No Future for You

Resumen del libro

Theres never been a better time to be outside the consensus'and if you dont believe it, then peer into these genre-defining essays from The Baffler, the magazine thats been blunting the cutting edge of American culture and politics for a quarter of a century. Heres Thomas Frank on the upward-falling cult of expertise in Washington, D.C., where belonging means getting the major events of our era wrong. Heres Rick Perlstein on direct mail scams, multilevel marketing, and the roots of right-wing lying. Heres John Summers on the illiberal uses of innovation in liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts. And heres David Graeber sensing our disappointment in new technology. (We expected teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, and immortality drugs. We got LinkedIn, which, as Ann Friedman writes here, is an Escher staircase masquerading as a career ladder.)

Packed with hilarious, scabrous, up to-the-minute criticism of the American comedy, No Future for You debunks 'positive thinking' bromides and business idols. Susan Faludi debunks Facebook executive Sheryl Sandbergs phony feminist handbook, Lean In. Evgeny Morozov wrestles 'open source' and 'Web 2.0' and other pseudorevolutionary meme-making down to the ground. Chris Lehmann writes the obituary of the Washington Post, Barbara Ehrenreich goes searching for the ungood God in Ridley Scotts film Prometheus, Heather Havrilesky reads Fifty Shades of Grey, and Jim Newell investigates the strange and typical case of Adam Wheeler, the student fraud who fooled Harvard and, unlike the real culprits, went to jail.

No Future for You offers the counternarrative youve been missing, proof that dissent is alive and well in America. Please be warned, however. The writing that follows is polemical in nature. It may seek to persuade you of something.

Copublished with The Baffler.

Contributors
Chris Bray, Mark Dancey, Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Faludi, Thomas Frank, Ann Friedman, James Griffioen, David Graeber, A. S. Hamrah, Heather Havrilesky, Chris Lehmann, Rhonda Lieberman, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Evgeny Morozov, Jim Newell, Rick Perlstein, John Summers, Maureen Tkacik