The Baffler Returns – Huzzah!

Long before Gawker Media changed the way we consume information, analysis and media, there was a surprising little literary journal out of Chicago’s south side called The Baffler. Edited by Thomas Frank, who’s also known as columnist for WSJ and best-selling author of What’s The Matter With Kansas, The Baffler compendium Commodify Your Dissent was a must-read for every literary hipster in lower Manhattan in the mid to late 90s. Well good news now-aging-hipsters. The Baffler is back with a brand new issue!

Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Christopher Borrelli reports:

The Baffler magazine — which punctured egos and provoked, which irritated New York Times editors and Hyde Park intellectuals alike, which was rooted in Chicago and became a smart, abrasive must-read during the 1990s, which predicted our economic future, then burned down (quite literally) — has returned. It’s been four years since the last issue; the new issue, slowly working its way into bookstores nationwide (and recently mailed out to patient subscribers), is only its 18th issue.

Its 18th in 22 years.

The staff was so slow and often distracted by other non-Baffler-related jobs, said former managing editor Matt Weiland, they would refer to the magazine as “a quarterly publication that only came out once a year.”

“But see, thing is,” said Thomas Frank, the founder and editor, from his home in Maryland, “I never had any intention of going away. I would get e-mails that said, ‘Too bad you guys are gone.’ So I would write back: ‘Don’t give up on us.’ Because we need the Baffler more now than ever. That contrarian attitude toward culture, that scoffi

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