The Baffler Magazine

11/09/2024

It wasn’t so long ago that people believed that an increasingly multiethnic population would deliver the Democrats perpetual victory. This has obviously not come to pass. In our new issue, Geraldo Cadava and Rick Perlstein discuss why.

Demography has not managed to be destiny in the past half-century—but predictions of a millenarian shift have not lost their appeal.

10/09/2024

There’s a growing faction on the right that believes diversity initiatives are a problem because some races are stronger, smarter, and better than others. They base these theories on discredited research and a great deal of personal animus.

Political affiliations are not actually written into our DNA, despite the growing fondness among conservatives for Great Replacement fearmongering.

06/09/2024

In our latest issue, Michael Lipkin considers the resurgence of far-right politics in Germany, where the five-year trial of a member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground touched every live wire in public life.

If the German press could once embrace the narrative that a resurgent far right was a statistical phantom, that myth has now been put to bed.

05/09/2024

As a Nixon strategist in the 1968 election, Kevin Phillips pushed a “divide-and-conquer” method. His race-baiting grievance politics would inspire future generations of Republican leaders—and guide some of today’s Democratic pundits, too.

Democrats are fighting for their lives rather than coasting to victory on an unstoppable demographic wave. What happened?

04/09/2024

What ever happened to the emerging majority? In Baffler no. 75, “Facing the Future,” our writers consider the consensus that never came, and the public figures who promised it would.

Start reading on our site now:
https://thebaffler.com/issues/no-75

29/08/2024

In a preview from our upcoming issue—out next week!—‪Dennis M. Hogan considers Staten Island: its provincialist bias, its legitimate grievances, its mob violence, and its secessionist dreams.

Lately, Staten Islanders have been acting out more than usual.

04/06/2024

Our drugs issue is online. Baffler no. 74, “Altered States,” is a survey of what we take and how we take it—a trip that chases through nightclubs, rehabs, ketamine clinics, and retirement communities. Start reading now.
https://thebaffler.com/issues/no-74

12/01/2024

The far right beat took shape in 2015, but exploded after Charlottesville. Editors assigned more coverage of demonstrations and extremist groups. But one-off stories can’t always provide big-picture analysis, especially when written under pressure.

Extremism has migrated from the streets to the center of the Republican Party. What is the role of the journalist in such an environment?

11/01/2024

In our new issue, Anya Ventura travels to BizTown, a program where children toil at miniature versions of real businesses for popcorn and fake money—all in the name of teaching the next generation to love free enterprise.

At Junior Achievement’s BizTown, children get to experience the vaunted real world—and the indestructible loop of work and consumption that defines it.

09/01/2024

Baffler no. 72 is now available online and in print. “Life Alert” considers aging and its consequences, for the old and young alike—with stories on our sclerotic elites, q***r elders, and AI ancestors.

Start reading now:
https://thebaffler.com/issues/no-72

21/09/2023

Once a staple on Midwestern co-op shelves, the Guerilla Cookie has all but vanished. Dave Denison writes on his decades-long quest for its secret recipe, and the relationship he developed with the brilliant, complicated man behind it.

The recipe of the famed Guerrilla Cookie may be lost forever. But the legacy of its idealistic and eccentric creator lives on in unlikely ways.

20/09/2023

Wendell Berry is a prolific essayist, novelist, story writer, poet—and farmer. His book “The Unsettling of America” traced the dire consequences of agriculture’s decline. In 2020, George Scialabba wrote on the influential antimodernist.

What is Wendell Berry angry about? In 1950 there were more than twenty million farms in the United States. Today there are about two million.

19/09/2023

Ubiquitous coffee shops, machines manufactured to malfunction, and police paid to harass innocent child-cyclists . . . contemporary America is a sickening place. And in new fiction on our site, two road-trippers seek a remedy.

It looked like a cactus, but it was not a cactus. It had spines. It had juice, red flowers, you could make a living fence out of it. It had thorns.

18/09/2023

In 2015, Danny Meyer eliminated tipping in his NYC restaurants. Media coverage was breathless; the press seemed to believe that the rest of the industry would follow suit.

This didn’t come to pass. As it turns out, the politics of tipping are complicated.

Tipping may be an imperfect system, but is there an alternative that really works for everyone?

15/09/2023

No rational person is going to want to stay in Arizona as the mercury creeps toward 130 degrees—or endure the inevitable water shortages. They’ll have to move. But is the north ready to accept these internal climate migrants?

As the South heats up, more people will have to consider relocating to the Upper Midwest.

15/09/2023

The crunchy women of the alt-right are terrified of seed oils and insect protein. They want to return to the good old days—before pasteurized milk, before birth control, before vaccines. But they forget one simple, irrefutable fact: the tradlife generally sucked.

The tradwife life is based on lies of omission. Is that what makes it so appealing to such a broad swath of followers?