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Daily Bafflements
September 10, 2014
• Dealbook of the Day (read this out loud): “Dollar General said on Wednesday that it was taking its $9.1 billion offer for Family Dollar directly to shareholders. The move further complicates Family Dollar’s agreed upon deal to sell itself to Dollar Tree for $8.5 ...

Boston’s Literary Legacy, Mapped and Apped
September 09, 2014
Boston is a rarified city, of that you can be sure. How? Well, it has some of the most prestigious research universities in the country, which attract some of the nation’s greatest thinkers, many of whom have endeavored to write society’s greatest books. Add to that ...

Daily Bafflements
September 09, 2014
• News from our fair city: Harvard has just received the largest gift in its history, $350 million to the School of Public Health. “I brought this up to Bill [Lee, of the Harvard Corporation] to see if it was doable, to see if it was interesting,” the donor, Gerald ...

Finally, Wall Street Gets Put on Trial
September 08, 2014
The Tea Party regards Barack Obama as a kind of devil figure, but when it comes to hunting down the fraudsters responsible for the economic disaster of the last six years, his administration has stuck pretty close to the Tea Party script. The initial conservative reaction to the ...

Think Tanks for Sale
September 08, 2014
The New York Times came out with a blockbuster exposé on Sunday about how foreign governments are buying influence in Washington through nonprofit think tanks—while lawmakers who depend on supposedly “independent” research from these organizations to set policy are ...

Daily Bafflements
September 08, 2014
• “We didn’t know when the last time was that somebody introduced a new course into high school,” Gates told Andrew Ross Sorkin in a New York Times Magazine article about Gates’s efforts to change how history is taught in American high schools. ...

Grassroots and Astroturf School Reform
September 05, 2014
If you were asked to list the great leaders of education reform in America, would many of the names belong to people who achieved riches and fame in some other field? What nascent education reformers Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, and Mark Zuckerberg all have in ...

Daily Bafflements
September 05, 2014
• The fast-food strike spread to over 150 cities yesterday, and hundreds of protesters were arrested, including a congresswoman from Wisconsin. • Here is a totally bonkers corporate songbook from IBM in 1937, with “hymnals” that deifty the corporate leaders. ...

The Specter of Snapchat
September 04, 2014
There is a peaceful mutiny swelling in the world of images today, roiling on smartphones, in the pockets of passersby. For now, it travels inconspicuously under the sign of a faceless ghost—that logo for the international communications phenomenon called Snapchat. A leader in ...

Daily Bafflements
September 04, 2014
• Washington City Paper today has a very comprehensive guide to D.C. etiquette, including such entries as “How to Offer—and Ask for—Marijuana at a Party” and “Go Ahead, Ask Someone What He or She Does for a Living When You’ve Just Met,” and, of ...

This Just In: “Responsible Consumption” is Bogus
September 03, 2014
“Are environmental and social problems such as global warming and poverty the result of inadequate governmental regulations or does the burden fall on our failure as consumers to make better consumption choices?” Thus begins a very earnest press release about a study ...

The Rise of the Benevolent Data Pillage
September 03, 2014
While alerting the next-of-kin and helping make funeral arrangements are thought to be the primary responsibilities of a person who has recently lost a friend, the deletion of the deceased’s online browsing history has lately earned a place among them. It is one of the kindest ...