Daily Bafflements

• Today in billionaires: Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen is donating $100 million to research at the “frontiers” of the life sciences, including a large grant to the developers of CRISPR, a gene-editing and DNA-tracking tool. Corey Pein wrote about one of these dubious frontiers—cryopreservation—in our most recent issue. In the freezers where various clients have been subjected to what Pein calls a “botched mortuary procedure conducted by a gang of creepy scam artists,” progress has been slow-going. Hopefully Allen’s “Frontiers Group” has better luck with CRISPR—and doesn’t let any heads thaw out.

• “Millennials like socialism—until they get jobs,” sneers a Washington Post opinion headline. Don’t worry, though, Emily Elkins tells those who might rend their garments in despair for the free-trade ethos. “Millennials like free markets.” The Cato Institute fellow tells readers, soothingly, “there is more reason to expect that support for their Scandinavian version of socialism may wither as they age, make more money and pay more in taxes.” Recalling the boomers’ reversal on support for big government, Elkins writes that

Conservatives aren’t recognizing that in the 20th-century battle between free enterprise and socialism, free enterprise already won. In contrast with the 1960s and ’70s, college students today are not debating whether we should adopt the Soviet or Maoist command-and-control regimes that devastated economies and killed millions. Instead, the debate today is about whether the social welfare model in Scandinavia (which is essentially a “beta-test,” because it hasn’t been around long) is sustainable and transferable.

• Tonight in Tucson, Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden will have a conversation about privacy in the face of so-called national security concerns. You can catch the livestream here, and feel free to warm up with a recent Baffler salvo on government surveillance and its failure to even slow terrorism down, from the ACLU’s Kade Crockford.