Zachariah Webb

Jan 15, 2025 | thebaffler.com | Zachariah Webb

I grew up in a patchwork of generic suburban development west of Phoenix, Arizona, called Surprise, where parking lots stretched as far as the eye could see and most everything was the color of a sun-bleached dog turd.

Jan 6, 2025 | thebaffler.com | Alex Cocotas |Quinn Slobodian |Zachariah Webb

Have you heard that Berlin is dead? I hear it often. I’ve even heard myself say it. “Berlin’s dead!” I announce to my sub as we both sadly snort lines of ketamine off my sub’s sub, who we occasionally use as a piece of furniture—an armoire, a Biedermeier settee—because this is Berlin. Our pupils are like convex pennies. It is a Tuesday afternoon. It is a phrase, alas, that I am wont to use. At Berghain for the twenty-fourth weekend in a row: this is Berlin.

Jan 6, 2025 | thebaffler.com | Rodrigo Fresán |J.w. McCormack |Johannah King-Slutzky |Zachariah Webb

It’s like this: like one of those ships that, after dancing the night away with an iceberg to the rhythm of music disarranged by Mr. Stokowski, discovers it’s sinking amid dissonant passages of arctic wind. Sometimes I can even string together a full sentence with true grace, my words offering a discernible choreography, and, for a brief moment, I cease to be the person I am and become the person everyone else wants me to be.

Sep 3, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Kyle Paoletta |Gabb Schivone |Zachariah Webb |Zoe Hu

Amid all the Democratic hand-wringing and backbiting that followed Donald Trump’s election in 2016, some progressives found solace in the Sonoran Desert. After a twenty-four-year reign as the sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio, the politician who made Arizona ground zero for the confrontational nativism taking over the GOP, had been vanquished.

Jul 11, 2023 | thebaffler.com | Philippa Snow |Jude Doyle |Zachariah Webb

There are two things that might be said to define her from the off, and they are not the two things that one might expect. The first is that she is not American, but Canadian, an accident of her birth that seems unthinkable when one considers how American she seems from the outside—how blonde, how nominally plastic, how aspirational and saleable and generally designed to look just right rendered fourteen feet high on a billboard.