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Baffler Archives: Odds and Ends

Columns

A Bad Day in Brooklyn
February 12, 2014
If the financial industry operates in our society like a ruthless drug dealer, then the book publishing industry is like a superannuated old biddy, once grand and imperious, now losing her faculties and prone to ill-advised dispensations of large sums of money. She sort of means ...

Smells Like . . .
Yosh Han, a perfumer in San Francisco, got her start a decade ago managing 826 Valencia’s retail arm, the Pirate Store. She began making scents for her then-boss Dave Eggers and his friends and associates at McSweeney’s, including authors JT Leroy (whom she describes as ...

My Own Little Mission
Fatal Attraction An acquaintance of mine was into fly-fishing. I wouldn’t have had a clue what it was all about had he not shown me his resplendent collection of flies, their miniature beauty enchanting. I could easily imagine a dazzled salmon in a shady Scottish stream, an ...

Disposable Hip
January 10, 2014
Once upon a time the iPhone was to digital photography what Steve Wozniak was to the samba: it could perform, but it wasn’t pretty. But then Synthetic, LLC, a tiny design consultancy turned app maker, released Hipstamatic. Recognizing that the iPhone could never go ...

Buncombe
October 30, 2013
America is a country made possible by hucksterism and carnival buncombe. It is the birthplace of both modern PR and advertising, the first place on earth to apply techniques of commercial marketing to politics, and a country where, for at least thirty years, the economy has been ...

The Flight of the Creative Class
Dear Mayor Billings: Provo needs a premier literary magazine. In order to succeed in the twenty-first century and flourish economically, cities today must attract and retain the vital group of individuals that experts call “cultural creatives.” Only by doing so can cities ...

Camera Shy, Blah, Blah, Blah
My basic idea is that our times are weird times. On the one hand, they are superficially permissive. You get all the hardcore you want on the net, you can participate in orgies, blah blah blah. But at the same time it’s not even true consumerism. You have this obsession with ...

A Little Light Data
It’s hard to believe that at a distant time the US Congress exercised some legislative common-sense over ownership of media. The 1934 Communications Act codified diversity of ownership as fundamental to the public interest. Then, forty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that ...