The Baffler Makes Its Back Issues All Free to Read Online

The New York­er was­n’t the only mag­a­zine that relaunched its web site this week. The Baf­fler did the same. They got a new look and feel. And they made plen­ty of loy­al read­ers hap­py by mak­ing 25 years of back issues freely avail­able online. The edi­tors of the mag­a­zine — that “loose col­lec­tive of dis­af­fil­i­at­ed cul­ture crit­ics, knowl­edge work­ers, poets, illus­tra­tors, and clos­et utopi­ans” — write:

Well, when The Baf­fler was born in 1988, we nev­er could have fore­seen this #inno­va­tion, but here we are. Please enjoy this new and unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly shiny iter­a­tion of The Baf­fler online—featuring not only our new issue (no. 25, “The None and the Many”), but also, for the first time ever, all of our dig­i­tized archives in one place.

That’s 25 issues, 432 con­trib­u­tors, 277 salvos, 450 graph­ics, 172 poems, 73 sto­ries, 3,396 pages made of 1,342,785 words. You can click on indi­vid­ual pieces or flip through entire issues page by page, if you so desire.

You can flip through the spo­rad­i­cal­ly-pub­lished back issues and rev­el in the icon­o­clas­tic mag­a­zine that “ridicules respectable busi­ness lead­ers, laughs at pop­u­lar con­sumer brands as sou­venirs of the cul­tur­al indus­try, and debunks the ide­ol­o­gy of free-mar­ket nin­com­poops in the media and on the cam­pus­es.” Or, if you’re look­ing for some more direc­tion, you can head to the The Paris Review, where Dan Piepen­bring makes some rec­om­men­da­tions, start­ing with his “per­son­al favorite, Steve Albini’s “The Prob­lem with Music,” a terse, caus­tic cri­tique of the record indus­try at the height of yup­pie-ism and major-label excess.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York­er Web Site is Entire­ly Free This Sum­mer (Until It Goes Behind a Pay­wall This Fall)

The Pop­u­lar Sci­ence Dig­i­tal Archive Lets You Explore Every Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy-Filled Edi­tion Since 1872

The Entire Archives of Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Fou­cault, Alain Badiou, Judith But­ler & More (1972–2018)