Daily Bafflements

• A professor at the University of Southern California is starting an academic journal called BuzzAdemia, for “Buzzfeed-style scholarship” (listicles written by academics) to be published on sites like Buzzfeed, Gawker, and Reddit. “Scholarly merit will be judged in part on retweets and Facebook likes,” reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. “After all, as the BuzzAdemia manifesto says, ‘The RT is the purest form of peer-review.'”

• In other news, from Matt Yglesias and Vox comes the #counterintuitive #take that “Amazon is doing the world a favor by crushing book publishers,” which, no.

• Or, you know, maybe we’re just “blinded by nostalgia,” which this First Look essay explains is a fairly common American flaw. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.) Meanwhile, David Dunning in Pacific Standard explains why “we are all confident idiots.”

• But we do know this, at least: Jeb Bush’s plans for 2016 seem increasingly clear, and now is a perfect time to revisit Jennifer C. Berkshire’s salvo for The Baffler no. 25, “JebFest: The Education Miracle That Isn’t.”