Fear Factor
Today’s TV landscape is eerily devoid of anything resembling optimism.
Baffler Archives: Outbursts
Columns
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.
Secret Powers
Leaks are always political, never disinterested.
All Worked Up and Nowhere to Go
I did not anticipate how the death of the radical British writer and theorist Mark Fisher would haunt me, but I am reminded of him more and more often, and I find myself returning to his work regularly. And it’s not just me. Recently, a magazine editor asked if I would cowrite ...
Childhood’s End
What explains this state of willful cultural regression? Nothing good.
No Prophets, No Honor
Cultural criticism must perform the trick of reading the signs within culture while partially escaping it.
Enemies of the People
As we veer into a brave new age of right-wing populism, a restive mood of contempt for the masses has seized the opposition. Demoralized liberals, still reeling from the debacle of the 2016 presidential ballot, are salving their wounds with reveries of metaphysical ...
Strangers in a Cruel Land
On a chilly October morning, hours before sunrise, armed agents of an enormous, unaccountable government agency dragged a terrified teenager from his home, handcuffed his wrists and ankles, and transported him to a holding cell to begin a period of indefinite detention. It was a ...