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Intros and Manifestos

From the Magazine

Division Street
John Dos Passos wrote that the radical critic Randolph Bourne—“this little sparrowlike man”—“put a pebble in his sling and hit Goliath in the forehead with it. War, he wrote, is the health of the state.” In the spirit of Bourne’s “unscared ghost” (JDP again), ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 Contemporary liberals are summoning an omnium gatherum of dead words and outdated textbooks, dredging up confused accounts of Enlightenment rationality that tend to mutate into smug but underfunded mandates to “believe in science!”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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

ProCounterPublica
Whatever we call them, we know the people who lethally moshed the Capitol in January’s vape lounge putsch share at least one trait: the sense of superiority that comes from constant political and media attention. For more than a moment, we all lived in the Duck Dynasty version ...

The Grief Depression
Charon, the ferryman of the dead, was more like an Uber driver than a salaried employee. In Lucian’s dialogues, the psychopomp finds himself hard up, on the short side of his account with Zeus. To buy time, he asks the messenger god Hermes to relax, assuring him that peace on ...

The Supply Chain Gang
It is my displeasure to write this note fifteen days ahead of the U.S. election. I do not know if state polling has improved since 2016, if Biden and the Democrats have by now ridden the blue wave, or if another shock Trump victory has led to civil unrest. If Biden and the ...

Paging Mr. Agreeable
We know we’re living in a time of consensus because the attention paid to specific grievances is pitiably low. It’s not that the makeup of human beings has changed, it’s more that the barely distinguishable personalities who explain the meaning of every event are ...

A Matter of Life and Death
“Our illnesses are mostly political illnesses,” wrote the revolutionary novelist and playwright Peter Weiss. I prefer to take this cryptic remark, found in a private journal, to a radical conclusion: all illness is political in origin. Certainly this provocation could be ...