Hi friends,
This week we continued our roll-out of issue 27, "Venus in Furs," by publishing Evgeny Morozov's stinging salvo against contemporary tech criticism, calling mainstream critics (including himself) out for having grown tame and conservative. Analysis without politics is weak sauce, and it's steered and shaped too often by the very businesses that are its targets. "Today, it's obvious to me that technology criticism, uncoupled from any radical project of social transformation, simply doesn't have the goods," Morozov writes. Read more of his piece, "The Taming of Tech Criticism," here.
We also published a wide-ranging conversation between Baffler editor-in-chief John Summers and Edward Mendelson, 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, which contains portraits of Saul Bellow, Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, William Maxwell, Frank O'Hara, and, as it happens, Lionel Trilling and W. H. Auden. They discuss legacies, literature, student activism, and so much more. Read that discussion, entitled "Transcendental Rites," here.
As always, The Baffler | | |
