Daily Bafflements

• Check out some photos of yesterday’s historic People’s Climate March in New York; the crowd was estimated at 300,000. All major media outlets carried stories about the protest, of course, but the best take, as usual, is the New York Post take: “The resulting traffic snarls irritated taxi drivers to no end, as marchers strolled from Columbus Circle to 11th Avenue and 34th Street. ‘It’s a mess,’ said hard-working hack Gamal Abovelwafa, 60.” The Post also quoted a Heritage Foundation economist, because that makes sense in an article on this topic. “Kreutzer argued that it is unlikely that climate change will be the biggest problem of the 21st century. ‘It is phenomenally arrogant to think that 14 years into this century that we already know the greatest crisis we will face,’ Kreutzer said.”

• From RetroReport, a piece on how Prozac swept the nation in the 1980s and caused a cultural shift that still affects how we think about pharmaceuticals today. (Via David Grann.)

• The Wall Street Journal reports on how a collection of labor groups are pushing an investigation into Wal-Mart’s PAC; they want to see if the company “violated federal election laws by soliciting employees for donations to its political-action committee in exchange for charitable contributions to a fund that helps Wal-Mart employees in need.”

• Well, yes. “You’re Going to Die! So Buy Something” – Tom Jacobs in Pacific Standard on how “inserting reminders of our mortality into advertisements” helps sell products.