John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, discusses the American critic and writer Dwight Macdonald, an uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, an anarchist, and a pacifist. Summers assembled new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, Masscult and Midcult Essays Against the American Grain. It shows Dwight Macdonald as a critic of America’s susceptibility to cultural fakery—he dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it on aesthetic and on political grounds.