The Baffler

Junior Flints America has a long history of following up national tragedies with the marketing of questionable products, since grief and outrage are mere market demographics in the eyes of the corporate bounder: KFC’s pink buckets for cancer, O.J. Simpson pogs, the LEGO ...

Sex and Con-dy It is a new year and, with Valentine’s Day approaching, love is in the air—along with its attendant archangels of confusion, deception, and betrayal. To wit, Susan Meachen, the author of independently published romance novels like Smoky Mtn. Love and a ...

This year brought such a dizzying surplus of depravity—a truly incalculable preponderance of cruelty and braggadocio, vanity and idiocy—that no ledger would suffice. Each week, though, we plumbed the depths of mass media in hopes of surfacing the blackest pearls and the ...

The Baffler looks back in anger at 2022.

The Tide Is High In what is no doubt a flamboyant cross-promotion for James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, enthusiasm for the substance that covers 75 percent of the globe reached an all-time high this week, as humans seemed to rediscover the properties of wetness and ...

Irritable Vowel Syndrome It is a truth universally acknowledged that a spangle moop in Pasadena . . . wait, wait, let me start again. In a vole in the gerund, there lorved an omelet . . . no, still not right. Call me Fish Mail! Well, if you’ve been mangling lines you were ...

Ghost in the Shell While we sleep, the people rise and the pasta simmers. A Florida woman has embarked upon an upwards-of-five-million-dollar lawsuit against Velveeta for their fraudulent claim that their signature Shells & Cheese macaroni can be prepared in 3.5 minutes. ...

Aguirre, the Wrath of Gab “There is no space for symbolic structure,” sputters the Slovenian philosopher, “and this is really the paradox of psychoanalysis.” “In a way,” demurs the Bavarian filmmaker, “Freud also had something to do with literature.” The duo ...