The Baffler returns

Leon Neyfakh of the New York Observer writes about the impending return of The Baffler, a contrarian business magazine that has published just one issue in the past six years.

Neyfakh writes, “During its heyday in the 1990s, Mr. Frank and the rest of The Baffler team strove to produce a critical antidote to the breathless New Economy evangelism they saw being eagerly peddled in business magazines and on TV, and a wake-up call to consumers engaged in what they called ‘corporate sponsored transgression.’ As the editors put it in the introduction to the 1997 collection Commodify Your Dissent, the purpose of The Baffler was to ‘confront the pomposities of power’ and ‘burst the bubble of the moment, whether it was the ‘alternative culture’ or the liberating promise of cyber-revolution.’

“One big thing that will be different for this new iteration of The Baffler, Mr. Frank said, is the world its writers will be describing.

“‘We developed this critique of consumer culture and business culture, and lo and behold, a lot of the things that we were saying, instead of being this out-there stuff from the fringes of self-publishing land—it’s stuff that I think will make sense to everybody nowadays,’ Mr. Frank said. ‘The world has come a lot closer to our way of seeing things. It’s funny how obvious it is now!'”

Read more here.