Who’s Got Next?
What evolutions does the future actually hold?
Intros and Manifestos
From the Magazine
Just Say Yes
You can trace the liberalizing contours of the American public’s relationship to drugs by way of the last few presidents’ consumption habits. Clinton famously didn’t inhale, only willing to admit to touching reefer in England. Before his religious reawakening at forty, ...
Nohow On
Failure abounds today, but also its recuperation. Who hasn’t been sold “resilience,” what with a vast industry of self-help hucksters and combination fitness-business influencers imploring you to grit your teeth and embrace the grind? Samuel Beckett’s call to fail again ...
Age of Onset
We’ve never been so old. There were 95,000 centenarians in 1990 and more than 450,000 in 2015, according to estimates from the United Nations. Global life expectancy doubled from 1920 to 2020; the pandemic saw a dip that was horrifying but comparatively minor in the scope of a ...
Aiding and Abetting
The first quarter of the twenty-first century fast approaches its end, and all is not well in human welfare. According to the UN secretary-general, some 360 million people worldwide are in need of humanitarian assistance. Beset by challenges of its own making (corruption, abuse, ...
Terroir Squad
TikTok chefs stir-frying and red-cooking in idyllic Sichuan countrysides, listicles of where to get not-your-nonna’s tagliatelle, YouTube channels featuring artery-busting barbecue smoked by men who seem, above all, engorged: What are we awash in today but endless food ...
Glitter Gulch Global
It’s been twenty years since Las Vegas debuted “What happens here, stays here.” The slogan is a winking celebration of self-containment that has never quite been true. (Hence, perhaps, the marvelously redundant update three years ago: “What happens here, only happens ...
Gimme Shelter
On “The National Interest,” issue no. 67.
What Does Your Country Want?
On “The National Interest,” issue no. 67.
We’re a Happy Family; Me, Mom, and Daddy
On “The Ties That Bind,” issue no. 66.
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 ...
Change without Change
Forty-five years ago, the radical historian of science and technology David F. Noble observed a consistent pattern in modern American life: “Each major scientific advance, while appearing to presage an entirely new society, attests rather to the vigor and resilience of the old ...