“Podcasting during Obama had a wondrous feeling: we Americans had finally untangled the more vexatious knots of modernity by electing him and were ready to train our curious minds on the minute problems and the major shortcomings in society.” thebaffler.com/outbursts/the-hatred-of-podcasting-belden

With day care costing a fortune, and many without paid parental leave, no wonder American parents have turned to YouTube channels like Ms. Rachel.

“Writing and thinking well are not acts of resistance any more than subculture is automatically resistant.”

Pierre Guyotat’s rendition of the genocidal savagery of one colonial war arrives in English as we confront another. His account of atrocity is unblinking and his books remind us to see clearly when everything else tells us to look away.

“All things considered, living out your life in an asylum for the mentally ill is a small price to pay for getting out of burning in the flames of Hell for all eternity.”

“Writing and thinking well are not acts of resistance any more than subculture is automatically resistant.”

As Michael Oswell’s exhibit from our new exhibit demonstrates, the AI slurry we’re being force-fed was derived from the advertising nonsense that came before it.

New fiction on our site presents stories of schizophrenic delusion, contrarian misery, and the life-and-death dramas of childhood:

Thanks to Tesla’s shareholders, Elon Musk might soon be the first trillionaire in history. And like other high-tech entrepreneurs, he’s left California to build his wealth in Texas—a state highly amenable to extraction and pillage.

Published during the AIDS epidemic, George Whitmore’s “Nebraska” was set in 1956, 1957, and 1969. But as Dale Peck observes, the novel feels so timeless as to read like a fable.

“War—whether it takes place between societies or within them—has no heroes, only distributions of cruelty, debasement, and ruin, a fact that is routinely denied, ignored, or repressed by those most responsible for perpetuating it.”

In the exhibit from our new issue, Michael Oswell illustrates culture’s devolution into slop:

In his work, Ronald M. Schernikau paired strong political commitments with a rigorous engagement with craft. Ben Miller writes on his queer Bildungsroman, “smalltownnovella,” out this month in an English translation from @uglyducklingpresse.bsky.social.

This put words to the thing I keep coming back to: "Ducks, Newburyport" is the only novel that makes sense of this moment thebaffler.com/salvos/ameri...

" #MauriceSendak brought the scary, thrilling, perverse world of fairy tales and folktales to modern picture books"

Gaza sits inside Ryan Ruby’s essay on Guyotat

Another seminal essay by Fred Turner, this time on "The Texan Ideology": While the Californian Ideology fused 1960s counterculture with tech entrepreneurship to imagine a connected digital utopia, the Texan Ideology combines neoliberal economics, Christian nationalism, and resource extraction.

’In 2015, if you said, “I heard it on a podcast,” you were trying to sound smart. In 2025, it’s better to lie.’ Loved this essay by Brace Belden in @thebaffler.com, maybe the best thing I’ve read about the podcast form

The sadomasochistic games of Terao Tetsuya’s “Spent Bullets” begin at a boy’s prep school in Taiwan before expanding to Silicon Valley and the American interstate, where identity is overwhelmed until it’s no longer clear who’s topping whom.

In three new tales from Alla Gorbunova (translated by Elina Alter), a madman signs a bargain with the devil, a contrarian shoots a dove with a slingshot, and children take sides in the battle of Dark against Light.

As the second Trump administration lumbers on, let’s hang onto the hope that the literature it produces will be more politically engaged than what came out during the first. thebaffler.com/salvos/american-gothics-lehmann

Our debates around symbolic violence unfold against a backdrop of terrifying and grisly real violence. Pierre Guyotat’s final book draws a line between the two, parsing the realities of war with the only civilized response: extremity.

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The novels that dealt with Trump 1.0 were filled with avatars of retrograde masculinity. They are human-shaped symbols, hulking and inarticulate, clinically diagnosable but without agency or politics.

The narrator of “smalltownnovella” gets an education in how the world actually works—who it is designed to protect, how its boys become men, and in how the system might be used to seed its own destruction.

My old masthead home at @thebaffler.com graciously let me hold forth on the not-so-great American Trump novel: thebaffler.com/salvos/ameri...

"What draws readers to Guyotat and the other writers of the transgressive tradition is that they are candid about violence. Violence may not be the totality of life, but it is closer to the core of it than spurious humanisms would have us believe." Ryan Ruby on Pierre Guyotat in @thebaffler.com

In response to the rise of Trumpism, America’s novelists—or at least their protagonists—retreated to the relative safety of the domestic sphere. The result, writes @chrislehmann.bsky.social, is a disappointingly depoliticized literature. thebaffler.com/salvos/american-gothics-lehmann

The narrator of “smalltownnovella” gets an education in how the world actually works—who it is designed to protect, how its boys become men, and in how the system might be used to seed its own destruction.

A federal judge has ordered the White House to resume offering ASL interpretation at press briefings. As @quailty.bsky.social remarks in our new issue, these attacks on deaf culture clarify the rage that propels a new novel from Sara Nović.

Terao Tetsuya’s “Spent Bullets” bounces between three narrators, though it’s never clear who is speaking, and each story sinks further into the quicksand of identity.

French provocateur Pierre Guyotat’s Prix Médicis-winning memoir “Idiocy” invokes brutality, perversity, and endurance amid political injustice. As Ryan Ruby writes, its appearance in English is timely and urgent.

“These Trump fictions seek to displace the explicit politics of the MAGA uprising into the deeper substrata of American life—specifically, into the overlapping realms of language and family life, where contemporary American novelists are most at home.” thebaffler.com/salvos/american-gothics-lehmann

“The experience of a deaf person is often imagined in binaries, beginning with the seemingly definitional division between people who hear and those who do not.”

The loneliness of George Whitmore’s “Nebraska,” originally published in 1987, stretches from an unknowable past into an even darker future. Dale Peck writes on queer literature before and after the schism of AIDS. thebaffler.com/latest/tryin...

Given the garish entitlement at the Gatsby themed WH party on the very day that SNAP benefits are cut off, I thought I would post a piece I wrote about a book about The Great Gatsby @thegreatgatsby0901.bsky.social @fscottfitzgerald.bsky.social @thebaffler.com thebaffler.com/latest/gatsb...

A new generation of deaf writers and artists consider the contradictions, binaries, and interstitial linguistic spaces they find themselves in, as technological advances and ableist politicians threaten to transform deaf culture. thebaffler.com/salvos/manual-labor-leland

Even after an order from a federal judge ordering Trump to resume them, SNAP payments sit in limbo. Christopher Bosso explained in 2023 how the government is starving the program.

Originally published in 1980, Ronald M. Schernikau’s “smalltownnovella” is finally available in English via @uglyducklingpresse.bsky.social, translated by Lucy Jones. In this excerpt from the afterword, Ben Miller writes on craft, politics, and lowercase text.

“We’ve already established that ‘Spent Bullets’ has no time for morality, and if it explodes the contract between the aesthetic and the ethical, then Terao gains the same free will to write whatever he desires for which his characters would happily perish.”

Andrew Leland's piece on a new generation of deaf writers is a nice pairing with this. New possibilities exist, even in a world falling ever deeper into illiteracy. (As always, it pays to look in marginalized places and note diversities within them.) thebaffler.com/salvos/manua...

In Baffler no. 81, @quailty.bsky.social examines three works by deaf artists: a memoir from Rachel Kolb, Sara Novic’s novel of deaf-anarchist insurrection, and the film “Deaf President Now!”

“Trussell’s role as the Robert Moses of the city’s hospitals—an unelected official tasked with redesigning a core public service—has been largely relegated to old newspaper clippings.”

“Culturally deaf activists and thinkers tend to describe being deaf as distinct from disability; to them, deaf people are a linguistic minority like Arabic or Vietnamese speakers in the United States; the disadvantage is structural rather than intrinsic.”

Poised between Fascism and anarchy, Pynchon’s feckless heroes skip like stones through twentieth-century upheaval. His latest, “Shadow Ticket,” is caper across a fraught war zone.

Originally published in 1987, The Song Cave has reissued George Whitmore’s “Nebraska.” Dale Peck writes on the search for truth in the literature written before and after AIDS.

“Why do people listen to this shit?” thebaffler.com/outbursts/the-hatred-of-podcasting-belden

Donald Trump recently announced that he’d ordered the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing after three decades. As @emmaclairefoley.bsky.social explained last year, Americans we sit closer to nuclear annihilation than we like to imagine.

“Ronald M. Schernikau knew that literary creation and political engagement are intimately related in unpredictable ways.”

Terao Tetsuya graduated from NTU in Singapore and worked as a Google engineer. His new book lays bare the disgust, fascination, and sublimated envy at the heart of technical ambition. @arghpoetica.bsky.social reviews “Spent Bullets.”