Daily Bafflements

 • In case you felt let down after price-gouging pharma bro Martin Shkreli escaped a congressional hearing after rolling his eyes and invoking his Fifth Amendment right to avoid answering even a single substantive question, fear not. As Jaya Saxena reports, some witches have put a hex on Shkreli, “and it seems to be working.” Says one such witch, “I don’t have a direct line to him, but someone did post an article that he lost a lot of money trying to purchase rights to a Kanye album that wasn’t released. Or, he lost Bitcoin, which I guess translates to real money. I hope that it’s working.” So do we.

• After Mitt Romney’s speech denouncing Donald Trump as a “a phony” and a “fraud” yesterday, we found ourselves reminded of Rick Perlstein’s Baffler no. 21 salvo, “The Long Con,” chronicling Mitt’s own mendacity. After all, the former candidate who yesterday invoked Reagan’s “time for choosing” had an “apparently bottomless penchant for lying in public.”

• More and more Uber and Lyft drivers are finding themselves in debt to the company store after the “ride-sharing” corporations offered them pricey car leases through partner companies and then slashed fares and driver pay.