Daily Bafflements

• “More than a year after federal regulators issued new privacy rules for kids’ mobile apps, online stores are flooded with cute and silly software programs that quietly collect vast amounts of data on the youngest consumers, including a person’s location and even recordings of their voice, according to privacy researchers and consumer advocates,” according to a disturbing report by the AP’s Anne Flaherty.

• Speaking of which, “There are many Orwells: Literary Orwell, militant Orwell, rural Orwell, paternal Orwell. Sixty-five years after his death, they’re all in demand,” writes Robert Butler in Intelligent Life. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

• Jon Ronson visits Shimer College in Illinois, a “tiny, madly intellectual place” that has been ranked the worst college in America. (Via Dave Weineke.)

• New York University, while still contending with criticism about worker abuse in the construction of its Abu Dhabi campus, has acknowledged similar working conditions at its new campus in Shanghai. For more on the Abu Dhabi debacle, read Andrew Ross’s salvo in Issue 26, “Degrees of Danger.”