Skip to content

Daily Bafflements

Central Park picnic

• Today in Billionaires: Chinese “recycling tycoon” Chen Guangbiao put ads in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal this week inviting 1,000 impoverished Americans to a free lunch in Central Park. Attendees will apparently receive both food and cash to spend on “occupational training.” It’s planned for June 25 and will include his performance of “We Are the World.” So all of this is to say, the Baffler blog will be off that day so we can attend . . . .

• Please enjoy this very Economist news lede in a piece about the train strikes in France: “THREE French institutions—trains, strikes and philosophy—collided this morning to create a near-perfect political storm.”

• An update to Monday’s Bafflement: you wouldn’t know it from Starbucks’s media blitz on The Daily Show and elsewhere, but that tuition program involves some pretty inconvenient fine print, such as the fact that “students could have to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket, and wait months or years before being reimbursed.” The Starbucks plan isn’t evil, as corporate brainstorms go, but it’s not nearly as “revolutionary” as its marketing would suggest. One expert told Think Progress, “It’s a farce to claim to be offering ‘free college’ to employees when what’s being offered is simply the chance to pursue a degree at one specific university, only online, only if you enroll full time and work at least 20 hours a week.”

• Finally, thank you to The New Republic for collecting these photographs of world leaders awkwardly playing soccer.