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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Force Multiplier

6 days ago | thebaffler.com | Tanvi Misra |Jess Bergman

In the middle of last month, a Florida state trooper pulled over a car after it crossed the state border from Georgia, allegedly for speeding. The officer arrested all three men inside, including a twenty-year-old U.S. citizen passenger named Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez—and promptly booked them under the state’s recently passed, and subsequently blocked, law barring undocumented people from entering Florida.
Small Fry | Walker Rutter-Bowman

1 week ago | thebaffler.com | Jess Bergman

On the Clock by Claire Baglin, translated from the French by Jordan Stump. New Directions, 144 pages. 2025. In the world of mass-produced food, “pink slime” plays a crucial role. Coined by a former meat inspector and USDA microbiologist named Gerald Zirnstein, the term refers to beef trimmings melted into a paste and treated with ammonium hydroxide. “It’s pink. It’s pasty. And it’s slimy looking,” said Zirnstein, explaining his thinking.
Ideology Ruled Her Camera

1 week ago | thebaffler.com | Jess Bergman

In September 1982, while withdrawing from Beirut, Israeli military forces plundered the research center of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Israel had sought to eradicate the group through its illegal invasion of Lebanon in June of that year, after supporting and arming right wing factions in the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), a conflict that is an integral part of the Palestinian question.
Heteropessimism of the Intellect

2 weeks ago | thebaffler.com | Jess Bergman

Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp. Simon & Schuster, 256 pages. 2025. During the Holocaust, there was a word for a prisoner who was resigned to his death: a Muselmann. Primo Levi described Muselmänner in his memoir Survival in Auschwitz as “an anonymous mass” that formed the “backbone of the camp.” “[They are] non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer,” he wrote.
Deterrence Theory

4 weeks ago | thebaffler.com | Belen Fernandez

On Saturday, March 15, the United States launched large-scale air strikes on Yemen, killing at least fifty-three people, including five children, by Tuesday. The U.S. military continues to pound the country with daily strikes in an open-ended operation that has also destroyed such infrastructure as a cancer hospital in northern Yemen.
Kafka in Kurdish

1 month 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

1 month 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

1 month 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

1 month 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.
Down by the River

1 month ago | thebaffler.com | Wen Stephenson |Tarence Ray |Abdelrahman ElGendy

They came in broad daylight, the police and their bulldozers, on the afternoon of November 28, 2022. Their orders were to destroy the makeshift houses and evict the people living on public property along the banks of the Bagmati River in the Thapathali section of Kathmandu.