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Finally, Wall Street Gets Put on Trial
September 08, 2014
The Tea Party regards Barack Obama as a kind of devil figure, but when it comes to hunting down the fraudsters responsible for the economic disaster of the last six years, his administration has stuck pretty close to the Tea Party script. The initial conservative reaction to the ...

Think Tanks for Sale
September 08, 2014
The New York Times came out with a blockbuster exposé on Sunday about how foreign governments are buying influence in Washington through nonprofit think tanks—while lawmakers who depend on supposedly “independent” research from these organizations to set policy are ...

Labor Day Reading from The Baffler
August 29, 2014
Happy Friday, all! If you find yourself with some extra time over this long Labor Day weekend, why not take a moment to think about the reason for the season? These classic salvos from The Baffler all happen to be from issue 9 of The Baffler, a labor-themed issue we published in ...

Battered Women Behind Bars: True Stories on Stage
August 21, 2014
“Abuse is a generic term, it doesn’t mean anything,” the parole board commissioner says. “Be specific.” Helen Broker sits in handcuffs at the hearing and prepares to defend herself. Her husband had violently abused her throughout their marriage, until one day, acting ...

We Do Actually Know What’s the Matter with Kansas
August 20, 2014
A decade ago, coastal voters and the political and media elite were banging their heads on their desks with bafflement, wondering why so many Americans were voting against their economic interests. Wasn’t the Democratic Party supposed to be the party for the little guy, and ...

Rick Perlstein on America’s Nervous Breakdown
August 04, 2014
This past weekend brought bright and starry reviews for Baffler contributing editor Rick Perlstein’s new book about the tumultuous 1970s, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, out now. Max Boot in the Wall Street Journal admires how ...

Cantor’s Next Gig, Part Two
August 01, 2014
Alrighty folks, it’s time to call this thing. Last month, after Eric Cantor’s (to many) surprising upset in the Virginia primary race, we asked you all what you thought he would do next after leaving office. We got a pretty impressive array of responses, and we ...

Tax Inversions and the Dems Who Love Them
July 25, 2014
Corporations are people, my friend. Just like human people, they will go to absurd lengths to reduce their income-tax liability, and just like human people, they can move to another country if the one they live in doesn’t suit them. So in that sense, when the generic drug ...

Why Aetna Should Pay Reparations
July 24, 2014
“This is a civil rights bill—this is reparations,” Rush Limbaugh said of the Affordable Care Act back in 2010. As you might expect, he didn’t mean it in a good way. Limbaugh’s ability to condemn the Civil Rights Act and reparations in a single breath is an achievement ...

On Class and Work in HBO’s “Girls”
March 24, 2014
On the occasion of last night’s season finale of HBO’s Girls, we’re publishing online for the first time Heather Havrilesky’s essay “Sit-Cons: Class on TV,” from Issue 20 of The Baffler. In it, she examines how the subject of class is treated (and should be treated) ...