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Daily Bafflements
May 02, 2014
The sack of the past. / Photo by jericl cat • Chicago just became the latest city to ban plastic bags. • From Adam Gopnik, an appreciation of The Little Prince as a war story. • According to a new study, speaking in a language that is foreign to you will alter the moral ...

Slackersomething: “Portlandia” as Generational Therapy
May 01, 2014
Jello Biafra wakes from a coma and really, really doesn’t like what he sees. That is, in an opening sketch this season on the IFC show Portlandia, a punk character played by Biafra (lead singer of seminal 1980s hardcore band the Dead Kennedys) wakes from a coma he’s been in ...

It’s Time to Shut Everest Down
May 01, 2014
Everest has had a good run in mountaineering lore and public fascination. At 29,035 feet the world’s highest mountain, it once inspired George Mallory’s famous zen-like justification for mountain climbing in general, “Because it’s there.” It has seen its tragedies ...

Daily Bafflements
May 01, 2014
• Here are some fun facts about minimum wage. In both Georgia and Wyoming, the state minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. In Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee, there is no state minimum wage at all. Yesterday, Senate Republicans blocked a vote on a bill ...

It Will Just Keep Getting Easier to Oppose the Death Penalty
April 30, 2014
Last night, the state of Oklahoma tried to murder someone. They eventually succeeded (phew?), but only after torturing him for a while. To the more bloodlusty among us, this was an apt way to send a particularly nasty fellow packing. For those who don’t think the state should ...

Commodify the Classics!
April 30, 2014
Older denizens who came of age when the groves of academe blossomed now worry they will soon look upon bare, ruined choirs. The assumptions we long held about higher education have one by one withered and died. This is particularly true in the liberal arts, where class ...

Daily Bafflements
April 30, 2014
• The cause-i-fi-cation and brand-i-fi-cation of the artist Ai Weiwei, from The L Magazine. • In related news, the making of the cottage industry of posthumously-discovered street photographer Vivian Maier, from Chicago Reader. • The Denver Post investigates why Colorado ...

Rahm Emanuel, Mayor One Percent
April 29, 2014
In Chicago this past weekend, a tragic story made headlines. A thirty-two-year-old anti-violence advocate named Leonore Draper was shot and killed while returning home from an anti-violence charity event. Police say that Draper was a victim of gang crossfire. The Leonore Draper ...

Donald Sterling, Cliven Bundy, and What People are “Given”
April 29, 2014
It’s 2014, and yet our news cycle seems to be currently dominated by a pair of unreconstructed racists. We’ll get to them in just a second. What their rhetoric most reminds us of, though, is a Racist In The News from the distant past: 2013. Let’s travel back in time to ...

Daily Bafflements
April 29, 2014
• “Kodak did finally modify its film emulsion stocks in the 1970s and ’80s—but only after complaints from companies trying to advertise chocolate and wood furniture . . . . Kodak never encountered a groundswell of complaints from African-Americans about their products. ...

What Piketty’s Conservative Critics Get Wrong
April 28, 2014
With his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty has lobbed a truth bomb that has blown up several decades’ worth of received opinion about the way the economy works in capitalist societies. He makes a powerful, meticulously-argued, data-driven case that ...

The Long Arm of the NRA
April 28, 2014
This past weekend, the annual convention of the National Rifle Association was held in Indianapolis, a panoply of fearmongering speeches and fearsome weapons for sale—otherwise known as “9 acres of guns and gear.” This year’s convention featured Sarah ...