2015
The “war on terror” is only the most recent threat used to rationalize our military’s extensive global footprint. The military and intelligence establishment possesses hundreds of military bases worldwide, making us the only country with permanently forward deployed ...

Veritas and Vineyards
February 09, 2015
What do the following two stories have in common? In Corrientes, Argentina, local residents were troubled by timber plantations that encroached on their small family farms, provided little economic opportunity for local workers, and disrupted the delicate ecological balance of ...

Daily Bafflements
February 09, 2015
• The blockbuster series by the New York Times uncovering the faces behind layers and layers of shady shell companies buying up elite real estate in New York is a must-read. The first part of the series unpacks the owners of the condos at the Time Warner Center, from reality ...

The Revolution Will Be Venture Funded
February 06, 2015
Where do revolutions begin? In the streets? On Twitter? In Greece? No! Little did we know, they begin in a Washington, D.C.-based venture capital fund. Aptly named 1776, these titans of entrepreneurship plan to overthrow our bloated and broken system, by replacing it with a more ...

Daily Bafflements
February 06, 2015
• This one goes out to Sady: “When their new $70,000 princess-themed playroom is finished in March, Stella, 4 years old, and Presley, 2½, will have a faux gem-encrusted performance stage, a treehouse loft, and a mini-French cafe. A $20,000 custom carpet with colorful ...

Walker, Wisconsin Ranger
February 05, 2015
When the results of the Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll dropped last week, Scott Walker appeared to have the competition in a chokehold. Walker led the other Republican presidential hopefuls with 15 percent of respondents naming the Wisconsin governor as their ...

Daily Bafflements
February 05, 2015
• Today in Billionaires: Some tycoons buy mansions, some buy yachts. Some build a Grand Inter-Oceanic Canal through Nicaragua. It’s “an audacious $50 billion plan by an obscure Chinese billionaire to cross Central America and challenge the Panama Canal for the ...

Breaking: Moguls Fear AI Apocalypse
February 04, 2015
A funny thing happened on the way to the Singularity. In the past few months, some of the tech industry’s most prominent figures (Elon Musk, Bill Gates), as well as at least one associated guru (Stephen Hawking), have publicly worried about the consequences of out-of-control ...