The Baffler
Issue Number ThirteenBaffler, 120 pp., $7.50 (paper)
Pick up a copy of The Baffler and you might find yourself screaming, “Lighten up!” Praised by everyone from The Nation to SPIN to The New Yorker, this literary and cultural zine is published in Chicago by a diabolically intelligent University of Chicago Ph.D. named Thomas Frank. He and his zine get lots of publicity, which is interesting since The Baffler is a polemic against the hypocrisies of marketing. Frank has targeted everyone from The Gap to business bestsellers (for more, check out the 1997 book Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos From the Baffler), and often he is far too serious, but no matter — The Baffler is certainly more interesting than it is maddening. Issue No. 13 offers a typically thoughtful and provocative assortment of essays, fiction, and poetry on a variety of topics including Westbrook Pegler, cartoonist Al Capp, “handlessness,” and Milwaukee politics. The magazine’s highlight, however, is an essay by Paul Maliszewski (view more of his terrific work at http://www.mcsweeneys.net), whose career at the Business Journal of Central New York develops alongside a satirical project in which — writing to his own employer under a freelance nom de plume — he successfully sells the paper a story about a nonexistent local company (he even creates a plausible Web site). The hoax lands Maliszewski temporarily in hot water with the state’s attorney general’s office, but the prankster enjoys the last laugh: After the Business Journal prints an apology, Maliszewski — writing under yet another pseudonym — mails a letter to his former editor, who, apparently duped once again, publishes it: “I, for one, can rest easily knowing that you are watching the news and watching yourselves watch the news, acting as both guardian of journalism’s lighted torch of truth and the watchdog guarding against journalism’s occasional mistakes. Once more, my hat is off to you, my head bowed, and pate exposed.”
This article appears in February 4 • 2000.