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Bulldozing the Humanities
August 01, 2014
By now, denizens of Facebookistan are familiar with its ever-proliferating “You know you’re from…” groups. Reuniting people dispersed by the winds of commerce and time, these hometown pages are drenched in shared nostalgia for local businesses, buildings, ...

Daily Bafflements
August 01, 2014
• We hereby endorse the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s “Stupid Patent of the Month,” the inaugural edition of which features a patent on the abstract idea of a patient communicating with his or her doctor through the intermediary of a telephone or ...

Daily Bafflements
July 31, 2014
• Today in Bespoke, just because: “‘Majestic Spirit,’ A bespoke collection of fine art Equine Photography.” • A new startup called Wevorce has raised 1.7 million “to make divorce fun,” reports The Verge. Christopher Mims calls it ...

An American History of Botched Executions
July 30, 2014
A series of executions has recently gone wrong, leaving prisoners gasping and writhing long after clean and precise lethal injections were supposed to have quietly taken their lives. In Oklahoma, convicted murderer Clayton Lockett tried to lift his head off the table where he ...

Daily Bafflements
July 30, 2014
• The latest #innovation in designer jeans is for them to be mauled and shredded by lions, tigers, and bears before sale; Judith Thurman at The New Yorker connects this to the “sartorial slumming” that has been going on since before Count Tolstoy dressed like the ...

The Ideas Bubble
July 29, 2014
Where technology start-ups have disruption, editorial outfits both online and off are now laying claim to a meaningless shibboleth of their own: the idea. Ideas are blooming everywhere. The New Yorker recently launched a “new blog about ideas” by its archive editor Joshua ...

Daily Bafflements
July 29, 2014
• America’s elite schools and universities don’t need to worry about being “disrupted” by technology, according to Moody analysts (via Matt Phillips for Quartz). “The most vulnerable to the threat of online education are less selective schools ...

Amway Journalism
July 28, 2014
Like uninsured New Agers afflicted by terminal illness, journalists facing the collapse of their industry are turning in desperation to faith healers, quacks, and hucksters of all sorts. The new media charlatans’ latest cure-all is a toxic concoction of marketing-seminar bluff ...

Daily Bafflements
July 28, 2014
• Today in Billionaires: Vincent Mehdizadeh, the inventor of a marijuana vending machine, has become legal weed’s first billionaire; read Adweek‘s interview with Mehdizadeh, in which he insists on referring to pot as “the medicine.” • Today in ...

The Baffler’s Week That Was
July 25, 2014
What a Week This Was, Bafflers. By now you have probably noticed that we launched our brand new website featuring all 25 issues of our head-spinning salvos, which you can browse by issue or search through using this handy dandy index. So for the first time all in one place, ...

Tax Inversions and the Dems Who Love Them
July 25, 2014
Corporations are people, my friend. Just like human people, they will go to absurd lengths to reduce their income-tax liability, and just like human people, they can move to another country if the one they live in doesn’t suit them. So in that sense, when the generic drug ...