Skip to content

Baffler Archives: Intros and Manifestos

Columns

Own Goals
“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 ...

Been There, Done That
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 ...

At Home He’s a Tourist
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 ...

On the Clock
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 ...

Just Say Yes
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, ...

Nohow On
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 ...

Age of Onset
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 ...

Aiding and Abetting
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, ...

Terroir Squad
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 ...

Glitter Gulch Global
It’s been twenty years since Las Vegas debuted “What happens here, stays here.” The slogan is a winking celebration of self-containment that has never quite been true. (Hence, perhaps, the marvelously redundant update three years ago: “What happens here, only happens ...