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The history of literacy is a list of complaints. Critics reliably decry each new technological development as an attention-stealing toy. Before recent grousing about ChatGPT, protestations were uttered about the detrimental effects of the internet (fearing endless distraction, Jonathan Franzen destroyed his laptop’s ethernet port); the word processor (the ease of moving text around declared “an irresponsible whimsicality” by Alexander Cockburn in the eighties); the typewriter (“The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm,” wrote C. S. Lewis, in 1959, to a schoolgirl requesting writing advice); and the very reproducibility of the book (Song-era scholar Ye Mengde held that woodblock texts too often propagated uncorrected errors). In Plato’s Phaedrus, writing itself is suspect, as the literate “will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing.” Amid the breathless techno-optimist awe of artificial intelligence—and ahistorical dismissal of its novelty—it is easy to forget that the current crises of reading and writing are unprecedented in degree, but not in kind. “After Words” considers what’s actually different about today’s information overload and whether we’ve been postliterate for far longer than we’d like to believe. “Under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say,” Friedrich Kittler wrote, but that lofty moment was in the eighties, and the fin de siècle of the written word had yet to give way to the twenty-first century’s incessant logorrhea—a second age of orality, Noah McCormack explains, the Homeric epic replaced by short-form video content and podcasting. (Brace Belden reports from the latter industry, a heady mix of dick-pill ads and Kamala Harris interviews.) Whatever heights our devices have reached, McCormack warns, do not succumb to a technological determinism that ignores class. Accordingly, the siren song of Ms. Rachel cannot be understood outside of America’s ongoing impoverishment of families, writes Sophie Pinkham, lamenting the YouTuber’s death grip on toddler attention spans, to the detriment of the world of books. More than laudable, however, is Ms. Rachel’s vocal support for Palestine. As Bruce Robbins writes in his account of the Sokal affair some thirty years on, the occupation is also a uniting cause between the physicist and the editors of the magazine he so famously hoaxed. Often falling short of such political demands, our literati may indeed have little to say, as Chris Lehmann points out in his survey of the Trump novel. (If the MFA lifestyle has failed you, consider, as the protagonists of Jess Row’s short story do, assassinating a war criminal.) Andrew Leland contemplates how deaf artists and writers are grappling with a second Trump administration keen on dismantling the Americans with Disabilities Act. Looking outside the imperial core, non-anglophone writers hailing from South Korea to Mexico join a forum on brain rot across the globe. Domestically, Mina Tavakoli writes on the devolution of American culture into chaotic slop over the past twenty-five years—a descent made graphic by Michael Oswell in the issue’s exhibit. Where does the reader find respite, then? One possible path, though usually maligned: video games, at least in the case of Disco Elysium, the Estonian blockbuster built upon a novel that exceeds said book as a literary experience, as Gabriel Winslow-Yost argues. In it, more than a million words evoke both postrevolutionary melancholy and communist fervor for a more just world, as experienced by an amnesiac cop with the DTs. Call it harm reduction of the digital variety: if we’re to be addicted to our devices, let us be bound to something better on our screens.
 October 2025

no. 81—After Words

Gauche, in my opinion, to settle a grudge worthy of the name with money. (Did you not nurse that grievance? Would you sell your child?) But when the payoff grows big enough, cooler heads prevail, or just ones more venal. From Sam Altman to Ted Cruz, political, corporate, and tech elites have put aside previous objections—Trump’s resemblance to past dictators, his willingness to insult your wife—to profit and empower themselves. The arc of domestic animosity bends toward dollars and nationalism. The Hatfields and McCoys have museums, romance novels, and a document announcing a truce to their century-and-a-half-old feud in the star-spangled aftermath of 9/11, as Lauren Fadiman writes in “American Vendetta,” our issue on domestic grudgery. Equally historical is the labor unrest at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Tadhg Larabee reports from Steel City on the newspaper workers carrying out the longest ongoing strike in the United States. Journalists are on the scoreboard of this country’s resentments, but the nearly fifty million immigrants in residence seem to have taken first place. Belén Fernández leads readers into the Darién Gap, that treacherous stretch of jungle traversed by many recent arrivals, where smugglers serve as de facto U.S. border guards. Nick Tabor describes how Denver attempted to navigate these surges of immigration with little assistance from the Biden administration and open hostility from its successor—a vehemence Trump has extended toward the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, as Pooja Bhatia reports. And Nicolás Medina Mora writes on the cultural legacy of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which devastated Mexico such that both farmers and fiction writers sought a new life north of the border. Elsewhere in the issue, contributors consider a feud old as time: man against nature or, increasingly, its replacement. Piper French asks whether RICO lawsuits against OnlyFans creators or the automation of pretending to be a nubile all-American natural blonde will put low-paid “chatters” on the platform out of a job. Facing a future of employment made uncertain for all by artificial intelligence, Jennifer C. Berkshire ponders why the idea that our schools might teach values besides corporate growth has been ceded to right-wingers. Those touting “patriotic education” have included Pete Hegseth, whose long-running war against women inside the military and out is chronicled by Jasper Craven. But what of the youth? They’d call me ancient for remembering Nas’s “Ether,” the song nearly a quarter-century old. (The homophobia remains silly and indefensible but accusing Jay-Z of being a man in his mid-thirties who takes karate holds up.) As Adrian Nathan West writes in his essay on drill music in Philadelphia, rap beef now can involve a degree of violence perhaps unimaginable to previous generations, conflicts stoked in impoverished environs between a select but vocal few dissing one another on Instagram Live and modifying Glocks to be capable of fully automatic fire. “All they soldiers getting touched,” rapped the scene’s figurehead and self-described “Mr. Disrespectful” YBC Dul, months before he was shot and killed at the age of twenty-five. Gauche is gauche, maybe, but one wishes there were a dollar amount that could have kept any of these men—some so young as to be in high school—alive.
 September 2025

no. 80—American Vendetta

“America first does not mean America alone,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on April 23, seeking to reassure the market three weeks after the president declared Liberation Day and tariffed the world. Spooked by turbulence in the bond market—or eager to discard the pretense that this wasn’t primarily about a Sino-American decoupling—the White House had already announced a ninety-day pause exempting all countries besides the Middle Kingdom from the new import levies. Despite Bessent’s remarks, the administration’s attack on all the factories under heaven has been met with international opprobrium and plunging domestic confidence in our chief dealmaker; the United States’ position in the twenty-first-century global order has arguably been more threatened by its upheaval of the supply chain than, for example, the approximately 4.5 million left dead in the war on terror, to say nothing of what this country now abets in Gaza. “Player Haters” surveys the state of competition in Fortress America, where the only flourishing industries are sports betting and YouTube. The latter’s vloggers have embraced the country’s masculinist turn: fewer suicide forest pranks and tiny-mic’d street interviews, more beating the shit out of each other. Sean Nam demonstrates how influencers took over the dying sport of boxing, selling sloppy bouts to an uneducated audience while decrepit and corrupt regulatory bodies played blind and profited big. Elsewhere in violence, mixed-martial-arts moguls TKO Group Holdings, Inc. have diversified, now proffering Professional Bull Riders, a multimillion-dollar novelty league that sells highlight reels of bovine-on-man accidents and the Western frontier as not a place but a vibe, per Grayson Scott, easily accessible everywhere given this nation’s omnipresent fears of invasion. Country-fried LARPing continues in Lena Redford’s exhibit of cowboy mounted shooting, while Tristan deBrauwere’s photos of CarJitsu—i.e., jiujitsu in a car—depict another breed of vehicle-based brutality. No one has choked out a Formula 1 driver at 230 miles per hour, but perhaps one of the citizens of Las Vegas might chance it, aggrieved, as David Hill shows, by the city’s many capitulations to the racing league. Other athletes watch as once quintessentially American pastimes experience a downturn. Dennis M. Hogan contemplates whether college sports are too dependent on exploitation to survive paying players. Dave Denison wonders how long the change-resistant sport of bowling can endure the vulture capitalists buying up alleys around the country. Petra Browne details the challenges faced by female bodybuilders long after their 1980s heyday, competitors reliant now on muscle-worshipping groupies to bankroll their costs—inclusive of the steroids necessary to compete at the highest levels. Andrew Schenker considers the complicated questions faced by halls of fame, like whether a separate wing should exist for the dopers and cheaters. On its current course, the United States could use some juice of its own. Domestic production will have to be bolstered and industrial inputs found. Meg Bernhard reports from Arizona’s copper mines, necessary for the cutting-edge technologies we’re supposedly about to furnish ourselves, alongside the billions of dollars of pharmaceuticals we’ll no longer import from abroad. But will putting a “Made in the USA” sticker on every bottle of Advil compel the middlemen of medicine, described by Jess McAllen, to take pity on our wallets? It’s doubtful. The tariffs, as currently conceived, are already a regressive tax, and America First seems to only ever mean immiserating the poor until they’re penniless and alone.
 June 2025

no. 79—Player Haters

Forty-Five has become 47, and Donald Trump is now the first president to serve two nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland. With protective tariffs anathema to Uncle Jumbo, as Cleveland was known to family and friends, the two wouldn’t have agreed on all counts, but our twenty-second and twenty-fourth president was also a downsizer cartoonishly obsessed with small government. (Handing out nearly six hundred vetoes in total, he earned the additional nickname “His Obstinacy.”) When denying aid to drought-stricken farmers in Texas, Cleveland proclaimed, “The lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.” Once reelected, Trump said nothing as nakedly hostile to the idea that a state should provide for its citizens, preferring nationalist banalities and “work smarter, not harder” paeans to efficiency that will supposedly be delivered by Elon Musk’s cost-cutting campaign. “Sunlight is pouring forth over the entire world,” Trump announced at his inauguration, accompanying “a tide of change” sweeping America. At the time of this writing, a month or so into his presidency, Trump’s war on “flagrant scams,” as he declared at this year’s CPAC, has looked mostly like the evisceration of the institutions he was elected to helm once again. Then again, homecomings are often ugly business, and in “Homeland Insecurity,” The Baffler’s authors consider various unhappy returns. J.W. McCormack heads back to Knox County to answer the burning question: Why is the professional wrestler known as Kane the mayor of this corner of Tennessee? Martin Dolan recounts a summer back home spent serving winners and losers alike behind the bar of the Saratoga Race Course, and Britni West attempts to preserve the scrappy cowboy nature of her family in the mountain west in the issue’s exhibit. Adéwálé Májà-Pearce considers his upbringing within and without Nigeria and that class of natives alienated from their countrymen courtesy of colonial education and a culture of flattering foreign powers. Elsewhere in national chauvinisms, Wen Stephenson visits a development-obsessed Nepal after decades away, finding a country whose financial ascendancy is outpaced by its increasing vulnerability to climate change. André Naffis-Sahely examines ethnic cleansing in Bhutan, which would prefer to be known for its self-selected slogan of being “the happiest country in the world.” Rebecca Nathanson details how the right-wing French group Némésis riles up anti-immigrant sentiments in the name of feminism. And Alexander Wells takes the reader on a tour of Budapest’s House of Terror museum, a physical embodiment of Viktor Orbán’s ambition to rewrite Hungary’s national myths along authoritarian lines. What to do when you can’t go home and you don’t want to stay here? For those leftists longing for a less antisocial version of the billionaire’s doomsday bunker, Caitlin L. Chandler presents an account of learning survival skills and talking theory at the Island School of Social Autonomy. Or you could denounce domestication altogether, rewild yourself and the lands around you, as the eco-saboteur profiled by Christopher Ketcham alleges to have done—an assault on civilization itself, or at least its fences on public lands, one stroke of a Sawzall at a time.
 April 2025

no. 78—Homeland Insecurity

ON THE MORNING OF November 5, the day of the 2024 presidential election, the algorithm delivered me the promise of escape. Titled “Here’s How to Buy Citizenship in Another Country,” the article lamented the global character of climate change and the fact that “political turmoil is upending longstanding democracies.” Despite the polycrisis’s indifference to borders, the author suggested I might be happier elsewhere. One can achieve citizenship by investment in Turkey or Dominica, I read, and resident status is obtainable by “Golden Visas” in locales ranging from Spain to New Zealand for a minimum investment of a quarter of a million dollars. For those looking to expatriate on a budget, Fodor’s Travel suggested the life of a digital nomad. An attractive prospect if you don’t mind jacking up the rents in Condesa or Neukölln—though American males like myself should worry about being mistaken for a Passport Bro, those members of the American manosphere abroad taking advantage of remote work in order to perform “dating market arbitrage” in poorer locales where feminism has supposedly failed to take root. In “Expatriates,” Adrian Nathan West argues that this phenomenon repackages sex tourism as glossy personal accomplishment. Sex workers themselves have a demystified, materialist understanding of their work, as Jessica Van Meir writes, reporting on their experiences trying to stay put and survive turbulent economies and rampant gentrification in Colombia and Guatemala. Elsewhere in Latin America, Jared Olson reports on internal migrants forced to pull up stakes throughout Mexico, caught between criminals, paramilitaries, and a frequently indifferent government. Delusional is perhaps the best word to describe the Japanese state, according to Dylan Levi King. His essay describes a changing Tokyo at a moment in which the yen is low, the population is declining, and citizens, expats, and guest workers alike cling to the country’s past rather than face Japan’s uncertain future. Alex Cocotas considers how the cosmopolitan creative class has exhausted their bohemian version of Berlin, and Chris Crowley details how Australia’s willingness to join the Global War on Terror led to a flat white-swilling, coked-up invasion of Williamsburg from down under at the peak of trés cool Brooklyn. Elsewhere in globalized kitchens, an Argentinian working in a London restaurant when the Falklands War breaks out takes revenge on a sadistic cook in Rodrigo Fresán’s short story. Leaving doesn’t always mean getting away, a sentiment echoed by Dorothee Elmiger, who describes her Swiss hometown’s Silvesterchlaus celebration and its apocryphal roots. Expatriate, despite its urbane connotations, simply means someone living abroad. Spies technically fit the bill, per Ann Neumann’s account of a reunion of veterans of a military intelligence post in the Horn of Africa; as do medically minded humanitarians, some of whom may reconsider the work of Doctors Without Borders, given Mary Turfah’s critique. Those Americans who feel like they woke up on November 6 citizens in another country might also claim the title (though Baffler readers were less likely to be surprised)—no need then to uproot yourself to venture somewhere foreign and join the Gringo Worldwide.
 January 2025

no. 77—Expatriates

CHOOSE YOUR PRECIPICE. The grist that makes modern life will run out at some point—when will we tap the last barrel of crude, blow through the remaining stocks of helium, deplete those rare metals only getting rarer? More pressing than bismuth and boron as I write this in September is who will win the election; even more pressing than that is a ceasefire in Gaza, though one worries that the war will only widen. Perhaps by publication time the conflagration will have broadened—perhaps the very worst will have come to pass, the Doomsday Clock having finally struck midnight, the world set ablaze by intercontinental ballistic missiles. We have already endured years of near-misses by nuclear-weapons states—solar flares and training exercises mistaken for imminent attacks to be responded to with the most lethal capacity—as Emma Claire Foley points out in her essay for “Get in Line,” which considers the ways in which we wait today and for what exactly. Elsewhere on the nuclear question, Emily Harnett takes the reader on a tour of decommissioned missile silos in America’s heartland, Cold War weapons infrastructure now rented out on Airbnb or memorialized as patriotic kitsch. On the subject of cheap spectacle, Gabriel Winslow-Yost considers the promise of virtual reality, which seems to only improve in proportion to the real world’s degradation. Jess McAllen surveys the landscape of AI therapy bots: ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of mental health, they are yet another impoverishment of our health care experience. Few understand this more acutely than the poor, as Bryce Covert writes, pushed off of Medicaid across the country by the millions. Waiting on the powerful’s whims, too, are seafarers, who, as Laleh Khalili argues, have little redress against shipowners who fly flags of convenience and leave crews in limbo at sea. There can be promise in waiting, however: Jack Sheehan considers what a finally united Ireland might look like, even as a shifting party landscape and the political rise of an Irish far right complicate the picture. Eric Dean Wilson writes on more than a decade of cruising and whether the analog experience of patiently seeing who’s around might combat sex’s domination by the apps and the gentrification of queer life. His essay is accompanied by photographs from the late 1960s by Arthur Tress depicting cruising in New York’s Central Park, a series Tress has only recently begun to show publicly. Fret as we might over life’s various ticking clocks, art rewards such forbearance (though a race can be inspiringly bizarre, per the issue’s short story by Manuela Draeger, translated from the French by Brian Evenson). Ed Park describes his rediscovery of an unpublished 1998 manuscript during the pandemic, finding a “document of sustained artistic bliss” he had yet to experience again. And Justin Guthrie contributes a series of portraits of discarded objects picked out from an obsessive period of trawling the Los Angeles River, the photographer now waiting for the waters to deposit another haul of trash he can make his own.
 November 2024

no. 76—Get in Line

“In the United States, political change is evolutionary rather than revolutionary,” wrote Kevin Phillips, the Republican political analyst who helped devise the racial grievance-driven Southern Strategy, in 1969’s The Emerging Republican Majority. That book’s intensive taxonomy of which whites broke for Nixon and why—Phillips referred to his research as an outgrowth of “taking zoology in the classroom”—inaugurated a pop-Darwinist tendency among commentators: extrapolating prophecies of America’s political future from some supposedly imminent preponderance in the changing population. Accordingly, Democratic partisans have made Phillips’s titular locution their own, taking the country’s looming majority-minority status to mean a likely voting bloc perpetually blue. “Facing the Future” examines the use and abuse of the “emerging majority,” our contributors asking how the idea of a coming consensus has been used to manipulate voters and paper over dissension within ethnic and racial groups. In an examination of Phillips’s career, Astra Taylor argues that the bipartisan fondness for this essentializing trope occludes solidarity and organizing across both race and class. Geraldo Cadava and Rick Perlstein wonder whether predictions of a millenarian shift will ever lose their appeal, given that demography has not managed to be destiny in the past half-century. Political affiliations are not actually written into our DNA, despite the growing fondness among conservatives for Great Replacement fearmongering, as Gaby Del Valle describes in an essay on the recent eugenics revival. The current immigrant experience is less that of an invading Democratic foot soldier and more of a buffeted member of the precariat, per Pooja Bhatia’s report on the liminal protections provided to migrants. Dennis M. Hogan’s chronicle of Staten Island demonstrates the long and sordid history of mob violence against newcomers to this country, whose growing diversity hasn’t secured a permanent liberal stronghold. See Arizona, as Kyle Paoletta details, a rapidly expanding state more in thrall to a culture of economic growth than to either party; or Texas, where Dave Denison searches for a long-lost left populism now struggling to be revived. It may have been Americans who coined the term “emerging majority,” but the unpredictable politics of demographic change are playing out across the globe. Lily Lynch surveys the “demographic oblivion” faced by the Balkans’ native-born population, pinched by low rates of fertility and high rates of emigration; filling in the gap are migrant workers from countries like Nepal and the Philippines, as well as Russian émigrés fleeing Putin’s regime. Writing on the German trial of neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Underground, Michael Lipkin reconsiders the country’s famed memory culture in its current era, marked by an ascendant far right and a plentitude of citizens with an “immigration background.” What evolutions does the future actually hold? Probably not the matriarchal society of “wooms” and veiled men auditioning for the privilege of donating sperm, as depicted in Chantal Clarke’s short story. Perhaps we’ll look like the motley multiracial amalgamations depicted on this issue’s covers, or we’ll be uploaded to the cloud to live a pixelated life à la Gao Hang’s low-res portraits. Or we’ll be hunted like dogs by dogs—robot ones, to be exact, like those Rebecca McCarthy finds on campus at the University of Pennsylvania, already used today to police the southern border of a country terrified of what (and who) is to come.
 September 2024

no. 75—Facing the Future

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, Bush the younger by all accounts led a wild life. While author J.H. Hatfield’s claim in Fortunate Son, his 1999 presidential biography, that Bush had been arrested for cocaine use was met with skepticism—the book would be withdrawn by St. Martin’s Press upon reports that Hatfield had served prison time for hiring a hitman—polling at the time also suggested that people cared little if Dubya partook. His successor simply admitted to both pot and blow in a memoir, with little mainstream political backlash, though cocaine use is one of many real and imagined facts about Obama that feed right-wing conspiracies to this day. Afterward, Trump’s reign demonstrated the broadening of our nation’s pharmaceutical lens, as well as its darkening. White House doctors freely dispensed ziplocks of Ambien and Provigil in the executive offices as Trump would go on to hock hydroxychloroquine (and bleach) as Covid prophylactics. Hunter Biden’s crack use seems to bother people less than his being on the board of a Ukrainian energy company; if his father is on a cocktail of performance enhancers, as some allege, what truly rankles is not Biden’s possible Adderall usage but his advanced age. That’s not to say that drugs have definitively triumphed in the war on drugs, though the gradual mainstreaming of drug-assisted therapy does signal a certain kind of victory. Here, in “Altered States,” John Semley writes on the growing acceptance and commodification of MDMA, championed now for its psychic amelioration by veterans and ravers alike. Dan Piepenbring finds antecedents for the current vogue for ketamine clinics in the nineteenth-century “Anaesthetic Revelation” fueled by nitrous oxide and ether, whose users struggled to preserve the overwhelming wisdom fully available only during a fleeting high. That drugs can mean both so much and so little is Dylan Levi King’s takeaway from his survey of synthetic drug use by hobbyists in contemporary China. The dankly organic is now recreationally legal in twenty-four states. Ariel Fisher tours retirees wild for marijuana in their golden years, while Baynard Woods examines labor abuse in the growing cannabis industry. We’ve come far, then, from the 1980s heyday of antidrug propaganda chronicled by J.W. McCormack, when McGruff the Crime Dog might warn that a single puff could send you straight to the hard stuff. Still, many myths persist. This issue attempts to puncture a few: Zachary Siegel questions the “epidemic” framing of the opioid crisis. Ann Neumann argues that we continually demonize those seeking to minimize physical pain through the poppy plant’s derivatives, and Donald Morrison details how Oregon never really gave drug decriminalization a fighting chance. As Madeleine Wattenbarger writes, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s criticism of his country’s prisons as “five-star hotels” is only true with regard to the exorbitant costs of incarceration there, often borne by prisoners’ families. Edward Ongweso Jr. and Athena Sofides explain how patent “evergreening” allows insulin prices to soar year-after-year, despite Big Pharma’s lack of actual innovation in hormone production. Oswaldo Zavala lampoons claims that Hamas and Mexican cartels bonded over the fine art of tunnel building, the sort of political pipe dream it’s easy to imagine leaving the cosmetically plumped lips of former congressman George Santos like, as Dale Peck describes, so many other lies—the largest one, perhaps too easily believed by even his skeptics, being that Santos is uniquely duplicitous in a nation trashed in more ways than one.
 June 2024

no. 74—Altered States

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 and better has been repurposed as prosperity gospel by BrainyQuote.com and by Buddhist nun and best-selling self-help author Pema Chödrön. It’s been consumed like so much protein powder by retired Navy SEAL, podcaster, and “leadership instructor” Jocko Willink, who militarizes the Irish playwright’s bleak, language-starved injunction in a YouTube video that’s been viewed twelve million times: “Get up, dust off, reload, recalibrate, reengage.” Some refuse this mandate to try again, differently. Take the Democrats, who, as Jennifer Berkshire shows, have failed to look beyond the neoliberal educational policies of the past thirty years even as conservatives lead an assault on public school teachers, who are leaving the profession in droves. Or the warmongers, berated by John Dolan in his survey of recent military trends, who are happy to march anyone but themselves to a bloody end despite dwindling numbers of the young, willing, and able across much of the globe. In the United States, as Jasper Craven points out in a profile of Willink’s fellow ex-SEAL influencer Eddie Gallagher, we seem to prefer our military members to hawk supplements and gun-themed coffee. How should the left recalibrate? Jules Gill-Peterson considers Judith Butler’s analysis of the reactionary anti-trans forces surging worldwide and finds the philosopher’s solutions less vital than fatiguing. Hannah Proctor places the major Anglophone electoral losses suffered by the left at the end of the last decade into a larger history of left melancholia and burnout, arguing for the necessity of mourning—and its acknowledgment—in politics. Drawing from the psychoanalytic tradition of the Middle Group, Sam Adler-Bell contends that at least a moment of lying fallow after defeat is necessary. Convents were once a place for such contemplation and renewal, but as Lauren Fadiman shows, the United States’ Catholic sisterhood is now shrinking to the point of nonexistence. When reengaging, best to avoid easy absolution and fictitious succor. This is often easier said than done, as Jess McAllen demonstrates in her study of celebrity endometriosis surgeons, who have flourished by offering supposed cures in an environment of misinformation and false promises. Hubert Adjei-Kontoh lambasts the too-easy conflation of dance music’s emergence from the marginalized with its supposed ability to bring about utopia, while Liam Baranauskas makes a plea to free ourselves from the isolating tyranny of the Netflix algorithm in favor of seeking ourselves in others, that “most affecting and holy of reactions to art.” He finds common cause then with Andrew Norman Wilson, who narrates his departure, replete with a rib removal and an episode of penguin-induced dissociation, from a contemporary art world whose works serve no one but yacht owners and curatorial bureaucrats with terminal degrees.
 April 2024

no. 73—Consolation Prizes

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 century’s time. Simultaneously, there have never been so many of us of so many ages (nearly a third of the eight billion alive today are under eighteen), and so there is an unprecedented number of generations now existing, which is to say aging at the same time. “Life Alert” considers getting older and its consequences, for the aged and youthful alike. Chris Lehmann surveys the sclerotic class of gerontocrats from Biden and Trump to McConnell and Pelosi, tracing the question of how old is too old to govern back to the 1984 Reagan-Mondale debate, which inaugurated the concern in American public life. To be elderly is not necessarily to be empowered in this country, however, especially for those who’ve experienced lifelong bigotry: Ann Neumann details the discrimination faced by LGBTQ elders from a nursing home industry already struggling to care for its aging clientele, while Jeff Weinstein chronicles how hard it is for queer seniors to get adequate health care from Medicare when no one in the U.S. government seems to believe anyone over sixty-five fucks. Elsewhere in the issue, contributors consider how we navigate a changing world that remains hostile to its inhabitants. Aaron Gell places the RICO charges against the activists militating against Cop City within a long history of state persecution of dissidents in the American South, the recent charges echoing the 1930s prosecution of Black communist agitator Angelo Herndon. Britt H. Young considers the brand-new world of silicone penises and the prosthetic euphoria available to all at your local sex shop. And Adrian Nathan West examines the loosening taboos around steroids, making the case that it’s a laudable sea change for a particularly masculine kind of gender affirmation—with some qualifications, given the American appetite for excess. No one has, to my knowledge, used artificial intelligence to resurrect the likes of the bodybuilding YouTube greats Rich Piana or Joesthetics, gone at the tender ages of forty-six and thirty; one likely could, however, with the gimmicky tools scrutinized by Tamara Kneese in her survey of transhumanist technologists’ attempts to resuscitate the dead with data. A more deliberate approach, without the use of Amazon’s Alexa, might be that of Cecil Brown, the eighty-year-old veteran of the Black avant-garde attempting to digitally revive, as Matt Sandler writes, the enslaved antebellum poet George Moses Horton. Amid all this not-quite-dying and almost-living, how fare the youth? Some are funneled into Reaganite financial literacy programs where they play at being fifth-grade adults, e.g., work to pay off an imaginary bank loan and pretend to have carpal tunnel syndrome, as Anya Ventura reports from the immersive learning experience that is BizTown. Others might have the privilege of learning from Austin McCoy, who writes of his rap-soundtracked political education in the 1990s and his current efforts teaching university students the history of hip-hop. It’s an effort toward a tradition—the best we can do in our short time here, our lengthened dotages still falling short of the lifespan of, say, Niagara Falls, as Chris Maggio shows in his photo essay on the natural wonder and its tourist economy.
 January 2024

no. 72—Life Alert

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, influence-peddling), as well as developments, like climate change, beyond its control, the humanitarian industry faces down an era of permanent crisis. Whither humanitarianism? Straight to hell, according to Joshua Craze, in his history of “the angel’s creed” professed by the European bureaucrats who preside over never-ending famine and war. The humanitarian, he continues in his contribution to the issue’s titular symposium, might soon be held in as much contempt as the colonial missionary is today. Michael Barnett, Miriam Ticktin, Alex de Waal, Musab Younis, and Hong (Stella) Zhang offer their agreements, rejoinders, and addenda to the debate. Elsewhere, the actions of global leaders past and present offer little confidence on the matter. Tim Schwab writes on the Big Philanthropy of Bill Gates, who has attempted to trick the public into viewing his self-interest as charitable largesse, while Laura Robson details how the United Nations remade refugees as precarious, unprotected labor during and after the Cold War. The issue also features contributors considering the legacy of specific twenty-first-century humanitarian efforts. Pooja Bhatia describes how the UN tried to deny responsibility for bringing cholera to Haiti following the 2010 earthquake, refusing to this day to make adequate reparations for the deaths caused by their workers. Helen Epstein chronicles the failure of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (better known as PEPFAR) to end, per its Bush-administration architects’ ambition, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa once and for all. Domestically, Sam Russek considers “humonetarianism,” or conservative social reform which is derived from grievances over taxes rather than concern for human dignity, as applied to criminal justice in Texas. Elsewhere in the state, Caroline Tracey profiles the forensic anthropologists of Operation Identification, who attempt to identify and repatriate the remains of migrants too often carelessly buried in the borderlands. Tanvi Misra highlights the United States’ shoddy, patchwork, and often abusive system for dealing with unaccompanied migrant youth who survive that treacherous crossing. What can be done, in the face of all this failure? There aren’t easy solutions precipitating from these pages, though there is at least one rough consensus: no more dollar-a-day campaigns that use the supposedly pitiful as props and ultimately line humanitarians’ pockets. Consider the work of Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, or CATPC, a cooperative of Congolese artists purchasing back ancestral lands from Unilever with funds derived from the exhibition and sale of their work in a contemporary art world whose institutions have been financed by the very exploitation of said lands. On slash-and-burned palm oil plantations with depleted soil, CATPC plants forests and plans for self-sufficiency. Slow work, to be sure, but their own: tangible, direct, and with nary an angel in sight.
 November 2023

no. 71—Whither Humanitarianism?

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 content? With issue no. 70, The Baffler overcomes the dyspepsia induced by such gluttony to consider the contemporary consumable. The issue features reports regarding the psychoactive substances of (semi)legal choice, with Adrian Nathan West taking on the craft cocktail bar and Kathleen Alcott scrutinizing the weed restaurant: the former home to a frenzy of ritualized “premiumization” and the latter a portal to an otherworldly catatonia. Equally replete with body horror is Will Self’s fiction contribution to the issue, featuring a surgeon’s diary of fantastical operations. Meanwhile, Chris Crowley writes on the gratuity-included attempts to solve the eternally vexed politics of tipping in America; and, across the pond, Ruby Tandoh visits the British seaside destination of Margate, which is caught between a creative class fairytale of cute restaurants highlighting seasonal ingredients and the hardscrabble town as it actually stands. Of course, every plated morsel is not the sui generis product of a noble chef working in harmony with nature but the precipitate result of a bewildering tangle of agricultural and economic policy, as Alan Guebert describes in his overview of farming in the United States. For millions of food-insecure Americans, to plate a morsel at all requires food stamps, which Christopher Bosso defends in his treatise on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Elsewhere, Karen Olsson’s history of the Texas Observer considers the often tenuous connection we have to the land, one made only stranger by online tradwives in Gaby Del Valle’s report on influencers on the range. Sometimes this connection is deliberately severed, as Sarah Aziza details in her essay on Israel’s history of “making the desert bloom” by planting water-intensive monocrops over the site of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages, while Jen Monroe depicts several victims through sugary sculptures of our messy agricultural present. Such distance can be remedied, argues M. Jahi Chappell in an interview with Zoé VanGelder, by the decommodifying principles of agroecology, a discipline which seeks to design more equitable and sustainable food systems aligned with the needs of local communities. Though the land itself must first be protected from the golf course-ification of the world, as the baker of a Wisconsin-famous whole-grain treat attempts to do in Dave Denison’s account of the Guerrilla Cookie and its erratic creator, Ted Odell.
 September 2023

no. 70—Out to Lunch