The Culture Wars are Dead
Trump is breathing new life into the venerable right-wing tradition of complaining that the nation went to hell during the Age of Aquarius.
Baffler Archives: Outbursts
Columns
The People Who Stole the World
As we struggle for control over the scraps that are left, the young stand defiantly against the old, and vice versa.
Body Work
Sometime in my fifties I lost faith in conventional medicine, which, I had come to see, is more a collection of rituals than anything evidence-based. Alternative medicine did not attract me, since it is even goofier than the regular kind; I wanted an alternative to medicine. I ...
Mourning Joe
It takes about half an hour to drive from the airport to downtown Tbilisi, the capital of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. You’ll likely land in the middle of the night—the few regional flights that service the city mysteriously favor 11 p.m. departures—and on the ...
The World is a Business
Network, a merciless and prescient satire of television released in 1976, is best remembered for its unhinged news broadcaster, Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch), who exhorts his audience to go to their windows and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take ...
The Do-Nothing Discipline
How political science fell into the thrall of fundamentalist forecasting.
Fear Factor
Today’s TV landscape is eerily devoid of anything resembling optimism.
Great White Hype
The late-career arc of Steve Bannon, Washington insider, was by any measure a supreme anticlimax. Bannon, you may recall, was unceremoniously nudged out of the White House back in the late summer, and in lieu of easing into a lucrative lobbying job or academic sinecure he ...
Wayne’s World
Investigative reporters are insecure and imprudently curious. It drives our work and it savages our lives.
Total Quality Revolution
What if I told you that revolutions happen when people lose their fear?
Future Fail
Fantasy is a big part of our futurist predicament.
High Times in the Car Barn District
Chicago’s segregation has set up other barriers of a transparent apartheid, in a way that affects all our lives, shuffling us into drastically different pools of risk.