With the presidential election in the rear-view mirror, we wanted to think about the opposite of politics, so we thought about sex. The result was an issue in which Heather Havrilesky sent up Fifty Shades of GreyChris Bray tracked down General David Petraeus and his wandering PhD, Hussein Ibish remembered the Marquis de Sade, Christian Lorentzen buried the British pop star/pedophiliac Jimmy Savile, Slavoj Žižek told us why gonzo porn is the most censored of all film genres, and Anne Elizabeth Moore explored the hidden assumptions behind Nicholas Kristof’s bid to rescue the women of the world, who have nothing to lose, apparently, except their market potential. Thomas Frank and David Graeber wrote about politics after all, and Thomas Bernhard‘s homage to Arthur Rimbaud appeared here for the first time in English. Evgeny Morozov’s “The Meme Hustler,” meanwhile, made the longest single essay in the history of The Baffler. Hey, look, we’re finally in color!

 

Publication date: March 2013
Pages: 164 pages