The Baffler’s Week That Was

Hello Bafflers, won’t you consider subscribing to the print magazine, if you have not done so already? For $30 a year, your mailbox will be graced thrice yearly by a perfect-bound collection of salvos, satire, and colorful art. Sign up now and receive our new issue, which is just about to be released into the capable arms of the U.S. Postal Service as you read these words. (That’s the cover of Issue 25 there in the bottom right, above.)

And if you’re looking for something to read in the meantime, here’s what you may have missed this week on The Baffler blog:

• Corey Pein’s very thorough, and slightly terrifying, piece from earlier this week, “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich” has gotten quite a response from the “dark enlightenment” neoreactionary movement that is the subject of his examination. Pein’s detractors objected, perhaps, to his describing one of their leader’s writings as “the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of a Gwar concert.” You really don’t want to miss this one.

• George Scialabba reviewed Ralph Nader’s new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, which outlines Nader’s hopes for an anti-corporatist “convergence” movement.

• In a celebration of “The Last Days of Abercrombie & Fitch,” Alana Massey described the blissfully-culturally-ignorant, chronically-mismanaged chain’s new expansion into China—an effort which she predicts will fail, if all goes as planned.

• Jordan Fraade explored the many connotations of the buzzword “density,” an urban-policy development goal that is too often accompanied by yet another d-word, “displacement.”

• We celebrated O.G. feminist Margaret Fuller’s 204th birthday by publishing Kim Phillips-Fein’s essay on Fuller from the print archives, “The Threshold of Joy.”

• Finally, Kathleen Geier vented about student protests against commencement speakers (when there’s really so much else they should be protesting), and trigger warnings in the classroom.

Have a fine weekend, and say hello some time. We’ll be back here on Tuesday.