John Summers

“They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.” —Herman Melville This magazine comes packaged with no official doctrine, no fancy method ...

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg reappeared in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2011 and announced that this old city had growth potential after all, the region’s public officials have been eagerly positioning themselves to ride a wave of digital startup commerce. The state’s ...

Conservatives invoke Adam Smith and Friedrich von Hayek in their defense of the free market. Liberals invoke John Maynard Keynes for his defense of government intervention. Only in Thorstein Veblen, however, may a sane person hope to understand the carnival of mendacity that has ...

The general elections were looming by the time we packed up these salvos, stories, poems, and graphics and laid our bindle on the doorstep of our printer in Pennsylvania. Yes, we went to print with an issue on politics, one eye blind to the outcome of the great contest. Still, ...

One hundred years ago, 25,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, walked out of the mills. Unskilled, unorganized, crowded into tenements, they’d been lured from their homes in Turkey, Poland, Russia, and Italy by promises of prosperity in the world’s largest textile ...

One day we will tell you all that’s happened since we moved the journal from Chicago and revived it in Cambridge. But it was a lunch-time remark uttered along the way, a memorable snatch of conversation from a patroness, that has set the mood of this new issue. Attempting to ...

Here’s a surprising story in our climate of austerity and lowered expectations. The Baffler, a quarterly magazine long in the habit of appearing now and then, published three issues in succession last year—the first time three issues have appeared in a single year since ...

The Baffler’s contributing editor Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11. Only 26 years old, Aaron’s accomplishments, both technical and political, were stunning, as detailed elsewhere. And his interests and talents were amazingly diverse, as displayed on his blog, Raw ...