The Baffler (no. 31) Contents

Killing Time History Fake Out

John Summers

3

From the Archive

The Nostalgia Gap

Tom Vanderbilt

Conversation

Tick Tock

Rick Perlstein and Daniel Tucker

6

9

Memory Holes Memoryland

Mark Dancey True Fakes on Location

World-building, Hollywood-style

18

36

Tom Carson Where the Wild Things Aren’t: National Parks 50

Nathan C. Martin The Slippery Slopes

A dispatch from the birthplace of neoliberalism

Ola Morris Innset Exit Planning

Thomas Geoghegan Confession Booth

The trouble with the trauma industry

Amber A’lee Frost The Naked City

You can no longer get there from here

Melissa Gira Grant

70

78

96

106

Ozymandias

Delusion at the Gastropub

On the foodie devolution

Heather Havrilesky Knock Yourselves Out

“Punching up” in American comedy

Ben Schwartz W(h)ither the New Sensibility?

123

134

148

Rochelle Gurstein Metropolitan Museum of Rot

The shrinking future of the American City

James Howard Kunstler

168

Poems

Sorrow Is My Own Yard 34

Danniel Schoonebeek Why so angry, Bluto?

Martha McCollough All the Answers I Ask

David Winter Artemisia Mourns Her Husband

Sarah Pearl Heard After I Die

48

84

95

114

Miriam Bird Greenberg Narrated by Leonard Nimoy 147

Michael Lynch Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley

167

4 1 the Baffler [no. 31]