The Baffler

The Baffler stands out as a prominent platform for engaging and unconventional left-wing political commentary, cultural insights, short stories, poetry, and art in the United States. We release four print editions each year and share fresh online content every weekday. Established in 1988 by Thomas Frank with the mission of “the journal that blunts the cutting edge,” the magazine is now led by editor Chris Lehmann and is based in New York. We showcase both emerging and established writers, featuring regular contributors such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Faludi, Evgeny Morozov, Rick Perlstein, and Astra Taylor. You can become a subscriber for just $15 a year.

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Kafka in Kurdish

1 week ago | thebaffler.com | Matt Broomfield

Lovers of Franz K. by Burhan Sönmez, translated by Sami Hêzil. Other Press, 144 pages. 2025. A single letter can bear a heavy burden. Just ask the fifteen million Kurds living in Turkey, where the letters X, Q, and W were long banned from names and public use due to their association with the repressed Kurdish language. Or the Palestinians, whose claims to nationhood have been similarly denigrated by Israeli lawmakers on the spurious basis that the Arabic language lacks a letter P.
Invisible Crisis

3 weeks ago | thebaffler.com | Michael Friedrich

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone. Crown, 448 pages. 2025. Celeste Walker was picking up her kids from a friend’s when a neighbor called to tell her that her rental house, in an Atlanta suburb, was on fire. By the time she got home, the place was a soaked and smoldering ruin, surrounded by firefighters. In a flash, the family’s possessions were reduced to her children’s backpacks and a few hampers full of dirty laundry that had been sitting in her SUV.
Been There, Done That

3 weeks ago | thebaffler.com | Matthew Goodman |Rafia Zakaria |Pooja Bhatia

Forty-Five has become 47, and Donald Trump is now the first president to serve two nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland. With protective tariffs anathema to Uncle Jumbo, as Cleveland was known to family and friends, the two wouldn’t have agreed on all counts, but our twenty-second and twenty-fourth president was also a downsizer cartoonishly obsessed with small government.
Wrenching the Ranchers

3 weeks ago | thebaffler.com | Christopher Ketcham

What can be described of the Livestock Saboteur, without identifying him to authorities, is that he has a high school education, dresses shabbily, lives in squalor, is widely read and highly intelligent but also a vulgarian. He works odd jobs to survive, spends half the year in a tent, and loves the public lands of the West, those last wild places in a domesticated nation.
The Mismeasure of Bhutan

3 weeks ago | thebaffler.com | André Naffis-Sahely |Astra Taylor

Once upon a time, in what some calendars called the 1950s, there lived a young prince named Jigme Singye Wangchuck, whose father ruled over Bhutan, a maze of glacial valleys in the Himalayas almost perfectly isolated from events down below.
And They’re Off | Martin Dolan

3 weeks ago | thebaffler.com | Martin Dolan

Jim Dandy might be the racehorse most famous for losing. The story isn’t heartwarming enough for a folksy biopic or a Laura Hillenbrand book, but his out-of-nowhere victory at the 1930 Travers Stakes is nonetheless cemented in American equestrian lore. At the historic Saratoga Race Course—where the Travers is still held—legend has it that bookies offered odds as long as 500–1 and went bust in the upset.
Schumer’s Warning

3 weeks ago | thebaffler.com | David Klion

Antisemitism in America: A Warning by Chuck Schumer. Grand Central Publishing, 256 pages. 2025. Barely two weeks into his second presidency, Donald Trump mused that he would like to see the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip relocated to other countries, possibly never to return. “Why would they want to return?
Losing My Religion

3 weeks ago | thebaffler.com | Ranbir Sidhu |Astra Taylor |Quinn Slobodian |Jessa Crispin

A year ago, I took a friend visiting from California to a casual mixer at a rooftop bar in Athens, Greece, where I live. The mixer was arranged by the local chapter of Democrats Abroad, a get-out-the-vote organization for expat Americans in Europe. With drinks in hand and the sun setting on the Parthenon in the distance, we pushed ourselves into the knot of Americans at the far end of the patio.
House of the Rising Hun

1 month ago | thebaffler.com | Alexander Wells |Gábor Schein |Billie Anania |Shilpa Jindia

On Andrássy Avenue, the most elegant shopping strip in central Budapest, there is one four-story building that is not quite like the others. It is called the House of Terror, and you can tell, because its metallic awnings have the word terror stamped into them. Behind an art installation made of chains and a piece of the Berlin Wall, the building’s facade is decorated with pictures of victims of the Communist regime that once controlled Hungary.
What’s the Matter with Abundance?

1 month ago | thebaffler.com | Malcolm Harris

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Simon & Schuster, 304 pages. 2025. January of 1992 was a strange time to be thinking optimistically about the future prospects of global communism, but the end of the Soviet experiment prompted Howard University professor (and inveterate red) David Schwartzman to wonder what it would take to bring the promise of “from each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs” into the twenty-first century.