Flying Cars — and a Progress Report on Our Summer Issue

What’s the difference between an iPhone and a flying car? David Graeber can tell you in his great Baffler 19 essay, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” which you can read now, for free, on this site. Just click on the current issue and scroll down to the table of contents.

Subscribe this week and you won’t miss our summer culture issue, The High, the Low, the Vibrant, in the mail later this month. Sure, the issue features our typically bold, sweeping salvos in satire and muckraking. Thomas Frank takes you on a tour through “vibrancy” theory, the official art of American cities, while Jed Perl looks inside their museums and finds “laissez faire aesthetics” the rule.

But where else can you find your favorite cultural icons so abrasively assailed? You’ll read Steve Almond on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Heather Havrilesky on Girls, David D’Arcy on the Pew Charitable Trusts, Emma Garman on the Pulitzer Prize, Chris Lehmann on The Washington Post, and Eugenia Williamson on Ira Glass and This American Life.

To the anticulture of higher education we’ve prepared a special section, Studies in Total Depravity, in which Jim Newell introduces us to Adam Wheeler, the fraudster who conned Harvard, Chris Bray surveys nine books on the education of the president, and Matt Hinton shows how college football lies in thrall to the donor class. Oh yes, Baffler 20 also offers the first-ever publication of Christopher Lasch’s 1972 novel, The Life and Times of the Libertine.

All that, plus Kim Phillips-Fein on Margaret Fuller, Seth Colter Walls on Simone de Beauvoir, Will Boisvert on delusional parasitosis, three short stories, ten poems, and graphic art front to back. Don’t miss it! Subscribe now!