That's a damn good article alright. Depressing as hell, too. There's a red state born every minute, I guess.
This isn't actually from The Baffler, but it might as well be! Ribbing of the Atlantic and Harper's in the same screed! Two for the price of one! The Intellectual Situation Issue 15
That's a damned good article. I've long despised the Atlantic's Femtrolling, but the other stuff was new to me.
Speaking of Bafflers, I got mine the other day in the mail. It has a Tony Hoagland poem and I seriously love Hoagland, except for his middle aged love poetry. That stuff is gross.
Here's a bizarre and hilarious description of CNBC's use of tickers and info graphics from "High Church Hustle."
That and Barbara's bullshit session on the migration from malevolent ancient gods to happy fun modern gods were the highlight of this month.
Yeah, I was happy it brought up both Prometheus and The Golden Compass books. After a couple issues now, I really like reading the print version more than the pdf -- the graphic design / cartoons / visual art are all quite good.
I just find it a lot easier not to get distracted. I tend to finish articles rather than skim with the print edition. The same thing happens to me with Foreign Affairs.
I tend to agree, reading long-form articles on the PC is difficult for me. I'm always a keystroke away from BF posts, catching up on some blogs, IM conversations, etc. I find that my iPad (old though it is) is a happy medium; one in which its age (and thus relative sluggishness in switching between apps) discourages the relentless ADD that I exhibit when I've got a PC in front of me.
Yeah, I find the same thing. I can read on a tablet; on the PC I just ADD my way into fucking TVTropes or something every time.
For Valentine's Day, the Baffler has gifted us an interview with Slavoj Zizek on seduction. An out of context quote: "First your fingers (she says) then put your hand on my breasts (she says). Now (he says) you put your finger into my ass. Then you get totally caught in these bureaucratic negotiations." E: It's only two snippets :(
Unless there's more than one Dwarf Fortress book, I believe Calistas got excerpted in this month's Harper's. HE HAS FINALLY ARRIVED (in low circulation lefty US magazines).
FUCK YOU BITCHES! I'M GETTING MY FUCKING FRENCH CIGARETTES AND TURTLE NECKS TODAY! I AM FUCKING CULTURE, NOW! (er, can someone please explain why an excerpt from my book is on that web page? I only know Harpers as home to very long and often quite interesting articles.) (worried I'm being trolled for my rambly sentences and structure. It's a style, ok!!!!!)
'Grats Calistas, and there's nothing to complain about with the writing. In fact the restrained, directly informative style you've gone for is downright hilarious given the content, which is no doubt why they put it up. "Try and reduce these common causes of unhappy thoughts: hunger and thirst; encountering miasma; not enough chairs in the dining room; accidentally murdering a friend while in a strange mood; encountering ghosts; seeing another dwarf die; sustaining injuries; having no clothes." That right there is superb.
Awww, thanks! I just don't know what that column is about... But I am pretty pleased! I told Tarn, and he replied "now to get DF into Popular Mechanics!"
As an aside, I'm tempted to subscribe to Harper's but they have a very off-putting system. Their advertisement is for 163 years for $16.97, which is for the print magazine for a year in the US + online access to the archive. As far as I can tell they don't offer access to the archive at all without paying for a print subscription, and doing so is not desirable outside the US, at least for me. The electronic-only option they do have is for "12 Digital Issues" for the same price, but without access to the archive. It's not clear whether those 12 issues are back in time, forward in time (what you'd expect, I suppose), or select at will. It's also odd to be paying the same as to have print copies sent to you and without the very substantial bonus of archive access. Nor is it obvious what form the digital issues take, such as being tied to one device.
The thing with Harper's is that it's such a ridiculously cheap subscription that I've never really thought much about their model. It seems to me that the zinio digital subscription is just one of those things you run into with outsourced e-editions; I have the same problem with the kindle version of Foreign Affairs and ended up having to get both subscriptions (at the student rate, thank god) to avoid going nuts. The website is quite readable and up to date, for what it's worth. It's basically a part of the magazine where they try to provide a whores de oovre platter of different sources, whether it's senate hearings, new fiction, or academic studies. Sometimes it's to watch a stylistic trainwreck, but more often it's because they think the content itself is shocking or interesting. I don't think you're being trolled for your sentence structure. It seems to me that they found the "just the facts" approach you've adopted fascinating in and of itself, since you're engaged in the functional equivalent of describing the contents of a madman's brain. I, for one, congratulate you on your transition to uncircumcised sweaters.
Lizard_King - Yes, I suspect you're right about it being to do with outsourcing. I guess I assume that if all the work of digitising has already been done, as the archive suggests, they'd jump at offering a straightforward online subscription, but perhaps that's naive and there are other considerations. Worry about undermining their print circulation, perhaps. Anyway as you say the website looks good, so I'll subscribe to that via RSS and see about paying later if I'm enthused enough.
Three attempts to parse this. I don't know whether to blame pronunciation differences, tiredness or that I've just started reading Game of Thrones.
That, er, was my point. That I used to mech a yolk. P.s. it's spelt hors d'oeuvres and pronounced oar derve. [/pendant].
It blew my mind when I saw it! Calistas, the section they included it in is usually chock-full of what-the-fuck-is-that subjects. To the Harpers demographic of old people Dwarf Fortress is moon language fan fiction.
This month's Harper's has a what-the-hell piece of fan fiction from Andrew Bacevich to Paul Wolfowitz.
I was sitting and sipping white wine and reading Harper's this evening and came across that Dwarf Fortress bit. I know next to nothing about DF and hadn't seen the mention in this thread. I very unsophisticatedly snorted and half-choked on my wine laughing out loud at Congrats and great job Calistas!
PBS, neoliberalism, and pseudo-social activism. The Baffler is succeeding at making me more unhappy with the world. I'm now suspicious of PBS. :( Full issue comes out soonish.
I could do a hatchet-job on the hatchet-job Moore does on Kristof, but... what's accomplished? "Kristof defended garment factories by saying sweatshops should exploit more but they aren't actually sweatshops but he said exploit stead of employ and sweatshop instead of non-sweatshop because it's racy and racy sells papers and he learned that from Milton Friedman!" Sure he did. Because the Milton Friedman thing isn't 100% bolted on to the Kristof-and-2000s-PBS section of the article. Was the 1980 Friedman documentary influential propaganda for the neoliberal consensus that came to completely dominate political-economy in the 1980s and 90s? Yes. So was Yes Minister. It's on PBS too, how'd they miss that part of the conspiracy? And the BBC too, oh god, they're all in it together. More seriously - PBS should have realized in 1980 how pernicious the post-Keynesian liberal swerve would be by the 2000s? What kind of insane standard are we holding them to? There is such a thing as school-"reform" and market-oriented-development limousine liberalism, and you do tend to get it from liberal millionaires and the news organs they read and write for. Such liberalism doesn't focus enough on tax reform and class and economic inequality for self-evident reasons; instead it's all about brilliant gain-with-no-pain innovations of organization or technology that will somehow fix the world's ills without soaking the 1%. Kristof, among dozens of others, shades over into that variety of liberalism in his columns. It's one of the reasons - besides a certain Thomas Friedman-esque anecdotalism - that I don't tend to read him much. But the absence of context (other limousine liberals, the rest of limousine liberal journalism) in this takedown, its guilt-by-association and omission - to say nothing of all the sneering at activist celebrities as Lady Bountifuls - is racy polemicism. So we may need to investigate its ties to Milton Friedman.
Frankly I think the "brought to you by Goldman Sachs" aspect of modern PBS is the part that's worthy of explanation - how was a 1980 PBS person to somehow have our monday morning quarterback knowledge of the triumph of neoliberal economics, 1975-200x? Which was, you know, total, and not the product of a show on PBS. (Whose PBS managers should have known was rotten because Coke was paying entire thousands of dollars to assist the production of?) But the "brought to you by megalocorp X" aspect of modern PBS is basically down to funding cuts and not conspiracy theory, so, less racy article.
