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Daily Bafflements
September 23, 2014
• Today in Billionaires: Some residents of the Dolores Heights neighborhood of San Francisco feel “under seige” by a “massive construction encampment” surrounding a $10 million “fixer-upper” bought (and currently being slowly and ...

Rhetoric Meets Reality for Married Gay Veterans
September 22, 2014
A couple purely rhetorical statements have recently achieved the status of “bipartisan consensus.” “ISIS is barbaric” is one. “Returning veterans deserve our best treatment” is another. Unfortunately, these truisms are too vague to suggest any particular course of ...

Daily Bafflements
September 22, 2014
• Check out some photos of yesterday’s historic People’s Climate March in New York; the crowd was estimated at 300,000. All major media outlets carried stories about the protest, of course, but the best take, as usual, is the New York Post take: “The ...

“So, What Do You Do?”
September 19, 2014
[A version of this article appeared in the German newspaper Die ZEIT in July, where it inspired considerable debate and commentary. The article has been translated by the author and is reprinted here with permission; he has also written a response to the commentary, below. – ...

Daily Bafflements
September 19, 2014
• For a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Ahir Gopaldas evaluated the different categories of emotions that drive consumers to “ethical consumption,” like buying organic produce or free-trade stuff, even when it costs them more money. ...

David Graeber vs. Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go?
September 19, 2014
David Graeber vs. Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go? Once upon a time, in the heyday of social prognostication, many Americans believed that gadget-related knowledge would surely yield immeasurable leaps forward in the progress of the human species. Yet as David Graeber ...

U2, Apple, and the Strip-Mining of Punk Rebellion
September 18, 2014
“Wasn’t that the most incredible single you ever heard?” asked Apple CEO Tim Cook as the last note of The Edge’s guitar died away. He was playing U2’s new single “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” to the audience at the end of a press conference this month for the new ...

Daily Bafflements
September 18, 2014
• “Millionaire Roger Ver has become a bitcoin bounty hunter. This will not end well.” – Vocativ‘s Eric Markowitz on an Internet vigilante known as “Bitcoin Jesus.” • The Los Angeles Unified School District police officials are debating ...

Hack Attack Goes to Hollywood
September 17, 2014
It was made for Hollywood, this story, with heroic journalists challenging their corrupt peers and government figures, both in the name of freedom. A good story, even though at the end, nothing much really changed, apart from a handful of people going briefly to jail. And so it ...

Daily Bafflements
September 17, 2014
Welcome to the first-ever Good News Only edition of Daily Bafflements! Here we go: • Among the twenty-one MacArthur “genius award” recipients this year is Ai-jen Poo, a labor organizer fighting for the rights of domestic workers. • The Rolling Jubilee, a ...

On Scarcity’s Appeal
September 16, 2014
On a Sunday afternoon in January, with an inch of snow forecast for later that evening, a queue of about fifty shoppers lined up outside the front door of the Downtown Brooklyn Trader Joe’s (DBTJ). The crowd inside had reached capacity. Those waiting outside shivered with ...

Daily Bafflements
September 16, 2014
• Today in Bespoke: Merrill Perlman in the Columbia Journalism Review pops the “bespoke” bubble: “Perhaps not surprisingly, The New York Times used it more than any other US publication in the past three months, according to a Nexis search, with ...