The Baffler

Scientific Progress Goes Boink If a rocket explodes in the wilderness, does it make a sound? The answer is yes, and it is harming all of the birds. The week got off to a bang with the detonation of a SpaceX rocket intended to bring mankind one giant leap closer to filling ...

Oh, perfect masters. They thrive on disasters.

The Fickle Pudding Fingers of Fate The tolling of each hour in this fetid garbage patch of a country summons a new atrocity to slouch across the cable news chyrons. Bad news: it’s a growth industry, one flourishing at such an apocalyptic pace that a comprehensive tally may ...

Babes in Oyland Life begins, language and memory dawn as the skull grows hard, and the digestion adapts to solids; the future is full of promise. But since disappointment, emotional scar tissue, and debt await you anyway, why not get the ball rolling and become traumatized ...

Meaty, Beaty, Big & Bouncy In a week that saw the historic indictment of a former president, the Senate overturning the Covid-19 emergency order, and a federal judge block coverage for preventative care and cancer screenings, the people can be forgiven for longing to ...

First, Do No Arm Take a walk, legs! See you later, head! Sayonara, belly button! After millennia in obscurity, arms are finally getting their due as the unsung body part: the torso’s twin protuberances are now the subject of an ode in Vogue by Ada Calhoun. Calhoun reports ...

Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash After the fanatical persecution of Oliver Cromwell, the great famine of 1845, and Margaret Thatcher’s horrific treatment of the Sinn Féin martyrs, Ireland has finally won a reprieve: the archdioces of Philidelphia, Trenton, and Wilmington have ...

Shilling Me Softly Celebrities: they’re just like us, finagling a 1990s career in radio-friendly hip hop into a second vocation meeting shady Chinese operatives at the Four Seasons to negotiate the release of American captives, only to be targeted by the FBI and linked to ...