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While the Dead Kennedys lamented, in the first flush of the punk era, that they were too drunk to fuck, we say that the country, high and low, has now become too scared to think. It writhes in the grip of a collective panic attack, a case of the sweaty palms, a crack-up of faith in the future—a claustral terror that our bipolar political system cannot hope to allay, but can only stoke to greater furies. Scapegoating, xenophobia, and demagogic posturing afflict our body politic, especially in a presidential campaign year. But as fear brews in our culture, there are other ailments too. Please hold our hand as Angela Nagle takes the temperature of the sex hysteria within the 4chan Internet enclave, Corey Pein examines the craze for cryonics, David Graeber diagnoses “despair fatigue” in austerity Britain, Kade Crockford nurses the terminally sick idea of a free and peaceful country, Cosmo Garvin scans the municipal corruption in California’s state capital, and Tom Frank holidays in Martha’s Vineyard. Sober pundits intone, how do we balance liberty and security, freedom and security? We? Balance? The bywords of America in 2016 are more like plutocrats and jittery. Not since the late 1950s has a sense of impending doom so twisted the nation’s mood. Welcome to the panic room. 
 March 2016

no. 30—Panic! Room

Tolstoy’s standby about families and unhappiness is nowhere quoted in The Baffler 29, our unsentimental family issue. True, toddlers in Los Angeles routinely die from abuse, unsaved by California’s squadrons of “family preservation workers,” as reported by Natasha Vargas-Cooper, while dysfunctional families living in the hull of the American dream have to put up with pious social scientists from Harvard telling them to get their houses in order, according to Kim Phillips-Fein. But some families seem pretty darn happy in their very own special ways! Two of the candidates for next year’s presidential coronation are members of the same exceptional dynasties that, between them, have occupied the White House for twenty of the last twenty-seven years. Spend more time with our family issue and it will guide you along the contemporary fault lines of this most sanctified institution, with commentary from Eugenia Williamson about the mainstreaming of 1970s punk rock onto the laps of suburban papas, Lucy Ellmann on nervous teenage girl vloggers posting their “Morning Routines” to YouTube, Jacob Silverman among the ugly fallout from the Ashley Madison hack, Kathleen Geier peering behind overaccumulating fortunes, and Tom Carson on family sitcoms—you have nothing to lose but your youths!
 October 2015

no. 29—The Family That Preys Together

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.  We devised all manner of new American-branded mayhem during our long passage from a frontier republic into, well, a frontier mass republic, as historian Richard Hofstadter notes in a strikingly timely essay abridged in this issue: lynchings, riots, vigilantism, and political assassinations, along with garden-variety domestic knifings, shootings, and bludgeonings carried out on a scale of gruesomeness pretty much unprecedented in the soi-disant civilized West.   In the pages of The Baffler no. 28—“Battle Hymns”—we give the last word to the hapless souls targeted for elimination by our nation of carnage-happy hot-heads. David Graeber goes to the heart of the perverse social contract dictating that deserters and war-resisters be typecast as cowards and finds its deeper psychic antecedents in the casual brutalities of the schoolyard. A. S. Hamrah scopes out the cult of the Zombie Apocalypse and descries a self-hating, consumerist fantasia in its flesh-eating cortex. Heather Havrilesky sizes up the new face of high-tech warfare and finds that it bears a distressing resemblance to the workaday commerce of our gadget-happy world. And Alex Pareene plumbs the disingenuous reveries of social peace plied by our best-known vendors of American mayhem: the producers of cable news. Along the way, there are rumors of dissent in the tightly scripted American war of all against all in Noam Chomsky and Kade Crockford’s unsettling anatomy of the death-dealing trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and in the placid muse of the Amish-themed romance novel. Hey, in our fast-unspooling uncivil society, poised as it is to implode at the next carelessly weaponized keystroke, you take your fugitive visions of peace and quiet wherever you can find them.
 July 2015

no. 28—Battle Hymns

Look, it’s our first-ever fashion issue! But the work arrayed under the slightly furtive label, “Venus in Furs,” amounts to nothing like the cosmetics kits of upmarket, style-addled journalism. We’re mindful, instead, that the fashion industry’s main proposition—confusing clothing with personal worth—has been a longstanding affront to women, not to mention a handy insignia for encoding and regulating the rules of social class. The general drabness
 of American attire is also something to consider. We strap into the uniforms that come with our corporate cubicles, and on weekends don our baseball caps, flannels, sneakers, and mom jeans—the studied, casual look that hipsters have ironically lifted from the working class and that fashion pundits are wont to call “Normcore.” Ho well, like the boy said (more or less): the empire has nothing to wear. Herein we also give you a manifesto for female supremacy; some bridge-burning recollections of what it meant to be a “Yahoo”; a peek at the mindfulness industry; the torrid love affair between venture capital and the media; the death of tech criticism as we knew it; and remembrances of Joe Bageant, Philip Roth, Karl Kraus, Joseph Brodsky, The New Republic, the city of Buffalo, and the very concept of satire. Oh, and so much more—some crisp and colorful new art, stories, and poems, too. Try it all on for size, why don’t you.
 March 2015

no. 27—Venus in Furs

How are you feeling? “Sickness and Pelf” features the perspectives of those stuck in the waiting-forever room of medical culture, dogged by symptoms unassimilable to diagnostic manuals or public policy prescriptions, and baffled by the offerings of both the medical establishment and alt-medicinal quackery. Follow William Giraldi, an uxorious young father who receives paternity leave, only to turn this gift of time into alcoholism. Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s ethnography of the decision-making cells in the human body. Stumble along with George Scialabba through a lifetime of therapy for chronic depression. Marvel at Jerome K. Jerome, the student who opens a medical encyclopedia and catches hypochondria, or June Thunderstorm’s vanguard of acronym-drunk disability-rights activists who sport the latest stylings in class privilege. Learn all about the stupid tech that Steven Poole knows won’t save our faltering bodies and minds. The distinctly American disorder of narcissism comes sharply into focus in several pieces here: Suzy Hansen reviews Lunbeck and Lasch, Astra Taylor and Joanne McNeil reveal the mansplainy underbelly of Tech Dads, and Natasha Vargas-Cooper skewers the rich kids of Instagram. Meanwhile, Chris Lehmann trains his microscope on David Brat, and Jacob Silverman considers the Tayloristic tyranny of crowdsourced labor. As for undigested collective traumas, both those America has inflicted and those it has suffered, we have them covered too. Here’s a field report on occupational health and safety among workers at New York University’s campus in the United Arab Emirates by Andrew Ross, on the profits of American war nostalgia here at home by Andrew J. Bacevich, and a piece by Siddhartha Deb on life in Bhopal, India, after the worst industrial disaster in the history of the world. Feeling amnesiatic? We can prescribe some archives and excerpts from Lisa Dierbeck and Paul Goodman. We’ve also got on offer some fiction by Mikhail Zoshchenko and Paul Maliszewski and J. Wagner, and poetry by Mario Alejandro Ariza, Debora Kuan, Jill McDonough, and Afaa Michael Weaver. Finally, visual art by Brad Holland, Ralph Steadman, Mark Dancey, Shawn Huckins, and Stephen Kroniger will help cure what ails you—well, for a while at least.
 October 2014

no. 26—Sickness and Pelf

Hello, friends. “The None and the Many,” our silver jubilee issue, starts off with a proverbial bang with “Pistols for Two,” an exchange between David Graeber and Thomas Piketty on capital, debt, and the future. Thomas Frank looks the Masons and Rotarians in the eye, and Natasha Vargas-Cooper considers the meaning of a president’s posterior. Nicholson Baker provides us with a meta-review of more than a dozen JFK-assassination books, and emerges from all his reading with his own arresting theory intact. Jacob Silverman travels back in time to visit some like-minded subversives from the cusp of the Information Revolution, and Jason Linkins does us the favor of immersing himself in countless hours of cable TV news, so we don’t have to, thank heavens. Tom Gogola reports from Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s segregation movement, and Astra Taylor from a worker-owned manufacturing plant in Chicago, while Helaine Olen sends updates from Venice, California’s “coolest block in America,” and Daniel Brook experiences the gospel of wealth from the perspective of the direst slums of India. There are also salvos on politics, economics, and education policy from the formidable brains of Todd VanDerWerff, Chris Bray, Chris Lehmann, Lee Fang, and Jennifer C. Berkshire. Plus excerpts, interviews, and archival treats from Barbara Ehrenreich, Matt Roth, and Hugh McGraw; fiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Melina Kamerić; and poetry by Peter Payack, Edwin Frank, Joshua Moses, Melissa Monroe, and Elise Partridge. Wait, that’s not all: there are full-color photographs and original illustrations by Michael Northrup, Lewis Koch, Henrik Drescher, Katherine Streeter, and more. Finally, we pay tribute to the dear, departed, and prolific genius that was Baffler artist David McLimans. It’s our friendship issue, believe it or not, and we invite you to join us.
 July 2014

no. 25—The None and the Many

Hey, it’s our play issue, in which David Graeber hopscotches over the robotic universe of contemporary science and winds up inventing a new law of reality. Barbara Ehrenreich calls for a science that can explain why fun is fun. John Summers reports from “The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan”—once known as the liberal community of Cambridge, Massachusetts, now a playground for startup science and tech professionals. Gene Seymour rescues science fiction from the warped real-world utopias of certain plutocratic cybervisionaries. Andrew Bacevich dances on the grave of Tom Clancy, the recently departed hack thriller writer. Ian Bogost analyzes the addiction economy lurking behind cutting-edge free-to-play videogames, while Rhonda Lieberman walks us through the trophy rooms of leisure-class art hoarders. And that’s only the half of it. Look here for head-spinning salvos by Chris Lehmann, Susan Faludi, William T. Vollmann, George Scialabba, and Heather Havrilesky on history, politics, feminism, and literature. Anne Elizabeth Moore makes sport of Vice magazine. Alex Pareene practices journalism on the New York Times’ DealBook. Fiction by Paul Maliszewski and J. Wagner; short prose by Jaron Lanier, Gabriel Zaid, and Erik Simon; poetry by Thomas Sayers Ellis; and hilarious graphic art by Brad Holland, Mark Dancey, and David McLimans, who gave us the cover. Not to win or lose the game, but to be free of the system of winners and losers—that’s the spirit.
 January 2014

no. 24—The Jig Is Up!

Oh, we may say our colleges are the best in the world while we secretly believe they’re an overpriced rip-off, but leave it to Thomas Frank in The Baffler no. 23 to ask whether they’re the best in the world at committing the rip-off. Welcome to America five years after the financial crisis. It’s a place “made possible by buncombe,” as David Graeber explains here. And it’s a time of magical thinking, as Susan Faludi says in her exposé of the narrow brand of feminism on offer from Sheryl Sandberg’s positive-thinking tract Lean In. Luckily, we have Jacob Silverman to burst the techno-bubble that is South by Southwest; Ann Friedman to explain why we’re “All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go”; and Quinn Slobodian and Michelle Sterling to report from Berlin “How Hipsters, Expats, Yummies, and Smartphones Ruined a City.” Our midyear issue contains world-defining fiction by Adam Haslett and genre-bending prose by Thomas Sayers Ellis about Lou Beach’s surreal cover art. The carnival’s all here. From Seth Colter Walls on Jean-Paul Sartre to Farran Nehme on Buster Keaton, from Dubravka Ugrešić’s dreams of Wittgenstein to Richard Byrne’s “Nod to Ned Ludd,” The Baffler gives you the latest trends in cultural news and retail opinion. Step right up!
 August 2013

no. 23—A Carnival of Buncombe

With the presidential election in the rear-view mirror, we wanted to think about the opposite of politics, so we thought about sex. The result was an issue in which Heather Havrilesky sent up Fifty Shades of Grey, Chris Bray tracked down General David Petraeus and his wandering PhD, Hussein Ibish remembered the Marquis de Sade, Christian Lorentzen buried the British pop star/pedophiliac Jimmy Savile, Slavoj Žižek told us why gonzo porn is the most censored of all film genres, and Anne Elizabeth Moore explored the hidden assumptions behind Nicholas Kristof’s bid to rescue the women of the world, who have nothing to lose, apparently, except their market potential. Thomas Frank and David Graeber wrote about politics after all, and Thomas Bernhard‘s homage to Arthur Rimbaud appeared here for the first time in English. Evgeny Morozov’s “The Meme Hustler,” meanwhile, made the longest single essay in the history of The Baffler. Hey, look, we’re finally in color!
 April 2013

no. 22—Modem & Taboo

In the third and last issue of our revival year, Thomas Frank tells you how theory met practice in Occupy Wall Street (and drove it out of its mind), Rick Perlstein explains how Mitt Romney lies to be loved, and David Graeber asks whether it’s possible to think that you believe something when, in fact, you don’t, or to think that you don’t believe something when, in fact, you do? (Answer: yes and yes.)
 November 2012

no. 21—Your Money and Your Life

In our summer culture issue, we bring you decomposing cities that tremble with vibrancy, art museums where cash-and-carry aesthetics are the rule, journalists on the endless education of the president, and imperial foundations and their pet broadcasters on public radio. Where else can you learn why Eugenia Williamson thinks Ira Glass’s This American Life is so annoying, or take in Steve Almond on the lame, postideological pantomiming of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, or admire, with Jim Newell, the performance art of Harvard fraud Adam Wheeler and laugh at the Ivy mothership’s efforts to smite the pretender down?
 July 2012

no. 20—The High, the Low, the Vibrant!

The fallout from the financial crash continues—everywhere but Silicon Valley’s profit center. Alighting on the bloodless crossroads of culture and technology, this issue was driven there by Thomas Frank’s “Too Smart to Fail,” David Graeber’s “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” and Maureen Tkacik’s hilarious satire of The Atlantic magazine. Barbara Ehrenreich, Rick Perlstein, Jim Newell, and James K. Galbraith all contributed. There’s fiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Kim Stanley Robinson, plus poetry by Geoffrey Hill. Who could have guessed that this flying car, a symbol for the tech-induced stagnation we investigated in this issue, first graced the cover of a Soviet youth magazine? Well, this issue marked the first assembled by the mag’s new crew: John Summers, Chris Lehmann, Patrick Flynn, Lindsey Gilbert. What have they done?
 March 2012

no. 19—The Revival Issue