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Aug 15, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Arielle Isack
My First Book by Honor Levy. Penguin Press, 224 pages. 2024. If Honor Levy isn’t exactly a feminist, then her writing has always betrayed an interest in unequal social relations between men and women. Take her story “Good Boys,” which was originally published on The New Yorker’s website in the summer of 2020, when Levy was a senior in college. The protagonist is a young woman hanging out on a rooftop in Paris with four boys who are in the midst of a study-abroad romp through Europe.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Rachael Wilson |Niela Orr |T.M. Brown |Arielle Isack
I once met a woman who’d beenWas her name Karen Horney? I once met a girl who’d beenand now my story’s begun. and now my story is done. I once met a woman who’d beenrun over by a dump truck. Her name, let’s say, was Karen Horney.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Rainer Diana Hamilton |Sammy Feldblum |T.M. Brown |Arielle Isack
I’m reacquiring taste, returning to the naturalRelish for learning how a woman sits, miming her calm,Associating her with piano, the saints, good dreams,Refracted light, whatever else that science wants to dull. I’m tying her to logic, even easily. See, KeatsWas wrong to say that touch of cold philosophy was “mere”—For me, it charms by making formal jokes.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | John Semley |Colette Shade |T.M. Brown |Arielle Isack
Looming on a cliffside in Big Sur, framed by the Pacific Ocean and California’s windy Highway 1, the Esalen Institute has long stood as the wooly nerve center of the philosophical, psychological, and pseudospiritual American tendency dubbed “the human potential movement.” Established in 1962 by two Stanford grads inspired by a lecture given by Aldous Huxley (on the subject, appropriately, of “human potentialities”), Esalen was pitched as a place where the latent gifts of humankind could be...
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Apr 17, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Arielle Isack
Last month, around 150 protesters occupied the lobby of the New York Times building, holding signs that said “LIES” and “STOP THE PRESSES, FREE PALESTINE.” Hours earlier, an affiliated group of protesters chained themselves together and blocked roads with debris to temporarily prevent distribution trucks from leaving the Times printing facility in Queens.
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Feb 5, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Toby Jaffe |Arielle Isack
BAM and The Baffler are pleased to present the following screening and discussion of Rosa von Praunheim’s 1986 film A Virus Knows No Morals. An AIDS comedy? From 1986? Prolific queer filmmaker Von Praunheim crafts an episodic, parodic, and offbeat Brechtian skewering of the greedy, vicious German response to a brand-new AIDS crisis in A Virus Knows No Morals.
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Jan 29, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Arielle Isack
It was nine in the morning on Monday, January 8, and nobody could move. All of Manhattan’s major throughways—the Manhattan Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, and the Holland Tunnel—had been blocked by more than a thousand people, who, for around an hour and a half, would remain obstinately in the streets.
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Oct 23, 2023 | 
thebaffler.com | Arielle Isack
On Wednesday, October 18, a reported five thousand people attended a demonstration held by progressive Jewish anti-Zionist groups Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow in Washington, D.C. They marched from the National Mall to the Capitol to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and to voice their opposition to U.S. complicity in Israeli war crimes.
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Sep 11, 2023 | 
thebaffler.com | Ruby Tandoh |Dubravka Ugresic |Arielle Isack
It started in London, the rumor about Margate. There was talk in Hackney in the east of the city, among a cloistered community of creatives: everyone seemed to know someone who had visited Margate, this little town to the southeast of the capital. The houses were cheaper there; someone had gotten a good deal on a place with original hardwood floors and Victorian detailing. Maybe we could move there, they said to themselves. I’ve heard this restaurant near me is opening a sister place by the sea.
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Aug 7, 2023 | 
truthdig.com | Lisa Borst |Ari Brostoff |Cecilia Corrigan |Jon Dieringer |A. S. Hamrah |Arielle Isack | +3 more
When a movie becomes a mass culture phenomenon, like Barbie, any negative criticism of it runs the risk of coming off hysterical. Any meanness toward it becomes the mirror version of the reactions of fans who see the movie in the theater again and again, who cry during certain scenes each time, and who tell the world about it on social media with a great sense of pride and purpose, or even with a certain amount of shock about its power over them.
