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Baffler Archives: Odds and Ends

Columns

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 ...

Pistols for Two: Jay Rosen vs Thomas Frank
January 15, 2013
Jay Rosen Writes: “At a time when the normal condition of the citizen is a state of anxiety, euphoria spreads over the culture like the broad smile of an idiot.” The critic Robert Warshow wrote that in 1948. Fifty years later, something similar appears to be on Thomas ...

Grating to the Oldies
January 15, 2013
At Ed Debevic’s we’re proud to say that we were one of the first restaurants to incorporate our special brand of entertainment into the dining experience. Since we opened our first restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona in 1984, many other restaurants have come along to offer ...