It’s easy to talk about lost Golden Ages in Berlin. Everyone has their own romanticized era: louche Weimar Berlin before the Nazis, Iggy and Bowie’s seventies Berlin before the Wall fell, or maybe the squatter’s Berlin of the good old nineties. So when people start complaining that something has changed in the city, it’s tempting to dismiss it as insider one-upmanship, the old game of “I was here when.” And yet something has felt different in recent years. . . .
CURRENT ISSUE [No. 23]
A Carnival of Buncombe
Oh, we may say our colleges are the best in the world while we secretly believe they’re an overpriced rip-off, but leave it to Thomas Frank in The Baffler no. 23 to ask whether they’re the best in the world at committing the rip-off. Welcome to America five years after the financial crisis. It’s a place “made possible by buncombe,” as David Graeber explains here. And it’s a time of magical thinking, as Susan Faludi says in her exposé of the narrow brand of feminism on offer from Sheryl Sandberg’s positive-thinking tract Lean In.
Luckily, we have Jacob Silverman to burst the techno-bubble that is South by Southwest; Ann Friedman to explain why we’re “All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go”; and Quinn Slobodian and Michelle Sterling to report from Berlin “How Hipsters, Expats, Yummies, and Smartphones Ruined a City.” Our midyear issue contains world-defining fiction by Adam Haslett and genre-bending prose by Thomas Sayers Ellis about Lou Beach’s surreal cover art. The carnival’s all here. From Seth Colter Walls on Jean-Paul Sartre to Farran Nehme on Buster Keaton, from Dubravka Ugrešić’s dreams of Wittgenstein to Richard Byrne’s “Nod to Ned Ludd,” The Baffler gives you the latest trends in cultural news and retail opinion. Step right up!
[No. 23] Feature Article
Smile, Buster!
Early in 1917 Buster Keaton left the vaudeville act he’d been performing with his parents since he was a toddler. Joseph Keaton would toss his acrobatic young son over furniture, into backdrops, and on at least one memorable occasion, right into a group of hecklers. Buster had enjoyed himself for years, but his father’s drinking steadily worsened; keeping a straight face while being thrown around by an unpredictable alcoholic was no way to earn a living. . . .
Baffler Blog
Pennsylvania’s Master of Analogy
Same-sex marriage is all the rage in Pennsylvania politics these days, as it is in many places. Now that New Jersey appears to be on its way to legalizing same-sex marriage via their superior courts, the . . .
