John Summers

A little while ago, director Dan Davies of Banyak Films in London materialized in The Baffler’s editorial HQ in Harvard Square with contributing editor Evgeny Morozov in tow, steered him to our admittedly tacky blue sectional couch, and, before a midday audience munching on ...

John Summers When the balance of trade between George Scialabba’s pension plan requirements and his age came to an agreement, and his long dreamed-of chance to break free of his day job at last presented itself, he retired from Harvard University, where he had served with ...

Andreas Lubitz, the 27-year old German copilot who flew a jetliner into a mountain in the French Alps last week, seemed normal, according to preliminary reports of his character and personality. Sure, Lubitz had worries—his girlfriend was pregnant; he was having difficulty ...

As we buttoned up The Baffler no. 27, on fashion and power, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week broke out in New York, and additional extravaganzas of the global leisure set were hotly anticipated in London, Milan, Istanbul, Tokyo, Mumbai, Shenzhen, and Moscow. Pretty soon, we knew, the ...

Edward Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the literary executor of the estate of W. H. Auden. His new book is Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (New York Review Books, $21.95), which contains portraits of ...

Hello from HQ, where we are happy/sad to present number 26, Sickness and Pelf, on the culture of medicine and certain undiagnosed psychopathologies of everyday life in America. The operative method, wielded with a scalpel throughout this body of salvos, stories, poems, ...

Competition is the legitimation device in the American system. Long ago enshrined in our laws as a mechanism for regulating goods and deciding value, competition is also our testing field for personal worth. From today’s tech entrepreneurs to yesteryear’s captains of ...

A minor but telltale moment of relief from the country’s paralyzing austerity broke through a few months back, when the Obama Administration announced major funding for a new group called Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. Yes, the group’s ...