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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.
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