“Like a French Ann Coulter with stumpy legs and nicotine-ruined lungs, but sans Coulter’s gift for punchy images, Baudrillard stalked fame by making outrageous declarations he knew to be false. Authors of the Baudrillard obituaries, like the writers of encyclopedia articles on him, found it easier to list subjects he’d written about or the usual-suspects list of influences (Nietzsche, Mauss, Debord, Bataille) than to articulate what he claimed about them.”