Press
Still don’t believe what you’re reading? Then check out this selection of articles, profiles, reviews, riffs, interviews, and radio and TV appearances concerning The Baffler since our relaunch in 2011. The media never fib, or exaggerate, or anything like that. You can swallow every single word.
“We love heroic Sacramento journalist Cosmo Garvin and we love The Baffler, and our feelings on Kevin Johnson are well-known; Garvin in The Baffler on Johnson more than lives up to our expectations.”
—Deadspin, March 29, 2016
“What’s different about a revealing piece in the latest issue of The Baffler is its inside perspective—a peek inside the practice from a freelance journalist who wrote an IBM/Twitter advertorial for The Atlantic. Jacob Silverman’s dispatch from the world of exciting brand partnerships captures the bizarre process of writing ad copy that’s designed to look like a news article.”
—Democracy Journal, March 28, 2016
“There are some who argue the return of mom jeans marks the death of alt youth culture, as One Percent Teens joyously (but somehow still ironically) wear them to celebrate their oppression of the proletariat. Okay, only The Baffler argues that. But even so: Do not be afraid. Mom jeans are a good thing.”
—New Republic, March 24, 2015
”The hallmark here is a kind of self-conscious crankiness. The Baffler’s basic worldview is that everything is terrible, and also that all change is for the worse. In a world of enthusiasts, this is the voice of dyspepsia.”
—Vox, December 9, 2014
“The Baffler, the magazine of cultural criticism founded under the tagline ‘The journal that blunts the cutting edge,’ was a talisman of a certain sort of left-leaning person throughout the 1990s, its self-consciously retro cover spotted in graduate student apartments and editors’ offices and independent bookstores. . . .
“The Baffler, which has probably the best slogan of any magazine in history—‘the Journal that Blunts the Cutting Edge’—has made all of its back issues available for free online: required reading for anyone interested in the tenor of criticism and analysis in the nineties and early aughts, if that’s what we’ve decided to call them.”
—The Paris Review, July 22, 2014
“The magazine pioneered a distinctive brand of analysis — hip to pop culture, but skeptical of its claims of political subversiveness — and inspired a later generation of upstart journals like n+1 and Jacobin, even as much of its content disappeared into the early-Internet ether.”
—The New York Times, July 21, 2014
“[Summers] 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 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. Many of these ideas are gloomy ones.”
—Columbia Journalism Review, July 1, 2013
“The Baffler represents itself as an alternative to a national discourse fraught with mediocrity. In its drive to fall ‘outside the debate,’ as Lehmann states, it generates some brilliant counter-intuitive analysis, namely Ehrenreich’s discourse on animals and how they hate us. It also puts forth a substantial amount of its own brand of mediocrity. After the meeting of 2 April one rank-and-file member said: ‘I feel like I just sat in on someone else’s staff meeting.’ We judge that sentiment to be accurate, but contend that this staff meeting was enjoyable enough to repeat when The Baffler releases another cache of briefs.”
—The Atlantic Wire, April 3, 2012
“The Baffler presciently warned of the housing and tech bubbles, and lamented Wall Street’s self-destructive mix of incompetence, brazenness, and vast sense of self-importance. As Summers wrote in a recent Baffler prospectus, the time is right for a comeback: ‘I cannot think of another journal better prepared to analyze the myths and dogmas of conservative rule or to anathematize the boom-and-bust style of life to which the country appears to be committed.’ Novelist and one of Time magazine’s official People Who Matter 2010, Jonathan Franzen, agrees—he reportedly mailed a donation with a note of encouragement that read: ‘Viva la Baffler!’”
—Bookforum, May 9, 2011
