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Beverly Hillbilly Elegy
October 14, 2016
Imagine if you discovered one day that your father was a closeted polygamist, that your brother secretly sold meth, or that your sister the schoolteacher had an affair with one of her fifth graders. A similarly dark family secret confronted me recently, when I learned that my ...

The Death of the Autodidact
October 07, 2016
Harry S. Truman seems likely to be our last self-educated president. Currently we are on pace for five consecutive Ivy League-primed commanders-in-chief. Of the twenty-three cabinet or cabinet-rank members in the Obama Administration, thirteen graduated from either Harvard or ...

The Snarxist Temptation
October 04, 2016
This is a letter to all those who, like me, have been foolish enough to spend this election season feeling something about it (hopeful, committed, angry, you name it). More than anything, though, it’s a letter to those—particularly those on the left—who chose ...

As We Saw Ourselves
October 04, 2016
On September 4, 1957, Carlotta Walls LaNier and eight other African American students tried to enter Central High School in Little Rock, but the students, who became known as the Little Rock Nine, were turned away by the Arkansas National Guard. The dress that LaNier wore that ...

History and You
September 30, 2016
Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History sidles up to listeners with the faux-charming tagline “Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance.” This plea-cum-disclaimer is an act of charity, perhaps, for a school subject supposedly demanding rote ...

Bye Bye, Blackbird
September 26, 2016
During his long life, it was said that Gore Vidal’s literary and cultural appeal stemmed from one singular feat: that he pisses from a very great height. Vidal’s rarefied, mingent corpus was disorienting and too snobbish for some, but for grown-ups, it’s a ...

The Ho-Hum Squad
August 09, 2016
Some time in April 2015, Jared Leto sent someone to throw a dead pig on a table during the rehearsals for Suicide Squad. Those who were present at the time recount their shock and fear beholding the scene, their worry that they might be working with someone who was genuinely ...

Punk Rock and Protest
July 07, 2016
Growing up, I learned the word solidarity from a vocabulary flash card. It was not something I had ever felt until my shoe became untied in the mosh pit at a NOFX concert in the early 2000s. When I knelt to re-tie it, four strangers formed a wall around my crouching body to ...

Queen Esther of the Potboilers
May 12, 2016
I have it on good authority that I’m a snob. The epithet is fair enough: I have little patience with popular literature, even though popular literature, by dint of its popularity, is arguably the most effective tool a writer can use to file a claim about the world, ...

All the President’s Chums
January 06, 2016
It seems odd, after the media revolutions of the past several decades, to behold one of the worst conventions of the old press order soldiering blithely on: the private, off-the-record presidential briefing. In a curiously noncommittal dispatch for the New York Times, D.C. ...

Q & A with Evgeny Morozov and Dan Davies
December 07, 2015
A little while ago, director Dan Davies of Banyak Films in London materialized in The Baffler’s editorial HQ in Harvard Square with contributing editor Evgeny Morozov in tow, steered him to our admittedly tacky blue sectional couch, and, before a midday audience munching on ...

Thought Leaders as Loss Leaders
December 02, 2015
The breathless, investor-beguiling fable that the next iteration of the Web has to be the smart one has been around long enough now to qualify as a touching millenarian faith, like the quadrennial fiction of a “deep” GOP presidential field, or the diehard belief that the ...