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Author: The Baffler

Columns

The Baffler Welcomes J. W. McCormack
December 12, 2019
The Baffler is delighted to announce that J. W. McCormack is our new fiction editor. He will oversee the relaunch of the magazine’s fiction section with new stories in each bimonthly print issue as well as online fiction offerings every month. He joins Nicole Terez Dutton, ...

Your Friends Are Not HR
December 12, 2019
I’ve fought two uphill battles during my time on earth: mental illness (neurodivergence) and friendship. Friendship is difficult for me. When people are not upfront with what they need from me or what they want to say to me, the difficulty of reading social cues intersects ...

A Case of the Icks
December 11, 2019
Hi Marlowe, My boyfriend left me abruptly a few months ago and immediately got a new girlfriend. I think he was in a moment of panic in his life, and he made a bad decision. His new girlfriend looks a lot like me, but she is arguably a less interesting version. He still texts me ...

The Cry of Alice
November 11, 2019
One of the best stories in Africa today is linked to one of the worst stories in America’s past.

Factory Blues
October 29, 2019
It’s not quite clear if the washer lizards are real. Washer lizards, in Hiroko Oyamada’s novel The Factory, appear only once, in a report written by a child. They are, supposedly, a species that have built a habitat in the cleaning facilities of the sprawling factory the ...

A Night at the Library
October 28, 2019
1. In the early twentieth century, the Brooklyn Library system had numerous Carnegie-funded branches, but, unlike the Manhattan system, then developing its 42nd Street pièce de résistance, it lacked a Central Hub. Some academics and public figures toured France to draw ...

So Metaphorical
October 24, 2019
Parasite, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes (in a reportedly unanimous decision) and was (less unanimously) a finalist for the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, begins in a dead-end. The film opens in a dingy sub-basement at the ass-end of a ...

Crashing the Body Party
October 15, 2019
Raised in the 1990s, I have a soft spot for the exercise tape aesthetic: upbeat motivational speech, house music, and B-movie production values all mashed together.

That’s so Craven
October 01, 2019
The defining characteristic of Donald Trump is the comprehensive absence of loyalty and trust in his relationships. Physicists can only dream of an atomic clock as reliable and consistent as the inevitability that Donald Trump will turn on every single person around him. Not ...