Skip to content

Baffler Archives: Intros and Manifestos

Columns

A Matter of Life and Death
“Our illnesses are mostly political illnesses,” wrote the revolutionary novelist and playwright Peter Weiss. I prefer to take this cryptic remark, found in a private journal, to a radical conclusion: all illness is political in origin. Certainly this provocation could be ...

Caravan of Fools
Idiots, as a rule, should be kept apart, but for this, The Baffler’s fiftieth issue, we’ve asked them to hold hands under the banner of “The New Booboisie.” A word often attributed to H. L. Mencken, “booboisie” combines the Saxon “boob” with bourgeoisie to ...

Gone to Earth
“Ruination happens at two speeds: furious and slow,” Susan Stewart writes in The Ruins Lesson. Either human error conspires with nature in lightning feats of physical destruction, or vegetation slowly overgrows the old stone monuments. In both cases, we’re left to scrape ...

The Limbs of the Well
Our incumbent regime of eugenic wellness leaves little room for flights of fancy, at least for the sick: it’s hard to spur and bridle the imagination when they’ve run you ragged around the track. Winner, as usual, takes almost everything; last across the finish line gets ...

Terms of Nervous
Here in the Contract State, we’re no longer certain the global markets will hold, what with all the reneging and withdrawing by President Interruptus and his international band of outsider-insiders. No deal, it turns out, is artful enough to stay dealt, whether climate accord, ...

Bedtime for Democracy
November 02, 2015
“The earth belongs to the living and not to the dead,” Thomas Jefferson said. And a lot of good that did. The founding father railed against economic royalists and their schemes to perpetuate wealth through inheritance, giving the dead hands of the past a leg up (so to ...

In Mayhem We Trust
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. Call it the uncivil ...

To the Ninety-Nines
As we buttoned up The Baffler no. 27, on fashion and power, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week broke out in New York, and additional extravaganzas of the global leisure set were hotly anticipated in London, Milan, Istanbul, Tokyo, Mumbai, Shenzhen, and Moscow. Pretty soon, we knew, the ...

All in Yer Head
November 01, 2014
Hello from HQ, where we are happy/sad to present number 26, Sickness and Pelf, on the culture of medicine and certain undiagnosed psychopathologies of everyday life in America. The operative method, wielded with a scalpel throughout this body of salvos, stories, poems, ...

Once Upon a Town
Alphabetically there is no such thing as unspoiled territory, which is why the black chalkboard became white and why the white chalkboard became green. Yes a running squirrel, yes a long intestinal tunnel. Only in Vermont is it possible for two people to walk and share the same ...