Word: baffler
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...view on the matter is admittedly derivative. I spent much of January leafing through the pages of the Baffler, a leftist cultural criticism journal led by the likes of Thomas Frank, whose thesis is irrefutable: In this new gilded age, in which Sport Utility Vehicles abound and frequent flier perks become sweeter every year, our culture has one driving motivation, one underlying sense of consciousness, one theme--the unbridled cult of materialism. All must bow to the almighty corporation, the omnipotent dollar...
This all sounds like old hat, and you certainly didn't need the Baffler to find this out, but its critique gets better. It argues our decade has reached a new pinnacle of capitalism because the corporation has crushed or subsumed any thing that might stand in its way. The fifties, for example, had the Beatniks, those whose lifestyles of drug-abuse, idleness and aimlessness stood in stark contrast to white-bread I-like-Ike America...
There was a time when I would have been more skeptical. In 1993, shortly after the New York Times published a glossary of grunge slang from Seattle, a journal called the Baffler claimed that a prankster had hoodwinked the Times with the notion that grungesters used "swingin' on the flippity-flop" to mean hanging around, and said "harsh realm" rather than "bummer." I was forced to admit publicly that if I hadn't happened to read the Baffler just before a trip to Seattle, which was sure to include some browsing at the mother church of Eddie Bauer, I might...
...three-dimensional twister called the Magic Snake, which can assume the shape of a swan, saxophone or steamroller. F.A.O. Schwarz, New York City's premier toy store, sold out its initial shipment of 864 Snakes in a week. Copy-cubers have devised multicolored variations of Rubik's baffler in the shape of pyramids, octagons and cylinders. A new puzzle marketed in France called the Tower of Babel has sold 600,000 copies in three months at a price of about...
...million dollar Cinerama spectacular, it can only be said that Kubrick's film is as personal as it is expensive, and as ambitious an attempt at metaphysical philosophy as it is at creating a superb science-fiction genre film. Consequently, 2001 is probable commercial poison. A sure-fire audience baffler guaranteed to empty any theatre of ten per cent of its audience, 2001 is even now being re-edited by Kubrick to shorten the 165 minute length by 15-odd minutes. 2001, as it is being shown in Boston now, is in a transitional stage, the theatre currently exhibiting...