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Daily Bafflements
December 23, 2014
• “Forget Spotify, Etsy, or Contenty,” says Fortune, “the latest trend in startup names is regular old human names,” like Oscar, Alfred, and Lulu. “Jacob Brody, founder of Benny, says he chose the name because he wants his company to be seen as a ...

Kate Tempest’s Recession-Era Epic
December 22, 2014
At the close of a year that brought us Iggy Azalea’s offensive accent and that off-putting spoken-word part of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” the world of white female rap can feel especially tasteless. But Kate Tempest, while less well known than her tone-deaf sisters ...

Daily Bafflements
December 22, 2014
• In a so-called “Instagram Rapture,” millions of fake accounts that have previously been marked as “spammy” were suddenly deleted. Fans can mean money, of course, in lucrative endorsement deals. “The singer Justin Bieber lost 3.5 million fans, ...

The Smarmies of the Night (Revisited)
December 19, 2014
The Colbert Report, a nine-year running gag in which the former Daily Show correspondent portrayed a louder, meaner, more megalomaniacal Bill O’Reilly, ended last night in a rush of celebrity self-congratulation. The stentorian maximum leader of the Colbert Nation flailed ...

Daily Bafflements
December 19, 2014
• In the San Francisco Business Times, a man who starts a company in Silicon Valley to make a vegan sandwich spread and receives funding from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin is referred to as a “Mayo disruptor.” • A woman in Illinois is trying to trademark ...

Sandwich, Inc.
December 18, 2014
The noble British sandwich, the snack of earls, the midday dinner of office workers, the after-school treat of hungry munchkins creeping home from their classes, was the subject of furor in Northamptonshire, England the other week. The outcry wasn’t over the sandwiches ...

Daily Bafflements
December 18, 2014
• Current events, summarized. (Via Jody Avirgan.) • We hear about plagiarism in journalism a lot, but what about plagiarism in grant applications for education funds? One Nevada organization copied and pasted its “research” from a Brookings Institution report, ...

Good Politics, Bad Policy: Our Disastrous War on Drugs
December 17, 2014
Recently Mexico’s largest newspaper El Universal declared the global War on Drugs un fracaso total–a total failure. Well, I guess they should know: America’s forty-plus-year tough-love drug enforcement strategy, and Mexico’s willingness to be co-opted into putting the ...

Daily Bafflements
December 17, 2014
• Happy Hannukah, everyone. For your pleasure: “Texas Gov. Rick Perry may not be dancing with rabbis this Hanukkah season, but the Lone Star State’s outgoing chief is still looking to find common ground with the Chosen,” reports CNN. “Perry released a ...

Agreeing to Disagree on Torture
December 16, 2014
Reflecting on his brutal interrogation by the Gestapo, the Austrian essayist Jean Améry described torture as a psychic annihilation, an experience that obliterated the social world. In his book At the Mind’s Limits, he argued that humans took for granted an assumption that ...

Daily Bafflements
December 16, 2014
• Our fair city is in the running to host the Olympics in 2024, and not everyone is excited about it. “The average pricetag for hosting a Summer Olympics is $15 billion,” according to the No Boston Olympics group. “That’s more than what the Commonwealth of ...