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Daily Bafflements
July 16, 2014
• Newspaper reporter has made the CareerCast “endangered jobs” list, alongside travel agent and meter reader. • Turns out the top one percent of earners in America are even richer than we previously thought. Neat! • Dorsey Shaw at Buzzfeed watches too much cable news, ...

CNBC’s Carnival of Crazy
July 15, 2014
If, by chance, you were watching CNBC’s Fast Money Halftime Report on Monday afternoon, you may have caught an epic meltdown by Rick Santelli about Fed policy. Or, more likely, if you weren’t watching, you may have caught the rest of the Internet rolling its collective eyes ...

Daily Bafflements
July 15, 2014
• Today in Billionaires: venture capitalist Timothy Draper has been “agitating for months” for a ballot initiative to break California into six separate states, Reuters reports, adding that “the plan has raised bipartisan hackles.” Under Draper’s scheme, Silicon ...

Books Are Alive
July 14, 2014
Mark it: We’re at the point in American civilization where the very existence of a literary culture is, in fact, newsworthy. That’s why the New York Times decided to run a column last week with the incredulous headline, “The French Do Buy Books. Real ...

Daily Bafflements
July 14, 2014
• A look back at Studs Terkel’s Working on its fortieth anniversary. • Long Island workers are preparing for the possibility of the first massive railroad strike in twenty years. • Please just take note of this “I’m a Mrs.” deal on Amazon. • “It turns out we ...

Daily Bafflements
July 11, 2014
• LEGO sells “police helicopter surveillance” kits for kids aged five to twelve. That is all. (Via Elizabeth Joh.) • Speaking of which, a slightly related Today in Billionaires: “As billionaires and dealmakers descend upon Sun Valley, Idaho, for the Allen & Co. ...

Inequality, the Flavor of the Month
July 11, 2014
Last December, President Obama delivered a speech in which he boldly declared that economic inequality is a “defining issue of our time.” It was a watershed moment — an ambitious speech on a topic presidents rarely address, let alone at such at length. Commenters ...

The “Digital Native,” a Profitable Myth
July 09, 2014
Technology buzzwords, although annoying, often seem innocuous enough. They’re just catchy and trite enough to bleed into common usage, but just misleading and obfuscatory enough as to discourage deep analysis. Two of the most widespread buzzwords and phrases to escape the tech ...

Daily Bafflements
July 09, 2014
• Headline of the Day, from ABC News: “Google Co-Founder Says People Shouldn’t Have to Work So Much.” (Because, robots.) • From Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussein at First Look, a 2005 FBI document instructing spy-trainees how to format internal memos that includes a ...

Daily Bafflements
July 08, 2014
• George Orwell reportedly “could thrive only in comparative adversity.” That may be why he moved to a distant, desolate, and weather-beaten Scottish island to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four. Islanders say he kept to himself and went by his given name, Eric Blair. (Via Roads ...

Daily Bafflements
July 07, 2014
• Today in Broken Records: yet another Forbes columnist helpfully explaining why Raising the Minimum Wage is Not the Answer. We would paraphrase his argument, but it’s too boring to even try to decipher. • Today in Billionaires: Yet another eccentric Chinese ...