Back in the mid aughts, Daily Kos launched a conference to bring together progressives disillusioned with the trajectory of the Democratic Party. The site has lost its way—and so has its flagship event.

“Each failed lover spurred me to reexamine my skin-care routine. I walked through wind tunnels formed by huge towers hunting for high-end moisturizers. Every time I tried out a new mud mask, the Tribeca moms complimented me on my glow.”

The Metropolitan Opera opened its season last night with an adaptation of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” Over the summer, Jeffrey Arlo Brown wrote about the general manager’s strange and unserious artistic choices.

Jordan Castro puts a lot of work into sculpting his persona, a fact that would be less annoying if his novels were any good. @anathanwest.bsky.social reviews “Muscle Man.”

Great essay from @jenniferberkshire.bsky.social. “If public education is to survive, Democrats will have to come up with an explanation for why we have public schools that goes beyond bloodless workforce preparation” Would add: Dems should listen to the teachers telling everyone that.

Who is Netroots Nation for anymore? Activists? Democratic Party advocates? Arvin Alaigh visits the 2025 conference for answers.

“Just as landscape requires foreground and background to create the illusion of dimension, so irony requires some shade of seriousness to indicate what it is distorting and why.”

The Baffler has been blunting the cutting edge since 1988. Get a full year of our hype-free criticism and reportage for the low, low price of $50.

“During Francis’s stint as a chatter, she worked the 6 a.m. shift, one of five or six employees who together maintained the illusion of perpetual horniness. The ‘girlfriend experience’ is half a dozen possibly underpaid workers hiding in a trench coat.”

From the Archives: Jasper Craven tells the story of how he was paid (not enough) to haul a life-size Harambe statue across the country in order to deposit it in front of Facebook’s headquarters—for, somehow, crypto.

When a hospital comes under the thumb of private equity, patients and workers suffer the consequences. That’s something James Kelly witnessed personally working as an ICU nurse. He spoke to @jessmcallen.bsky.social about his book back in March.

Here's this: thebaffler.com/latest/cuck-...

Pink is out, girls run the world, and a text notification is the harbinger of extreme good and bad tidings in a new excerpt from @emotrophywife.bsky.social forthcoming novel.

In our new issue, Piper French asks: What do we make of the men bringing their sense of grievance at OnlyFans models to court?

About to be raptured? You won't need money where you're going, so consider donating your earthly fortune to The Baffler. Every bit helps those of us left behind.

If Jordan Castro’s new novel was never going to be all things to all people, it might as well have been something to someone. But as @anathanwest.bsky.social writes, “Muscle Man” is curiously weightless.

“I didn’t even care about him. I wanted to get dicked down and score a free meal and instead ended up bagging a feelings text. I had no feelings. I boiled them down in an inner well of resilience.”

Over the course of 2023, Denver’s shelters ran out of space for arriving migrants. Mayor Mike Johnston called on Biden for help with the crisis. But the president had washed his hands of the matter.

Like Biden before him, Trump is pressuring Panama to stop the flow of foot traffic out of the Darién Gap. But he’s also using the country as a place to ditch America’s deportees—even ones from Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, and China.

Politicians and talking heads on both sides of the aisle are very selective about what kinds of “violence” are worth condemning. Torching the Stars and Stripes? Worthy of a prison sentence. Systemic oppression and plunder? Well . . .

A golden statue of President Trump holding a Bitcoin appeared in D.C. last week. Back in 2022, Jasper Craven recounted his own experience with hideous life-size statues meant to advance the cause of crypto.

Ash went and started one of those all-trans, gun-carrying rural communes. Can it be better than New York City? In the eyes of the recently unemployed protagonist of new fiction from @emotrophywife.bsky.social, it just might.

“It may be that Hollywood cinema’s gaze no longer extends across the vistas of real-world geopolitics, or there may be no external foe to cast in these roles. America is the imperial, authoritarian ‘Other.’”

What does it mean to burn a flag? To torch a Waymo? To set a police precinct ablaze? Aaron Boehmer considers why these actions pose such an existential threat to those in power.

“Unlike some of the other horror writers who mourn a promised future, Schweblin’s stories often show how the future we are mourning is one we have, or thought we had, created ourselves.”

“Outrage against destruction is an ideological sleight of hand: empty cars are to be protected, the fate of immigrant families ignored.”

The end of the Cold War changed the way Hollywood made its supervillains. So did the sensibilities of the viewing public—so did the needs of the overseas market. Our new baddies look a little different these days.

“Consciously or not, most of us have topics that are off-limits—subjects we stay away from for different reasons, whether moral, aesthetic, or personal.”

In the aftermath of recent high-profile school shootings, the right seems only ever to double-down on its defense of the Second Amendment. From the Archives: @madar.bsky.social on the American obsession with bearing arms.

It wasn’t long ago that the supervillains of American cinema were a sinister smorgasbord of dictators, Soviet saboteurs, and ululating terrorists. But these days, @johnsemley3000.bsky.social writes, we have met the real enemy, and he is us.

For our grudges issue, we made nine photographers show us the kinds of pictures they hate taking.

While the male-dominated, magical-realist literary set sentimentalized the past and distrusted the global present, a new generation of female Latin American writers look to the future with pessimism—and horror.

Last month, Trump signed an executive order instructing federal prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against anyone who torches the Old Glory. Aaron Boehmer writes on symbolic action and American symbols.

Sleep demons, a bump of K, dead-end drudgery, and a touch of edge play—it’s all in a day’s work in “Female Small Business Owner” by Grace Byron, excerpted from her forthcoming novel “Herculine.”

Crowds, caves, personal exposure—in our latest issue, nine photographers show us the kinds of images they are most averse to capturing.

“As the state continues to enact policies that encroach on our freedom to dissent, the indelible connection between the artist and the protester becomes more prominent.”

As the media works itself into a frenzy about the deadly danger of left-wing politicals, it bears repeating that gun culture has smudged out the boundary between state and non-state violence, as Chase Madar wrote in our pages in 2015.

In our new issue, we asked nine photographers to capture their least favorite subjects: protests, sunsets, single gloves that have been run over.

Back in 2017, @addiestan.bsky.social described how Sinclair pushes right-wing propaganda on your local news broadcaster. The station group is now using its monopoly power to force ABC to kick Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

The Argentina of Samanta Schweblin’s youth was one of disappearances and unspoken political violence. As Andrea Penman-Lomeli writes, her literature is likewise invisible, atmospheric, and filled with psychological dread.

“Consciously or not, most of us have topics that are off-limits—subjects we stay away from for different reasons, whether moral, aesthetic, or personal.”

“There was a time not so long ago that cartoon satires, Hollywood comedies, and even burly boxing dramas took direct aim at specific incarnations of foreign power. Contemporary villainy, by contrast, feels a bit queasier.” thebaffler.com/latest/kneel...

When protesters in Los Angeles burned the American flag earlier this summer, politicians on both sides of the aisle were aghast. This selective outrage obscures the violence that occasioned the protest in the first place.

Tech bros, media moguls, and self-aware AI have become the new antagonists in American cinema, from “The Naked Gun” to “Superman.” Wherefore the supervillains of yesteryear?

“I read Dul wasn’t offed over drill beef but because a weed customer put a bounty on his head. I’ll never know, but if it’s true, it would be like Houdini dying of a burst appendix after hundreds of death-defying stunts.”

“The same politics of fear that has incubated our punitive hyperincarceration state also directly feeds these citizen-protectors’ positive, if delusional, self-image as brave and useful men.” thebaffler.com/salvos/have-...

Drill arrived to Philadelphia not too long before Covid did. School closures and stay-at-home orders changed the street life of the city; so did the rise in gun buying. thebaffler.com/salvos/I-Wil...

The Biden administration failed to provide Venezuelan migrants with the kind of resettlement program it extended to displaced people from Ukraine. Cities like Denver are left to pick up the pieces. thebaffler.com/salvos/Dilem...

“There are now academic studies of drill; YouTubers like Trap Lore Ross make a living picking apart drill lyrics to keep fans cued in to who’s killed whom; there is drill fanfic on Wattpad.”

Melancholy is a never-ending loop and, in “Good and Evil and Other Stories,” Samanta Schweblin’s characters collect dead hair, reincarnate as horses, and mourn the living. Sometimes hanging on to death is all that gives life meaning.