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From the Magazine

Picasso at 25
1963: Before Picasso In 1963, Chicago architect William Hartman was assigned the task of procuring an appropriate sculpture for the plaza in front of the newly-built civic center his firm, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, had designed. The center was Mayor Richard J. Daley’s ...

Harsh Realm, Mr. Sulzberger!
An Exclusive Baffler Blunting! No one can say the New York Times is out of touch with the young. Like so many other organs of official culture, the Times has lately declared a newfound enthusiasm for all manifestations of The Hip, launching a new “Styles of the Times” ...

Twenty No-Think
The music is generically edgy, synth-poppy with a dollop of minor chords and staccato percussion—it makes clear references to all the record industry styles MTV so benumbingly purveys, giving every target market a slice of acoustic pie to say, hey, this show’s for you. The ...

The Packaging of a Literary Persona
The world’s only negative review of The Secret History by twenty-something superstar Donna Tartt, Knopf, 524 pages. I’m Nobody! / Who are you? / Are you Nobody — too? / Then there’s a pair of us? / Don’t tell—they’d advertise—you know! / How dreary to be Somebody ...

Art as Lifestyle (Monoculturalism)
The following was read at a real-life provocation staged by The Baffler on October 21, 1992 at the Hot House, a Chicago “performance space” and favorite art-lifestyle hangout. Capture the ambience of the moment by shouting this piece angrily as loud as you can and tearing ...

Riot in the Eye
Five Dream Units: 1. Knock the frog 2. Kick it out 3. Push it through 4. Cranial amphibian 5. Forget the happening 6. Your head/furnace He brushed his teeth with rainwater and mowed his lawn with billy goats. He marvelled at certain sticks and tufts of moss he found in the ...

Call Me Popcorn
Popcorn Report by Faith Popcorn, Doubleday, 226 pages America is a consumer culture, and when we change what we buy—and how we buy it—we’ll change who we are. Someday (soon) children will be able to communicate through their Nintendos to other children all over the planet. ...

Everything I Don’t Need
I used to dislike the Wedding Present; they were the sort of band that inspired not just admiration but FANDOM in others. Fandom’s like pot-smoking: a group of people sit in a room, intensely absorbed in a holy, marvelous object that displays nothing but repetition and a ...

Firing the Cannon
You know, Ben Franklin was the one who really started it. His relentlessly folksy “Almanacks” and his calculating “Autobiography” made him the ready midwife in the birthing of the venerable American practice of cynically manipulating the terms of public discussion to ...

Hannabarbildungsroman
I When public television aired Ken Burns’s ninety-part series on the Civil War, eggheads tripped over each other to proclaim this soft-spoken young writer as the American Homer, the architect of a Yankee national epic. The series was more than just good television; it was the ...

The PowerPoint Potboiler
Scan the kiosks of any airport bookseller and you’re sure to see the management manifesto du jour jammed against the latest techno (or psycho, political, or crime) thriller. The pulp purveyors know the tastes of the business class well: if they’re not looking for the killer ...