| Title | : | The Baffler No. 23 |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 164 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2013 |
Oh, we may say our colleges are the best in the world while we secretly believe they’re an overpriced rip-off, but leave it to Thomas Frank in The Baffler no. 23 to ask whether they’re the best in the world at committing the rip-off. Welcome to America five years after the financial crisis. It’s a place “made possible by buncombe,” as David Graeber explains here. And it’s a time of magical thinking, as Susan Faludi says in her exposé of the narrow brand of feminism on offer from Sheryl Sandberg’s positive-thinking tract Lean In.
Luckily, we have Jacob Silverman to burst the techno-bubble that is South by Southwest; Ann Friedman to explain why we’re “All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go”; and Quinn Slobodian and Michelle Sterling to report from Berlin “How Hipsters, Expats, Yummies, and Smartphones Ruined a City.” Our midyear issue contains world-defining fiction by Adam Haslett and genre-bending prose by Thomas Sayers Ellis about Lou Beach’s surreal cover art. The carnival’s all here. From Seth Colter Walls on Jean-Paul Sartre to Farran Nehme on Buster Keaton, from Dubravka Ugrešić’s dreams of Wittgenstein to Richard Byrne’s “Nod to Ned Ludd,” The Baffler gives you the latest trends in cultural news and retail opinion. Step right up!
--http://thebaffler.com/
The Baffler No. 23 Reviews
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This is the second print issue of The Baffler that I have received since I subscribed at the beginning of 2013, and it alone is worth the price of the annual subscription.
The issue's theme is "bumcombe" (or bunkum if you grew up where I did)and the collected authors do a fantastic job of illustrating the various ways in which America as an entity and an idea is built on hucksterism. A personal favorite (mostly because it's something I've been thinking and writing about for some time) is Thomas Frank's piece on education, which collects and distills myriad writings on the failures of the educational system into a single, clear motif.
Susan Faludi on the "lean in" movement and Ann Friedman on LinkedIn work together as a delightful pair of companion pieces on the emptiness of corporate "thought"--while each excellently explores different intersections of corporate nonsense, their "thought leadership as pyramid scheme" intersection is simply delightful.
The second pair of companion pieces (Slobodian and Sterling's piece on Berlin and Silverman's evisceration of SXSW) that explore the intersection of "hipness", class and social services in the modern city are classic Baffler--curmudgeonly musings on how the the intersection of "coolness" and corporate capitalism makes us all lamer and worse off.
Richard Byrne's piece on Ned Ludd was good as a shortform essay but would be outstanding as a long-form essay or a book, I look forward to reading either (or both).
The media reviews (Sartre and Buster Keaton) are perhaps the platonic ideal of long-form reviews--in-depth takes on the artist and the work wrapped up with intellectual ephemera and modern context.
The poetry was kind of eh this issue, but I'm not typically one for verse. Also the piece on Wittgenstein was intriguing but ultimately too playful for its own good.
Long live the Baffler! -
This periodical just keeps getting better. The writing, the art, the subject matter. It's all good. Especially liked the article about LinkedIn. I had no idea how it worked. Now I know. Just a great read all the way through. One of my essential reads 3 times a year.
