The Baffler’s Week That Was

Hi folks. In case you missed them, and are looking for some salvos to soothe your addled mind and soul this weekend, here are some things we’ve published this week, in the great Baffler Web Experiment of Early 2014.

(Also, if you’d like, you can get an update just like this in your inbox every Friday afternoon by signing up for our newsletter, up there in the upper-right-hand corner of this very same web page.)

• On Monday, for St. Patrick’s Day, we resurrected Jim Arndorfer’s timeless “McSploitation,” which examined our culture’s curious commodification of All Things Irish. Wednesday’s “Fed Day” inspired us to return to another gem from our archives, Jim Newell’s harrowing tale of competing in an economic-policy competition in front of Big Bernanke himself: “I Was a Teenage Gramlich” is as insightful as it is hilarious.

• A truly baffling column in the New York Times about the forty-hour work week gave us the occasion to return to Chris Lehmann’s essay “Let Them Eat Dogma,” from Issue 18 of the magazine. “New Deal denialism, much like creationism, entails blotting out whole swaths of contradictory evidence—not merely the bulk of FDR’s contemporaneous record, but also the decades of growth and comparative stability that succeeded it,” Lehmann wrote. Well, luckily, they have someone for that.

• From our current issue, “Play, Dammit!” by Heather Havrilesky explores what happens when kids play like adults and adults play like kids; while those categories gradually blur, it seems like no one’s having very much fun.

• Also from Issue 24, Andrew J. Bacevich took a look back at Tom Clancy’s legacy. When Clancy died, the Washington Post said that Clancy’s books “made the military cool again.” But is that necessarily a good thing?

• This week we published online for the first time poems by Fanny Howe, Rae Armantrout, Matthea Harvey, Roberto Tejada, and Harryette Mullen.

Have a great weekend, and say hi some time. Baffler out.