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Issue #17 -- Superslayer Storybook

$9.99 ... Magazine List Price: 10.50

What a difference a few years make! It wasn't so long ago that Americans thought they had learned a hard lesson about "irrational exuberance." But on the party went. Expensive military adventures abroad, a Ponzi economy at home, the largest asset bubble in human history . . . all topped off with a massive transfer of national wealth to you-know-who. We're going to have fun paying for this. In this issue, Thomas Frank explains how the mushy tenets of "bipartisanship" add up to rule by a class of people whose only clear interests are their own. Tom Geoghegan surveys the wasteland that American jurisprudence has become. Kim Phillips-Fein examines poker mania, and unearths clues to lumpen America's dashed aspirations. Steve Evans reveals why American poetry is now run by Midwestern ad men dreaming of corncribs and the big Nebraska sky. Andrew O’Hagan remembers the last days of an American literary giant. Catherine Liu tells you why the debt-driven, service-oriented urbanity of your funky downtown isn’t such a good thing for you. All that and more is found between the fetchingly illustrated covers of the long-awaited Baffler 17!  © 1996-2009, Dusty Groove America, Inc.