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Class War with a Smiley Face
March 28, 2014
In Silicon Valley there really is a class war going on, a wage-fixing cartel that’s pitting the one percent against everyone else. Thomas Piketty, the economist who wrote the new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is most famous for his insight that economic inequality ...

Daily Bafflements
March 28, 2014
Wait, what did you guys just say? / Credit: Jeffrey Pang • Let’s start this Friday off right. A Philadelphia craft brewery is releasing a new beer made with, among other ingredients, smoked goat brains. Okay! • Over at The Billfold, an interview with Melissa Gira Grant, ...

Questioning Authority & Other Forbidden Ideas
March 27, 2014
Cass Sunstein’s mind is a glorious reimagining-machine, reshaping everything it encounters. “Consider the question of whether people pay sufficient attention to their own futures,” he muses in his book, Why Nudge?: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism. ...

Student-Athletes of the World, Unite!
March 27, 2014
The National Labor Relations Board ruled on Wednesday that college football players had the right to unionize. The ruling states that, even though the players receive scholarships, they should be considered employees of the school they play (and work) for. The decision came in ...

Daily Bafflements
March 27, 2014
Behold, a fulfilling human connection being made in real time. /Phil Whitehouse • A study has found that it’s a bad idea to plan and shop for travel during business hours, because you’ll end up paying more for it. This seems particularly cruel, since that’s precisely ...

A Weasely Way to Fight a Law
March 26, 2014
A few blocks away from Tuesday’s Supreme Court culture war skirmish on access to contraceptives was a DC Circuit Court of Appeals hearing on another, less sexy Obamacare-related issue: a drafting error in the Affordable Care Act that could eventually damage the law’s ...

Daily Bafflements
March 26, 2014
Photo credit & birdhouse credit: 4RB • How did we miss this important billionaire-news update? Forbes announced on Monday that it would be tracking and ranking “more than 1,600” billionaires, each and every trading day. “We will update the value of individuals’ ...

Debates Outside the Dichotomy
March 25, 2014
We need to chart another axis. Americans are facing a conflict between authoritarians and counter-authoritarians, on both sides of the left-versus-right political spectrum. That conflict is usually obscured by the tiresome nature of politics that are trapped in a false ...

Candy Crushin’ All the Way to the Bank
March 25, 2014
Today King Digital Entertainment Plc, the video game company that makes the addictive game Candy Crush, and not much else, goes public. (The symbol is KING, for all you stock-watchers.) “At the top of the price range, King would be valued at $7.6 billion, or about 2.9 ...

Daily Bafflements
March 25, 2014
That’s one tall tower, bro. /Jennifer • Ukranian women are apparently Lysistrata-ing Russian men. • Over at Harper’s, Andrew Cockburn’s review of Bob Ivry’s new book, a “guide for tracking down the live villains and unburied bodies of the 2008 crash.” ...

It’s the Democratic Party’s Turn to Hate Nate Silver
March 24, 2014
Good for Nate Silver, finally getting his own fiefdom for “data journalism” at the new FiveThirtyEight.com, under the auspices of the Walt Disney Corporation. He’s famous. He deserves it! I, for one, don’t really care about a statistical breakdown of lines ...

Sit-Ups for Start-Ups
March 24, 2014
In the co-working area of Brooklyn Boulders Somerville, a rock-climbing gym outside of Boston that has more in common with a start-up office than a Crunch, is a sign emblazoned with a manifesto: “Physicality stimulates innovation and creativity.” A café-like space with ...