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Jonathon Sturgeon

Jonathon Sturgeon was the editor in chief of The Baffler. He was previously senior editor of the magazine, deputy editor of artnet News, literary editor at Flavorwire, and senior editor at The American Reader. He has contributed essays on literature, visual art, cinema, and politics to the Guardian, Frieze, ArtNews, and The Paris Review, among other outlets.

A flower bends over like a question mark as its petals fall to the ground.

The Enemies of the Many

Makepeace Sitlhou’s report, in this issue of The Baffler, on the agonies of Bengali Muslim Abubakkar Siddique, finds the worker stripped bare by his rulers, cast into statelessness and monitored by militant immigration enforcers in Assam, India. Sitlhou writes that in more ...
Two men in business attire holding a sheet over a pit.

Scenes of Instruction

“Our literary elites may all come from the same expensive institutions,” Jessa Crispin writes in issue 62 of The Baffler, “but they are all working stiffs in their own minds, pretending to feel solidarity with the working classes.” Crispin’s remark may explain two of ...
A glimmering star in space.

Cosmos and Pornografia

A SPACE TELESCOPE unfolds its golden mirror, blooming under the hidden light of the universe at the Second Lagrange Point, where it will offer the fruits of unpeaceful scientific progress to American humanity. It is named JWST, after a bigot who purged gay scientists from NASA, ...
A plastic bag on a boulder

Fracked and Extracted

If you’re feeling fracked, maybe it’s time to make the Great Resignation work for you. In August, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 4.3 million people left their jobs, the highest quit rate they’ve yet recorded. A March 2021 survey indicated that 41 percent ...
A sad looking blob creature with a tail and weird arms holds up a frowning pile of poop wrapped in a clear plastic bag.

Illness as Semaphore

Don’t look now. Contemporary liberals are summoning an omnium gatherum of dead words and outdated textbooks, dredging up confused accounts of Enlightenment rationality that tend to mutate into smug but underfunded mandates to “believe in science!” and calling everything ...
The spine of an open book rises up into the air, its end transforming into a hand that squeezes a hand grip strengthener.

Guru Shit

The yard fight over cancel culture reached what you’d call a good stopping point on July 17 of 2020, when J. C. Hallman, writing in Columbia Journal, recalled that the matter had been settled already with U.S. v. Alvarez, a First Amendment case decided by the Supreme Court in ...
A blurry picture of the moon hanging in the bleak darkness of space.

Goings On About Town

Last year we learned that an unspecified number of computer networks affiliated with the American government were compromised—maybe still are—by Russian actors. Not long ago, an oil pipeline supplying the East Coast was successfully targeted in a ransomware scheme. Earlier ...
Sketches of Xs.

Death of the Standard Model

Nestled somewhere in the unread pages of Democracy Journal is a roadmap to the Biden administration’s four-year plan. Something, something . . . Supply Chain Review. It mentions unions, I’ve heard, but unfortunately the editors translated it into the uncrackable pipspeak of ...