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Intros and Manifestos

From the Magazine

All in Yer Head
November 2014
Issue No. 26
Hello from HQ, where we are happy/sad to present number 26, Sickness and Pelf, on the culture of medicine and certain undiagnosed psychopathologies of everyday life in America. The operative method, wielded with a scalpel throughout this body of salvos, stories, poems, ...

Once Upon a Town
Alphabetically there is no such thing as unspoiled territory, which is why the black chalkboard became white and why the white chalkboard became green. Yes a running squirrel, yes a long intestinal tunnel. Only in Vermont is it possible for two people to walk and share the same ...

The Rites of Play
Competition is the legitimation device in the American system. Long ago enshrined in our laws as a mechanism for regulating goods and deciding value, competition is also our testing field for personal worth. From today’s tech entrepreneurs to yesteryear’s captains of ...

Magic Brain
A minor but telltale moment of relief from the country’s paralyzing austerity broke through a few months back, when the Obama Administration announced major funding for a new group called Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. Yes, the group’s ...

Friends in Low Places
“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 ...

Seen Dave?
David McLimans has contributed significant art to these pages over the past few years, most recently the cover of the previous issue, The Baffler no. 24. He died this year on the first day of spring. It’s one thing to lose a close friend and quite another to experience the ...

Only a Dream
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, ...

This Cradle Won’t Rock
February 2014
Issue No. 20
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 ...

Decrescendo
January 2014
Issue No. 19
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 ...

Negative Capability
October 2013
Issue No. 22
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 ...

Totentanz
When we launched this magazine back in 1988, our beef with the world was simple and singular. We objected to the deliberately obscure academic style that was then applauded as political engagement of the most advanced sort. We thought it would be fun to heave some dead cats ...

Introduction
As Baffler 18 went to press they were setting out the Christmas book display at the Kansas City Costco, a retail bazaar whose parking lot occupies the site of the city’s last jazz club. We never enter this particular Costco without thoughts about mortality, about what had to ...