Back to Blunt the Cutting Edge
John Summers, editor-in-chief of the critical, satirical magazine The Baffler, appeared on Boston's WGBH News to introduce his journal to television audiences, saying that when people ask what the publication is about, he "remind[s] them that this sort of thing existed for a long time in the American cultural scene."
John Summers, editor-in-chief of the critical, satirical magazine The Baffler, appeared on Boston’s WGBH News to introduce his journal to television audiences, saying that when people ask what the publication is about, he “remind[s] them that this sort of thing existed for a long time in the American cultural scene.”
This thing is a “literary journal … that doesn’t assume that the readers are idiots.”
“There used to be a larger stratum of cultural publications like this,” Summers continued. “There are very few like them now.”
The Baffler was founded by Harper’s Magazine columnist Thomas Frank in 1988. After years of stops and starts, it emerged in 2011 under Summers’ direction, just in time to take on the worldwide economic crisis.
“We’re trying to put the magazine’s history in relationship with the contemporary things that are not happening, such as justice for bankers and so on,” Summers said.
— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
WGBHNewsroom:
Your support matters…Independent journalism is under threat and overshadowed by heavily funded mainstream media.
You can help level the playing field. Become a member.
Your tax-deductible contribution keeps us digging beneath the headlines to give you thought-provoking, investigative reporting and analysis that unearths what's really happening- without compromise.
Give today to support our courageous, independent journalists.
An immediate inquiry is sought amid findings Mohammed bin Salman appears to have had access to Washington Post owner's private messages.
The president-elect’s tendency to go after people who criticize him by sending false and provocative statements to his 17 million Twitter followers not only imperils these individuals. It also poses a clear and present danger to our democracy.
A new book by A.O. Scott, senior film critic for The New York Times and probably the country's most influential film critic, is a reflection on the nature of art criticism itself.
In a victory for free speech, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that employees of T-Mobile do not have to maintain what the company called a “positive work environment” at all times.
Once an emancipatory project predicated on the right to study and engage the past critically, history under the reign of neoliberalism has receded into a depoliticizing culture of consumerism, a wholesale attack on science, the glorification of military ideals, an embrace of the punishing state, and a nostalgic invocation of the greatest generation.
You need to be a supporter to comment.
There are currently no responses to this article.
Be the first to respond.