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Intros and Manifestos

From the Magazine

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 ...

Caravan of Fools
Idiots, as a rule, should be kept apart, but for this, The Baffler’s fiftieth issue, we’ve asked them to hold hands under the banner of “The New Booboisie.” A word often attributed to H. L. Mencken, “booboisie” combines the Saxon “boob” with bourgeoisie to ...

Gone to Earth
“Ruination happens at two speeds: furious and slow,” Susan Stewart writes in The Ruins Lesson. Either human error conspires with nature in lightning feats of physical destruction, or vegetation slowly overgrows the old stone monuments. In both cases, we’re left to scrape ...

The Limbs of the Well
Our incumbent regime of eugenic wellness leaves little room for flights of fancy, at least for the sick: it’s hard to spur and bridle the imagination when they’ve run you ragged around the track. Winner, as usual, takes almost everything; last across the finish line gets ...

Terms of Nervous
Here in the Contract State, we’re no longer certain the global markets will hold, what with all the reneging and withdrawing by President Interruptus and his international band of outsider-insiders. No deal, it turns out, is artful enough to stay dealt, whether climate accord, ...

Bedtime for Democracy
November 2015
Issue No. 29
“The earth belongs to the living and not to the dead,” Thomas Jefferson said. And a lot of good that did. The founding father railed against economic royalists and their schemes to perpetuate wealth through inheritance, giving the dead hands of the past a leg up (so to ...

In Mayhem We Trust
Long before the triumph of Stand Your Ground gun legislation, the overlapping Grand Guignols of the Iraq invasion and ISIS’s rise, or the release of the latest cinematic blood orgy at the multiplex, America’s political id was drenched in blood. Call it the uncivil ...