The Baffler

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 ...

Cowabungled In a hell week that was particularly dystopic, even for 2023, Tennessee banned drag shows, Florida mulled requiring bloggers who want to critique the governor to register with the state, and the New York Times profiled a man who doesn’t wear shoes as though he ...

The Baffler magazine, America’s leading voice of interesting and unexpected left-wing political criticism since 1988, has appointed Matthew Shen Goodman as its new editor in chief. Shen Goodman comes to The Baffler from Triple Canopy, where he served as senior editor ...

Sphere is the Mind-Killer There seems to be no end to the ways that the formerly harmless old-timey knickknacks of a vanished Americana can harm us, with balloons peering down with sinister intent from the skies they once cluttered with box kites and fizzled fireworks, and ...

Écarté Derrière This week Germany continued to lead the world in modeling how an empire engages in civilized discourse when Marco Goecke, the director of the Hanover State Opera’s ballet company, smeared dog feces in the face of his critic, who had written of his ...

Two in the Bush In a week that saw America seized by spy-balloon fever, a toxic chemical cloud escape from a train to bedevil the residents of suburban Ohio, and the pre-Psychic Network song catalog of Dionne Warwick blast from car stereos in remembrance of Burt Bacharach, ...

The Importance of Being Concise After another cruel turn of the old Gregorian, we once again find ourselves stranded in the month of February, which is the official month of grapefruits, bird feeding, hot breakfast, snack foods, children’s dental health, embroidery, and ...

Robofop The tech world is already a burrow of shady borrowings, competing patents, and dodgy dot-com schemes, but these iniquities have so far been within the domain of the human. Enter CNET’s AI reporter, which has been found to have plagiarized the work of journalists at ...