Skip to content

Baffler Archives: Intros and Manifestos

Columns

Illness as Semaphore
Don’t look now. Contemporary liberals are summoning an omnium gatherum of dead words and outdated textbooks, dredging up confused accounts of Enlightenment rationality that tend to mutate into smug but underfunded mandates to “believe in science!” and calling everything ...

Goings On About Town
Last year we learned that an unspecified number of computer networks affiliated with the American government were compromised—maybe still are—by Russian actors. Not long ago, an oil pipeline supplying the East Coast was successfully targeted in a ransomware scheme. Earlier ...

Death of the Standard Model
Nestled somewhere in the unread pages of Democracy Journal is a roadmap to the Biden administration’s four-year plan. Something, something . . . Supply Chain Review. It mentions unions, I’ve heard, but unfortunately the editors translated it into the uncrackable pipspeak of ...

ProCounterPublica
Whatever we call them, we know the people who lethally moshed the Capitol in January’s vape lounge putsch share at least one trait: the sense of superiority that comes from constant political and media attention. For more than a moment, we all lived in the Duck Dynasty version ...

The Grief Depression
Charon, the ferryman of the dead, was more like an Uber driver than a salaried employee. In Lucian’s dialogues, the psychopomp finds himself hard up, on the short side of his account with Zeus. To buy time, he asks the messenger god Hermes to relax, assuring him that peace on ...

The Supply Chain Gang
It is my displeasure to write this note fifteen days ahead of the U.S. election. I do not know if state polling has improved since 2016, if Biden and the Democrats have by now ridden the blue wave, or if another shock Trump victory has led to civil unrest. If Biden and the ...

Paging Mr. Agreeable
We know we’re living in a time of consensus because the attention paid to specific grievances is pitiably low. It’s not that the makeup of human beings has changed, it’s more that the barely distinguishable personalities who explain the meaning of every event are ...

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 ...