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Intros and Manifestos

From the Magazine

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 ...

Introduction
January 2013
Issue No. 17
We sent this issue to press in June 2006 from Ana Cruz’s apartment high above the treetops in The Flamingo Hotel. As we watched cool wisps of mist drift inland from the lake, we wondered whether Ana’s national team, Brazil, really was going to win the World Cup. Then we ...

Introduction
January 2013
Issue No. 15
We finished this issue in November 2002, shuttling between Dan Raeburn’s pied-à-terre in the fashionable Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago and our spread in Woodlawn. More than a year has passed since our last issue. We beg your pardon, but we’ve been busy homesteading. Our ...

Introduction
  To even the most indifferent of observers, this can hardly seem the appropriate time to launch a literary review. College libraries struggle to make room for the inevitable journals of increasingly minute specialization while bookstores proffer ever-slicker periodicals ...

Introduction
Once again we are pleased to denounce the sordid art establishment of anti-establishment poseurs that burdens the American life of the mind; the talentless collection of would-be rock stars; the tired, ossified institutional avant-garde for whom image is in fact everything. ...

Introduction
Ce poison va rester dans toutes nos veines même quant, la fanfare tournant, nous serons rendu à l’ancienne inharmonie. – Rimbaud Nothing speaks more plainly of the entertainment plutocracy’s “institutional avant-garde” than their own public relations puffery. ...