The Baffler is a left-wing magazine of cultural, political, and business criticism that was founded in 1988 and published until the spring of 2007. It was revived in 2009, with the first issue of Volume 2 published in January 2010. The magazine was headquartered in Chicago, Illinois and sold at bookstores across the U.S.

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

, and the UK

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

.

Founded in 1988 by editors Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank is an American author, journalist and columnist for Harper's Magazine. He is a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, authoring "The Tilting Yard" from 2008 to 2010....

 and Keith White

Keith White (II)

Keith White is an American publishing executive and cultural critic, and co-founder of The Baffler. His writings, which have been influenced by his training as a literary critic, have focused on the intersection between culture and the publishing business...

, published by Greg Lane, it had subscribers all over the world. The Associate Publisher was Emily Vogt. Editors included Matt Weiland, Dave Mulcahey, Solveig Nelson, Jennifer Moxley

Jennifer Moxley

Jennifer Moxley is an American poet, editor, and translator who was born in San Diego, California. She currently teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Maine and resides in Maine with her partner, Steve Evans.- Poetry :...

, George Hodak, Jim McNeill, Damon Krukowski, Kim Philips-Fein, Tom Vanderbilt

Tom Vanderbilt

Tom Vanderbilt is an American journalist, blogger, and author of the best-selling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do .-Personal life:...

, Chris Lehmann, Angela Sorby

Angela Sorby

-Life:She was born in Seattle, Washington and teaches at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her main teaching areas are American literature and creative writing and main academic interests are American poetry, popular culture, and children's literature....

, Tom Frank. It was known for critiquing "business culture and the culture business" and for having exposed the grunge speak

Grunge speak

Grunge speak was a hoax created by Megan Jasper, receptionist for Sub Pop Records. Under pressure from a reporter for The New York Times who wanted to know if grunge fans had their own slang, Jasper, 25 at the time, told the reporter a set of slang terms that she claimed were associated with the...

 hoax perpetrated on the New York Times. One famous and much-republished article, "The Problem with Music" by Steve Albini

Steve Albini

Steven Frank Albini is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, audio engineer and music journalist. He was a member of Big Black, Rapeman, and Flour, and is currently a member of Shellac...

, exposed the inner-workings of the music business during the indie rock heyday. A self-described goal of the journal was to "blunt the cutting edge". Its models were the satire

Satire

Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

 and cultural criticism of H.L. Mencken and the progressive

Progressivism

Progressivism is an umbrella term for a political ideology advocating or favoring social, political, and economic reform or changes. Progressivism is often viewed by some conservatives, constitutionalists, and libertarians to be in opposition to conservative or reactionary ideologies.The...

 journalism

Journalism

Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...

 of Randolph Bourne

Randolph Bourne

Randolph Silliman Bourne was a progressive writer and "leftist intellectual" born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and a graduate of Columbia University...

.

In October 2011, the new editor, John Summers, signed a 5-year publishing contract with the MIT Press

MIT Press

The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts .-History:...

.

Overview

The magazine published sporadically (see Timeline), especially after the Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

 office of the Baffler was destroyed in a fire on April 25, 2001. (Baffler 14 was in press at the time, and only three new issues were subsequently published.)

Timeline of The Baffler magazine:#1 (1988), #2 (1990), #3 (1991), #4 (1992), #5 (1993), #6–7 (1995), #8 (1996), #9–11 (1997), #12–13 (1999), #14 (2001), #15–16 (2003), #17 (2006).

The magazine was relaunched in 2010, under a new publisher and new editors, and with a new design, with Volume 2, Number 1 published in Winter, 2010. They announced in March, 2011 that Volume 2, Number 2 will be printed later in 2011.

Contributing writers and artists have included: Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank is an American author, journalist and columnist for Harper's Magazine. He is a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, authoring "The Tilting Yard" from 2008 to 2010....

, Christian Parenti

Christian Parenti

Christian Parenti is an American investigative journalist and author. His books include: Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis , a survey of the rise of the prison industrial complex from the Nixon through Reagan Eras and into the present; The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America...

, Thasnai Sethaseree, Jeff Sharlet

Jeff Sharlet

Jeff Sharlet is an American journalist, bestselling author, and academic best known for writing about religious subcultures in the United States. He is a contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone...

, Thomas Geoghegan, Damon Krukowski, Paul Maliszewski, David Mulcahey, Robert Nedelkoff, Dan Raeburn, Andrew O'Hagan, Jim Arndorfer, Kim Phillips-Fein, Steve Evans, Jim McNeill, Matt Weiland, Catherine Liu, Martin Riker, Whitney Terrell, Geoffrey Young, Joshua Schuster, Jena Osman

Jena Osman

Jena Osman is an American poet and editor, who graduated from Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo, with a Ph.D. She teaches at Temple University. Osman's work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Conjunctions, Hambone, Verse, and XCP: Cross-Cultural...

, Paul Maliszewski, Jamie Kalven, Nick Cohen, Dubravka Ugresic, Kenneth Neil Cukier, Steve Featherstone, Kevin Mattson, Ana Marie Cox, Jim Arndorfer, Laurie Weeks, Bernadette Mayer

Bernadette Mayer

Bernadette Mayer is a poet and prose writer. In 1967 she received a BA from New School for Social Research. She has since edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci and the United Artists Press with Lewis Warsh...

, Andrea Brady

Andrea Brady

Andrea Brady is an American poet and lecturer at Queen Mary, at the University of London. Her academic work focuses on contemporary poetry and the early modern period...

, Juliana Spahr

Juliana Spahr

Juliana Spahr is an American poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S...

, Ian Urbina, Chris Toensing, Nelson Smith, Terri Kapsalis, Sharon O'Dair, J.D. Connor, Andrew Friedman, Martha Bayne, Eric Klineberg, Chris Lehmann, Mike Newirth, Mike O'Flaherty, Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish was a Palestinian poet and author who won numerous awards for his literary output and was regarded as the Palestinian national poet...

, Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles is an American poet who has also worked in fiction, non-fiction, and theater.She won a 2010 Shelley Memorial Award.-Early life and career:...

, David Perry, Benjamin Friedlander, Chris Stroffolino

Chris Stroffolino

Chris Stroffolino is an American poet, musician, critic, performer, author of 12 books of poetry and prose, and probably best known to the general populace for working alongside Steve Malkmus and David Berman on The Silver Jews “American Water” album...

, Daniel Bouchard, Clive Thompson, Michael Martone, Earl Shorris, Minou Roufail, Joshua Glenn, John R. MacArthur, Martha Bridegam, Leon Forrest, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Mike Newirth, Karen Olsson, Christopher Sorrentino, Sandy Zipp, Matt Roth, Mark McMorris, Elizabeth Willis

Elizabeth Willis

Elizabeth Willis is an American poet, literary critic and professor of literature and creative writing at Wesleyan University. Her most notable work includes four major books of poetry and a scholarly collection of essays on Lorine Niedecker which she edited...

, Lee Ann Brown, Michael Gizzi

Michael Gizzi

Michael Gizzi was an American poet.-Life:Michael Gizzi was born in Schenectady, New York in 1949 to Carolyn and Anthony Gizzi. He had two brothers, Peter and Thomas Gizzi...

, David Hess, Rebecca Bohrman, Christian Viveros-Faune, Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...

, Loic Wacquant, Stephen Duncombe, Brishen Rogers, Bryant Urstadt, Noah Berlatsky, Lydia Millet, Jay Rosen, Johnny Payne, Thomas Beer, Pam Brown

Pam Brown

Pam Brown is an Australian poet.- Career :Brown was born in Seymour, Victoria, and her childhood was spent in on military bases in Toowoomba and Brisbane. Since her early twenties, she has mostly lived in Sydney...

, Dale Smith, Joshua Clover

Joshua Clover

Joshua Clover is a poet, critic, journalist and author. He has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry, is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, and recipient of an individual grant from the NEA; his first book of poetry, Madonna anno domini, received the Walt Whitman Award from the...

, Keith White, Jesse Eisinger, Paul Lukas, Bill Boisvert, Joanna Coles, Jennifer Gonnerman, Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein is an American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets . In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American...

, Maura Mahoney, Tom Vanderbilt, David Berman, Jamie Callan, James Kelman, Charles Simic

Charles Simic

Dušan "Charles" Simić is a Serbian-American poet, and was co-Poetry Editor of the Paris Review. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.-Early years:...

, Rod Smith

Rod Smith (poet)

Rod Smith, who was born in Gallipolis, Ohio in 1962, is an American poet, editor and publisher. He grew up in Northern Virginia and moved to Washington, DC in 1987. Smith has authored several collections of poetry, including In Memory of My Theories, Protective Immediacy, and Music or Honesty. He...

, Margaret Young, David Trinidad

David Trinidad

-Biography:Trinidad was born in Los Angeles, California. In the early 1980s, he was one of a group of poets who were active at the Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice, California. Other members of this group included Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, and Amy Gerstler. As editor of Sherwood...

, Steve Healey, Joe Fodor, Jennifer Moxley, Dan Kelly, and more.

Contributing artists have included: Patrick W. Welch

Patrick W. Welch

Patrick W. Welch was an English painter, illustrator, cartoonist, and art professor who lived in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He billed himself as "Patrick W. Welch, Painter of Hate," a spoof/homage to Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light.- Career :Welch was born in Billericay, England and...

, Hunter Kennedy, Brian Chippendale, Keith Herzik, Amy Abshier-Reyes, Ada Rima Grybauskas, Emily Flake, Leif Goldberg, Mark Dancy, Russell Chrstian, Matt Brinkman, Lisa Haney, Le Mule, Jay Ryan, Don MacKeen, Clay Butler, Robin Hunicke, and more.

The Baffler is sold through many different distribution channels, both as a book and as a magazine; in addition to the publication's ISSN, all but the earliest issues have an individual ISBN, such as: #9 (ISBN 1-888984-30-9), etc.

On June 23, 2009 the New York Observer reported that founding editor Thomas Frank decided to revive the magazine. According to the Observer, the Baffler will be released on a regular, bi-annual basis. The first new edition of the Baffler was published in January 2010. This edition features an award-winning essay by Chinta Strausberg called "A steady stream of MF's, Sh*ts and B*tches."

Collections

• Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler. Edited by Thomas Frank
  Thomas Frank
  Thomas Frank is an American author, journalist and columnist for Harper's Magazine. He is a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, authoring "The Tilting Yard" from 2008 to 2010....
  
   and Matt Weiland. ISBN 0-393-31673-4.
• Boob Jubilee: The Cultural Politics of the New Economy (Salvos from The Baffler). Edited by Thomas Frank and David Mulcahey. ISBN 0-393-32430-3

External links

• Excerpts from The Baffler at Archive.org (requires JavaScript
  JavaScript
  JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
  
  for navigation)