Portals of Discovery
Awaking from the nightmare of genius.
Baffler Archives: Outbursts
Columns
The Dregs
The literature of the British pub.
Death in Space
Vampires and necronauts in the real fictions of Tom McCarthy.
2 or 3 Things I Know About Him
Jacqueline Rose and the question of gendered violence.
Cut-Rate Eden
Passing by the Jacob Riis Houses of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the summer of 1966, an observer would have seen not the empty concrete plaza and fenced off patches of green lawn common to public housing projects, but a vibrant adventure playground populated with gaggles of ...
Bricked and Mortared
New York City is often spoken of as if it were a week from collapse or a year from becoming a new Zion. It depends on who’s talking. New York governor Kathy Hochul recently declared her intention to “not only rebuild from the pandemic, but also to unlock New York’s ...
Absence of Malice
My mother’s family comes from a small village in Transylvania, a province horseshoed by the Carpathian Mountains and smack in the center of Romania. A shallow, purling river, the Sebeş, flows down from the foothills, cutting the village in half. With cemeteries at the edge ...
Mr. Garbage
Biography at its best may only manage to capture the fanny packs and Groucho glasses of an author’s inner world, but sometimes there comes a telling quirk that gives the game away. To wit: a habit peculiar to Donald Barthelme—the legendary square-bearded author of nine short ...
Faulty Towers
A building is considered “ultra-thin” when its width-to-height ratio is at least 1:10. For context, the Empire State Building is about 1:3. The old World Trade Center was close to 1:7.
The new 111 West 57th is about 1:24. This super-luxury project designed by SHoP Architects ...
The Masters Own You
“Ain’t singin’ for Pepsi / Ain’t singin’ for Coke / I don’t sing for nobody / Makes me look like a joke.” So goes the first verse of Neil Young’s 1988 hit “This Note’s for You.” In the second verse, this shitlist expands to cover Miller, Bud, politicians, ...
Traumatic Monologues
In 2016, over two hundred organizations signed on in support of a congressional resolution to establish May 5 as National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls (MMIWG). Long ignored—the need for an acronym itself is telling—the issue has belatedly ...
The End of Excellence
In 1982, McKinsey & Co. management consultants Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. published one of the most influential tracts on management ever written. Titled In Search of Excellence, it quickly became a sensation, and Peters went on to write many more books and sell ...