Ladies and gentlemen, pimps and hoes, prudes and Pulitzers, nannies, grannies, and ballers: here's a look back at some highlights from last week on
The Baffler online:
The Pulitzer prizes were awarded early last week, which gave us an occasion to return to two excellent pieces from the
Baffler archives: From 1993's Issue 4,
MAURA MAHONEY's piece on the making of
DONNA TARTT, or, what we like to call, "The world's only negative review of
The Secret History," and
CHRIS LEHMANN's Issue 19 appreciation of the very first winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature, the refreshingly anti-capitalist novelist
ERNEST POOLE.
We reprinted a classic essay by our editor in chief
JOHN SUMMERS on the life and work of the eccentric, irrepressible, prescient, and ultimately misunderstood economist
THORSTEIN VEBLEN, entitled "The Cult of the Boss: Why Do Americans Admire Businessmen?" (We also borrowed a quote from Veblen for a frontispiece in our
current issue, pictured above.)
We published two lovely poems from our current issue, "It was the year we turned to dragons" by
METTA SAMA and "Concerned Possibly Overly Concerned with the Eagle Warehouse & Storage Company of Brooklyn 1893" by
DARA WEIR.
On the
Baffler blog,
JIM NEWELL sank his proverbial teeth into
the stubbornness of Virginia Republicans in opposing Medicaid, when they really need all the electoral help they can get; the frat boys you may remember from college, at least some of whom appear to have
grown up to become political operatives in Texas, as evidenced by the "Boats 'N Hoes" PAC flap; and the nonsensical sexism of the political press in assuming that
Hillary Clinton's grandchild in utero would have any notable impact on her choice about whether or not to run for the presidency.
ALANA MASSEY took a lazy and misguided
Guardian column to task in her piece about the Everyday Sexism Project, "Shaming Sexism Isn't Prudery."
ANNE HELEN PETERSEN recalled her years as a "Liberal Arts Nanny," and what they taught her about how some employers do everything they can to insulate themselves from embodied interactions with their workers, and with money, and most importantly, with those workers' lack of money.
ANDREW HELMS examined what he calls "the slow creep of business language into sports and sports education," as evidenced by the tenure of U.S. Men's National Soccer head coach Jürgen Klinsmann. It's all well and good to "disrupt" with motivational talks about a "growth mindset," but actual strategic planning and practice are also probably a good idea if you want your team to be a contender for the World Cup.
