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Experiments in Extreme Luxury
December 12, 2014
In their unending quest to keep the attention of their wealthiest and most fickle customers, Qatar Airways, Lufthansa, and other airlines have been beefing up their luxury travel options lately—from offering multi-room apartments in first-class sections, to allowing passengers ...

Daily Bafflements
December 12, 2014
• “There were some who took to Twitter to express their disappointment in the absence of a much-anticipated new gown on the final evening of the [royal] couple’s tour” is an actual sentence that appeared in the actual New York Times yesterday. • If you missed it, ...

Getting Crumbs in Portland’s Food Revolution
December 11, 2014
In the 1970s, Portland, Maine was a typical New England seaport, with a typical working waterfront slum that that smelled like fish. Trendy tourists weren’t coming ashore from cruise ships, and while there were restaurants—mostly Italian—none were that special. Things ...

Daily Bafflements
December 11, 2014
• Good morning! Did Congress just quietly open the door for wealthy donors to give ten times more to political campaigns than they were previously allowed? • Speaking of donors, ProPublica explains the weird legal loopholes involved in “donor-advised” ...

On Shooting the Messenger
December 10, 2014
The concept of “shooting the messenger” predates actual shooting by millennia. It is said that the ancient Greeks so dreaded the receipt of bad news that those charged with its delivery along the proto-postal routes that birthed the modern marathon were at mortal risk upon ...

Daily Bafflements
December 10, 2014
• Today in Billionaires: Newt Gingrich has read the New York Times report about a plan by top GOP donors to all decide on a 2016 candidate early in order to avoid a costly billionaire v. billionaire brawl, and no sir, he does not like it. “If I were Mitt Romney, Chris ...

Get Up, Light Up (Get Rich)
December 09, 2014
There are celebrity sell-outs in every business—even the drug business. Fans of the world’s most famous reggae icon—once thought to be the herald of a spiritual revolution—might be taken aback to soon find his face smiling up from the packaging of the new “Marley ...

Daily Bafflements
December 09, 2014
• A huge Reuters report on “an elite cadre” of attorneys reveals that “although they account for far less than 1 percent of lawyers who filed appeals to the Supreme Court, these attorneys were involved in 43 percent of the cases the high court chose to ...

The Disruption This Time
December 08, 2014
I’ve been attending and observing protests for thirty years, and I’ve never seen anything quite like what I’ve experienced in New York City over the last week. In the days after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to charge police officer Daniel Pantaleo for the choking ...

Daily Bafflements
December 08, 2014
• “More than a year after federal regulators issued new privacy rules for kids’ mobile apps, online stores are flooded with cute and silly software programs that quietly collect vast amounts of data on the youngest consumers, including a person’s location and ...