Books by Chris Lehmann
Revolt of the Masscult
We live in an age of "popular culture"—another term, to some, for an organic mess of marketing strategies aimed at giving us the illusion of choice. From Oprah Winfrey's Book Club to presidential politics, however, distinctions of taste are more accurately understood to be "blunt instruments of antidemocratic elitism." So argues Chris Lehmann, in a discussion that ranges over the work of Edward Shils, Clement Greenberg, and Jonathan Franzen with equal ease. The resulting pamphlet is an impassioned plea for the rebirth of culture with content.
"Think that the age of the pamphlet ended with Thomas Paine? Think again. Chicago-based Prickly Paradigm Press has launched a series of broadsides aimed at knocking holes in conventional thinking wherever it's found. . . . In Revolt of the Masscult, Chris Lehmann—deputy editor of Book World—assails the blurring of 'mass' into 'popular' culture and the 'comforting impression that all mass entertainments are as freely chosen as, say, our political leaders or our forms of worship.' . . . Lehmann enlists everything from Dwight Macdonald's Masscult, Midcult, and High Culture to the Jonathan Franzen Oprah's Book Club dustup of 2001 to plead for a return to culture that means something—that, in other words, has actual rather than market value."—Jennifer Howard, Washington Post
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No Future for You: Salvos from The Baffler (The MIT Press)
by Thomas Frank, David Graeber, Rick Perlstein, Chris Lehmann, John Summers
A new collection on carnival hokum and magical thinking in post-apocalypse America—brought to you by The Baffler.
There's never been a better time to be outside the consensus—and if you don't believe it, then peer into these genre-defining essays from The Baffler, the magazine that's been blunting the cutting edge of American culture and politics for a quarter of a century. Here's Thomas Frank on the upward-falling cult of expertise in Washington, D.C., where belonging means getting the major events of our era wrong. Here's Rick Perlstein on direct mail scams, multilevel marketing, and the roots of right-wing lying. Here's John Summers on the illiberal uses of innovation in liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts. And here's 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 Sandberg's 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 Scott's 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 you've 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
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The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream
A grand and startling work of American history
America was founded, we’re taught in school, by the Pilgrims and other Puritans escaping religious persecution in Europe—an austere and pious lot who established a culture that remained pure and uncorrupted until the Industrial Revolution got in the way.
In The Money Cult, Chris Lehmann reveals that we have it backward: American capitalism has always been entangled with religion, and so today’s megapastors, for example, aren’t an aberration—they’re as American as Benjamin Franklin.
Tracing American Christianity from John Winthrop to the rise of the Mormon Church and on to the triumph of Joel Osteen, The Money Cult is an ambitious work of history from a widely admired journalist. Examining nearly four hundred years of American history, Lehmann reveals how America’s religious leaders became less worried about sin and the afterlife and more concerned with the material world, until the social gospel was overtaken by the gospel of wealth.
Showing how American Christianity came to accommodate—and eventually embrace—the pursuit of profit, as well as the inescapability of economic inequality, The Money Cult is a wide-ranging and revelatory book that will make you rethink what you know about the form of American capitalism so dominant in the world today, as well as the core tenets of America itself.
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Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class
"Social criticism at its scorching-hot best."Barbara Ehrenreich
"Think H.L. Mencken crossed with Jon Stewart."The Phoenix
In Rich People Things, Chris Lehmann lays bare the various dogmas and delusions that prop up plutocratic rule in the post-meltdown age. It's a humorous and harrowing tale of warped populism, phony reform, and blind deference to the nation's financial elite. As the author explains, American class privilege is very much like the idea of sex in a Catholic schoolit's not supposed to exist in the first place, but once it presents itself in your mind's eye, you realize that it's everywhere.
A concise and easy-to-use guide, Rich People Things catalogs the fortifications that shelter the opulent from the resentments of the hoi polloi. From ideological stanchions such as the Free Market through the castellation of media including The New York Times and Wired magazine, to gatekeepers such as David Brooks, Steve Forbes, and Alan Greenspan, Lehmann covers the vast array of comforting and comprehensive protections that allow the über-privileged to maintain their iron grip on almost half of America's wealth. With chapters on Malcolm Gladwell, the Supreme Court, the memoir, and more, no one is spared from Lehmann's pointed prose.
Chris Lehmann is employed, ever precariously, as an editor for Yahoo! News, Bookforum, and The Baffler, while dissecting the excesses of his social betters for his column Rich People Things at TheAwl.com. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife Ana Marie Cox and a quartet of excellent pets.
Copies
No copies available.
The Money Cult Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream
A grand and startling work of American history
America was founded, we’re taught in school, by the Pilgrims and other Puritans escaping religious persecution in Europe—an austere and pious lot who established a culture that remained pure and uncorrupted until the Industrial Revolution got in the way.
In The Money Cult, Chris Lehmann reveals that we have it backward: American capitalism has always been entangled with religion, and so today’s megapastors, for example, aren’t an aberration—they’re as American as Benjamin Franklin.
Tracing American Christianity from John Winthrop to the rise of the Mormon Church and on to the triumph of Joel Osteen, The Money Cult is an ambitious work of history from a widely admired journalist. Examining nearly four hundred years of American history, Lehmann reveals how America’s religious leaders became less worried about sin and the afterlife and more concerned with the material world, until the social gospel was overtaken by the gospel of wealth.
Showing how American Christianity came to accommodate—and eventually embrace—the pursuit of profit, as well as the inescapability of economic inequality, The Money Cult is a wide-ranging and revelatory book that will make you rethink what you know about the form of American capitalism so dominant in the world today, as well as the core tenets of America itself.
Copies
No copies available.
Building School 2.0: How to Create the Schools We Need
Ninety-five propositions for creating more relevant, more caring schools
There is a growing desire to reexamine education and learning. Educators use the phrase "school 2.0" to think about what schools will look like in the future. Moving beyond a basic examination of using technology for classroom instruction, Building School 2.0: How to Create the Schools We Need is a larger discussion of how education, learning, and our physical school spaces can―and should―change because of the changing nature of our lives brought on by these technologies.
Well known for their work in creating Science Leadership Academy (SLA), a technology-rich, collaborative, learner-centric school in Philadelphia, founding principal Chris Lehmann and former SLA teacher Zac Chase are uniquely qualified to write about changing how we educate. The best strategies, they contend, enable networked learning that allows research, creativity, communication, and collaboration to help prepare students to be functional citizens within a modern society. Their model includes discussions of the following key concepts: Technology must be ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible Classrooms must be learner-centric and use backwards design principles Good technology can be better than new technology Teachers must serve as mentors and bring real-world experiences to students
Each section of Building School 2.0 presents a thesis designed to help educators and administrators to examine specific practices in their schools, and to then take their conclusions from theory to practice. Collectively, the theses represent a new vision of school, built off of the best of what has come before us, but with an eye toward a future we cannot fully imagine.
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