A conversation with Chris Lehmann, Editor in Chief of The Baffler.

How did The Baffler begin? What was the goal when starting the magazine?
The Baffler started in 1988, basically as a somewhat-more-elegantly-typeset-than-most zine published by our founding editor Thomas Frank and his University of Virginia pal Keith White in 1988. I wasn’t there at the time, but as a longtime friend of both Tom and Keith, I’m quite sure that their immediate goal was to piss a bunch of people off, particularly champions of what they called “hip capitalism.”

Describe your decision-making process for selecting work to appear in the magazine.
Our decision-making process for launching assignments in an issue typically begins with the designation of an issue theme. These will often have somewhat cursory in-house sobriquets—for instance, our just-published Fall ’17 issue, “A Crack in Everything,” was known around the office for many weeks as “Cracked Utopias,” until we suddenly realized we had to get serious and give it a proper name. Anyway, once we have a theme in mind, we collectively discuss different approaches to it, and likely writers to execute individual pieces. We have a separate (great!) editor for poetry submissions, Nicole Terez Dutton. And we sort of settle on fiction submissions by committee, but we’re in the process, alas, of phasing out fiction when we go over to a bimonthly publication schedule next year.

If your magazine has an ethos, what is it?
Our ethos, according to our masthead is “the journal that blunts the cutting edge.” That slogan originally referenced the idiot tech-utopian sensibility of the ’90s, but we’ve found that it’s only gained in currency as the great American millennial caravan lumbers on.

After The Baffler, what’s your favorite writing venue?
Good question! My heart very much belongs to The Baffler, but I’ve enjoyed writing for a host of other outlets, most recently and happily the old Chicago lefty mag I formerly edited, In These Times. After your readers all subscribe to The Baffler, they should take out subs to In These Times!

What is your plan for the future of the magazine?
As mentioned above, we are going from a quarterly publishing schedule to a bimonthly one in 2018—we’ve decided that the Trump era is no time to be a literary quarterly. Our other ambitions are, in no particular order, to revive left populism, to dispel the current inept and corporate leadership of the liberal establishment in America, to get a robust welfare state off the ground, to ensure racial justice once and for all, and to see financier-brigands tried and convicted for various crimes against humanity. You know—the usual stuff!

Website: https://thebaffler.com/