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"The charmingly naive American student is in fact a cash cow, and everyone has got a scheme for slicing off a porterhouse or two. . . .It is all so wonderfully circular, is it not? We know college degrees make us affluent because affluent people have college degrees; and we also know that we must spend lots of money on college - signing up for a life of debt, essentially - because we believe status signifiers like college ought to be fantastically expensive. Think about it this way for long enough and you start to suspect that maybe those fancy stickers you put in your rear window are what education is all about, the distilled essence of the whole thing."

Thomas Frank on the collapse of the American university in Baffler #23: ACADMY FIGHT SONG.

#american university #university #college #student loan #student debt #thomas frank #academy fight song #the baffler #student rights

In the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks, the news media leapt into its usual dismal role, working to provide all of the really important information. Why is Snowden such a bad person? What’s wrong with Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer and activist who was Snowden’s contact at the Guardian? Is it bad for individuals to reveal the projects of state power, or is it unspeakable? But a few stories hinted at the outlines of our burgeoning reality, describing telecom and Internet companies as active partners in an exchange with government rather than mere victims of bureaucratic overreach. An employee of Booz Allen showed us, at least in outline, the intimate connections between the security state and its adjuncts in what we quaintly refer to as the “private sector.” That’s treason. Patriots don’t interfere with healthy business relationships.

Chris Bray writes on the thought process behind the American security state in "Street Legal: The national security state comes home," newly published in The Baffler #23: A Carnival of Buncombe.

#The Baffler #edward snowden #nsa #glenn greenwald #security state #chris bray #chelsea manning #bradley manning

Introducing Baffler #23: A Carnival of Buncombe!

Available in all your favorite bookstores and featuring Susan Faludi, Thomas Frank, and many more. In the meantime, read Jim Frederick's "Internment Camp: The Intern Economy and the Culture Trust," written for Baffler #9 and excerpted in #23 (because all we can say is: we told you so).

#the baffler #baffler 23 #unpaid internships #interns #labor issues #a carnival of buncombe

Sheryl Sandberg won't talk to us, and more from last night's episode of Greater Boston on WGBH.

#the baffler #sheryl sandberg #susan faludi #greater boston #wgbh

He has populated the magazine with other interstitial thinkers, intellectual drifters dismissed by the academy for being too snarky, too strident, or too sincere. There’s Thomas Frank, of course, who remains on the magazine’s masthead as 'Founding Editor' and regularly contributes articles and substantive input. There’s [Chris] Lehmann, now the journal’s senior editor and an invaluable collaborator for Summers. ('Chris is a veteran editor, and I’m just playing,' Summers said.) There’s the radical anthropologist David Graeber; authors Susan Faludi and Rick Perlstein. Though many of the contributors have high public profiles, they are unaffiliated with academic organizations. They have found in The Baffler’s pages a home for ideas they can’t express elsewhere.

Yep, that's us, the island of misfit intellectuals. Read what the Columbia Journalism Review has to say about The Baffler, and then maybe subscribe.

#the baffler #columbia journalism review #thomas frank #chris lehmann #susan faludi #david graeber #rick perlstein

Before, my Spanish wasn't so bad, but it wasn't so good, either....at 5:30 a.m. the morning of June 28, 2009, I plunged into a pit so huge and so dark and so endless that it was—and still is—far beyond any words I had ever learned or imagined having to learn. I already knew the biggest, most important word: golpe (coup, or blow). But that morning, the radio said golpe de estado—the full phrase, 'a blow to the state'—a coup d’état. As in, a violent overthrow of constitutional order.

In an essay from our upcoming issue, Baffler #23, UC Santa Cruz professor and activist Dana Frank reflects on the anniversary of the 2009 Honduras coup. To get this essay in print, delivered right to your door, make sure to subscribe.

#dana frank #vocabulary lessons #the baffler #honduras

Over the last few years, however, certain reaches of the political Right have developed an outright cult of the capital strike. We can see it, for example, in the resurgent popularity of Atlas Shrugged and its reversal of the strike-novel tropes of the thirties....Every news item, to these apostles of the capital strike, vibrates with the universal political chorus: Do what business wants! Do what business wants! Do what business wants! Or! Else!

Baffler founding editor Thomas Frank on capital strikes and insane Randian island fantasies..Over the boom and through the bust, "To Galt's Gulch They Go"!

#thomas frank #the baffler #ayn rand #capital strikes

A seduction to be successful has to imply a moment of impotence and failure, in the sense that you playfully acknowledge your limitations. Seduction never works with perfection. People are totally wrong when they think that you should present yourself as perfect, blah blah blah blah.

Romance tips from Slavoj Žižek.

#Slavoj Žižek #Žižek #seduction #philosophy

Pornography is the most censored genre you can imagine. First, you notice how totally regulated it is. In standard heterosexual porn, what happens? First, you have some fantasizing, masturbation, cunnilingus, fellatio, then full sex, then maybe an orgy, whatever. It’s absolutely codified.

Once upon a time we interviewed Slavoj Žižek...

#Slavoj Žižek #Žižek!#pornography #philosophy #questionable opinions

melvillehouse

This week:

Cotton Tenants by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans

9781612192123 // $24.95

This is the rediscovered original magazine piece Agee wrote that was later transformed into Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It is probably impossible to overstate the esteem we—and readers at large—hold for Agee, and for this work in particular.

Cotton Tenants is the story of three families of desperate but proud farmers in the South in the great depression. They struggle under an endless mountain of debt. They postpone or forego medical treatment they can’t afford. They are victims of a mindless, cruel system that steals their labor, their lives, and in return gives them not happiness but only—and rarely—an unthinking stillness, a biding of time.

Thank god we’ve come so far since then.

Find it in you library or local indie bookseller now.

bafflermagazine

Co-published between us and Melville House. Out tomorrow!

#the baffler #melville house #james agee #walker evans #let us now praise famous men #cotton tenants #the great depression #journalism

Tonight, tonight! - Baffler editor in chief John Summers will discuss James Agee and Walker Evans's Cotton Tenants, to be copublished with Melville House, at Harvard Book Store. 7 p.m. Come one, come all!

#the baffler #harvard book store #james agee #walker evans #cotton tenants #let us now praise famous men #melville house

The Savile scandal shows how rapidly and thoroughly the highest reaches of British society—all the way to Buckingham Palace—could be infiltrated by an enterprising sexual predator bent on multiplying his conquests, one who practically flaunted his pedophilic predilections during his long career in the limelight.

Christian Lorentzen, "Predator Drone," from Baffler no. 22, out now.

#jimmy savile #bbc #christian lorentzen #the baffler

David Petraeus worked in an environment in which everyone was getting something for their involvement...The cultural knowledge surrounding all these transactions was that the best warriors pursued women like they pursued the enemy. And yet a general somehow came to have a sexual affair with his much younger hagiographer, getting something and giving something and ending up with yet another person willing to gush about his brilliance to a credulous nation."

Chris Bray, "Passions of the Meritocracy," The Baffler no. 22, out now.

#chris bray #david petraeus #general petraeus #passions of the meritocracy

Because of the centrality of his erotic novels to his legacy, later critics have often caricatured Sade as not only a pornographer, but as the arch-pornographer, representing either the worst or the best of the genre. But this is deeply misleading. Insofar as pornography is a commodity of mass-marketed and stylized representations of sexual practices, Sade is better seen as an anti-pornographer.

Hussein Ibish, "The United Sades of America," The Baffler no. 22, out now.

#the baffler #hussein ibish #sade #marquis de sade #sadism #bdsm

The battle continues.

#the baffler #culture wars

Inside the House

Cathy Park Hong

I'm no frail eel, no damsel steal, My costume's a bathrobe, secure as hazmat one look at me, I'm addictive as transfat you can't touch my towel-rack.

My batcave's this needlepark, But it's being converted to luxury condos, so I'm gonna sing you my vendetta rondeaus. READ MORE.

#cathy park hong #poetry #the baffler #contemporary poetry #american poetry

I have been a husband. I know that there are secrets from the world, other lives in the darkness.

Mahesh Rao, from his short story "The Agony of Leaves," published in our glorious current issue, available now.

#mahesh rao #fiction #lit #tea leaves #tea #the baffler

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