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The Right-Wing Book Market is Dying a Free-Market Death
March 21, 2014
The free market is a cruel beast, which is something the book publishing industry has been made acutely aware of in the past decade or two. But now, even in one arena where that industry had traditionally been doing well, right-wing conservative political books—as in, books ...

Bill Gates, Regular Guy
March 21, 2014
It was entirely predictable that as soon as Matt Taibbi left Rolling Stone, the magazine’s political coverage would suffer. What wasn’t so predictable was that it would fall so far, so fast. Exhibit A: Jeff Goodell’s disgustingly fawning interview with Bill Gates, titled, ...

Daily Bafflements
March 21, 2014
Is this luxe enough for ya? / E. Dronkert • Amelia Greenhall has a wonderful, sharp piece about the job title “Data Scientist”—a lot of companies seem to want one, without necessarily knowing what it is. Which makes sense, because the title seems to ...

Empty Word Clouds
March 20, 2014
In November 2009, Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) declared on the floor of the House that there were 47 million Americans “without health care.” The Affordable Care Act, he said, would quickly and simply end the problem for “most of them,” providing immediate coverage for “96 ...

Let Them Eat Dogma, Revisited
March 20, 2014
In its recurring “Room for Debate” feature, the New York Times opinion pages recently invited several columnists to opine on the forty-hour work week. For instance, is it a “quaint” construction, considering the flexibility that advances in technology now ...

Daily Bafflements
March 20, 2014
Private jets. Not illegal./Andy Rusch • In prison on drug charges, Jesse Krimes spent three years making a thirty-nine-panel mural, made from transferring newspaper photographs onto bed sheets using hair gel. Each transfer took thirty minutes, and there are thousands of ...

Nazi Name-calling and Non-apologies
March 19, 2014
The daily life of the ultra-rich man in 2014 has taken a strange turn. For millennia, the routine was thus: wake up, eat ten of the finest beefsteaks, whip poor people, count money, bed one million prostitutes, return to slumber. Well, what was wrong with that ennobling and ...

Fed Games
March 19, 2014
Happy Fed Day, Bafflers! This afternoon, the Federal Open Market Committee will announce its policy statement and projections, in Janet Yellen’s first meeting as Federal Reserve chair. Exciting stuff! (The Business Insider even has an ominous-looking countdown clock on its ...

Daily Bafflements
March 19, 2014
• Do “tiny houses,” en masse, make a slum? Occupy Madison wants to build a “cooperative eco village” of tiny, affordable, fourteen-by-seven foot homes on trailers. One Madison resident objects to the project, but “not because of who might be living there, but ...

Who Cares What the Surgeon General Thinks About Guns?
March 18, 2014
The NRA is back in the ring, baby, and ready for a fight. And it’s not just blocking every little gun-related bill or appointment that goes through Congress—obviously it’s still doing that. But now it’s blocking nominees for any appointment position if those ...

The Risks to Rent-a-Soldiers
March 18, 2014
Owning stuff is hard, and you have to fix it if it breaks. Renting is easier. The U.S. Army currently has about 520,000 soldiers on active duty, with near-term fiscal constraints that will bring that number closer to 490,000, according to Military.com. Budget plans for 2015 ...

Erin Go Branding
March 17, 2014
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Bafflers! The big St. Patty’s Day headlines today are about all of the beer brands that have pulled out of city parades. In New York City, the organizers of the annual parade there banned “public expression of gay pride”—LGBT groups can march ...