| Title | : | The Baffler No. 24 |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 290 |
| Publication | : | First published January 20, 2014 |
Contents:
Under the Table
The Rites of Play
John Summers
Against Merit
Gabriel Zaid
Nerds on the Knife Edge
Jaron Lanier
Successitudes™
God’s Game
Erik Simon
Photo Graphic
The Real Toy Story
Michael Wolf
The Jig Is Up!
The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan
John Summers
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have a Little Fun?
David Graeber
A Thing or Two about a Thing or Two, a.k.a. Science
Barbara Ehrenreich
The Billionaires’ Fantasia
Gene Seymour
Hoard d’ Oeuvres: Art of the 1 Percent
Rhonda Lieberman
Play, Dammit!
Heather Havrilesky
Rage Against the Machines
Ian Bogost
The Dollar Debauch
Neoliberalism, Revolution in Reverse
Chris Lehmann
Lackeys
Deal Me Out
A stacked deck at the New York Times
Alex Pareene
The Vertically Integrated Rape Joke
The triumph of Vice
Anne Elizabeth Moore
Story
Bcc: Dridge
Paul Maliszewski and J. Wagner
Poems
Chemical Life
Timothy Donnelly
Learned
Fanny Howe
Narcissus Tweets
Airea D. Matthews
Concerned Possibly Overly Concerned with The Eagle Warehouse & Storage Company of Brooklyn 1893
Dara Wier
A Monkey Could Do This (and)
You and Me are not friends, OK?
Simone White
It was the year we turned to dragons
Metta Sáma
What It Look Life
Terrance Hayes
A Poet’s Guide to the Assassination of JFK [the Assassination of Poetry]
Thomas Sayers Ellis
The Literary Playground
Feminism for Them?
Susan Faludi
Tom Clancy, Military Man
Andrew Bacevich
Decently Downward
An appointment with John O’Hara
William T. Vollmann
Grave Dance
How Sweet Is It?
George Scialabba
Xcerpt
Feminism for Men
Floyd Dell
Graphic Art
Brad Holland
Mark Dancey
Mark Wagner
The Baffler No. 24 Reviews
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A new Baffler is always a cause for celebration. A Baffler themed on the corporatization and commodification of "play" doubly so.
As with most issues of the Baffler, the poetry doesn't quite do it for me. Overall the theme is tight and concise and most of the long-form pieces hit their marks.
Susan Faludi's analysis of Floyd Dell is excellent, and Frank, Graeber, Havrilevsky, Pareene and Lehmann should all be proud of their contributions.
The two biggest pieces, one about science fiction and the other about Cambridge, offer up what The Baffler does best: an exploration of what the cultural inputs of our Ruling Elite might mean for us on a policy level side by side with an in-depth analysis of a municipality laying itself bare for an "innovation economy."
Also William Vollman shows up and talks about John O'Hara. Thanks, Bill!
Two pieces felt a little off to me: The first being Ian Bogost's piece on video games, which ignores the history as well as the vast majority of games in order to make a point about the cynical machinations of free-to-play gaming that forbids any notion that video games might exist for a reason other than making people money; and Anne Elizabeth Moore's piece on Vice and News Corp, which tries to do too much in too little space. The tone in Bogost's piece is doubly weird, since it ignores his history as a designer of Cow Clicker, a game in which you click cows and not really much more than that.
Overall, this issue of the Baffler digs into interactions between economics, the law, science, parenting and play and delights in the middle-class and institutional anxiety it exposes. Worth a read. -
Took me awhile this time, but the issue does not disappoint. Highlights are the piece by David Graeber about play, the Susan Faludi article on feminism, and the excellent take-down of Vice magazine.
