Over the course of nearly a century, the United States government corralled Native children in federally run boarding schools. The goal was assimilation and absorption into industrial capitalism—all the easier to take their tribal lands.

“Agentic commerce invites us to hand over our data to the same regime of automation that will justify and accelerate the global march toward labor becoming more contingent and precarious.”

“Despite its digital dominance, PETA alone has changed little for nonhuman beings.”

To understand the most pernicious fantasies of late capitalism, one need look no further than the physical and intellectual properties of Disney. From the Archives: Sarah Marshall considers life on the margins of the House of Mouse:

“Israel has systematically disinterred thousands of bodies in cemeteries across Gaza. Israel keeps some of these bodies in morgues, others in unnamed, numbered graves inside military zones called ‘cemeteries of numbers.”

Over at @thebaffler.com, some thoughts on spiritual cinema, medieval mystics, Shaker chairs, dance music, and what it might mean for modern art to yearn for the divine. thebaffler.com/latest/wild-...

Modernity draws a bright line between the possible and impossible, the rational and irrational. Yet spiritual cinema reaches out toward the ineffable, offering audiences a glimpse of a world beyond our circumstances.

"À Gaza, Israël a déclaré avoir emporté des camions remplis de cadavres palestiniens afin de leur faire subir des tests ADN, pour s'assurer qu'aucun d'entre eux n'était israélien. Puis il les a conservés. Personne ne sait combien de corps ont été emportés depuis 2023." thebaffler.com/latest/im-no...

AI can draft your work emails (awkwardly), answer your customer queries (badly), and make something that sounds like music. But its abilities are finite—and as Sohini Desai explains, we should be skeptical of the promises CEOs are making.

The Baffler and Dissent are coupling up❣️Get a year of both magazines for just $60. ezsubscription.com/bfl/subscrib...

PETA wants to extend human rights to include all living, breathing, feeling things. But as recent history demonstrates, it’s not as if simply being human guarantees dignity and protection.

At the periphery of the parking lot, wild plants persist, poking their way through asphalt cracks and fences erected to keep nature out.

“I want this: an art of expectation and aspiration, an art that levitates and revelates, that shakes and speaks in unknown tongues—a miraculous art that pushes beyond itself.” thebaffler.com/latest/wild-...

"Palestinian witnesses have reported that some prisoners were alive at the time they were taken for organ extraction. In one batch of bodies, the organs removed were those commonly transplanted: heart, liver, lungs... Here, the surgeon acts as—is—a soldier." I'm honestly speechless.

“For as long as the ride lasted, I had believed that it was not physically possible for me, or anyone, to die at Disney World. I believed that mortality, injury, worked differently in here.”

This Valentine’s Day, treat yourself with a subscription to The Baffler and @dissentmag.bsky.social for just $60. It’s nicer than chocolates, cheaper than a prix fixe, and unlike roses, it lasts all year. ezsubscription.com/bfl/subscrib...

Shakespeare is a common tongue that unites us in grief, rapture, frivolity, fear, and longing—little wonder, then, that his works and the world that bore them, are reimagined again and again on page and screen.

“Israel’s approach to the Palestinian body emerges from a cross between the utilitarian logic of how death becomes life—here not between individual bodies but through them, for the nation—and the retrofitted justification to kill, in life’s name.”

A real nice bit of reviewage from Rob Rubsam in @thebaffler.com, placing "Revelations" within a larger trend of the sublime and spiritual in contemporary cinema!! And can you believe they used a still from our movie for the header!! Read on! thebaffler.com/latest/wild-...

“‘Six Speak’ was more than a sociological analysis or a cri de coeur; it offered a record of a neighborhood whose days could be numbered.”

Ours is a culture of persistent literalism, a society which routinely mistakes surfaces for depths. @robrubsam.bsky.social writes on three films that reach toward something deeper: “The Testament of Ann Lee,” “Revelations of Divine Love,” and “Sirāt.”

“His plays collapse time and distance and remind us to linger in the in-between spaces. We make and remake Shakespeare, as in the cycle of samsara, he is not dead but is becoming one with the universe.”

In October of 2025, Israel returned four hundred dead bodies to Gaza. But it denied entry to basic forensic materials that families would need to identify their loved ones—more proof of how Israel uses the dead to attack the living.

Our annual Valentine’s Day deal is back. For a limited time, get a year of The Baffler and a year of @dissentmag.bsky.social for just $60. ezsubscription.com/bfl/subscrib...

“The moves through 2025 were directed at clean energy and environmental justice: in August, Trump’s EPA announced the termination of $7 billion in grants that were meant to help low-income households install solar panels on their homes.”

The “Happiest Place on Earth” can be hell for those who work there. From the Archives: Sarah Marshall peeks behind the curtain of the Magic Kingdom.

“If the sovereign’s power over a person through their body ceases once a body is buried, Israelis have found a workaround: they pull the body out of the earth. __Come here, I’m not done with you__.” The rhythm of Mary Turfah’s sentences are as devastating as what she writes about

In the 1960s, urban planners wanted to plow a highway through Cambridge, Massachusetts. Barbara P. Norfleet sprung into action, camera in hand. Jackson Davidow writes on the resulting photography project that documented six houses at risk of demolition.

In Gaza, Israel takes truckloads of Palestinian bodies for DNA testing, to make sure they are not Israeli. They seldom return them. Mary Turfah examines what they are doing with the dead, how it structures Israeli power, and why they get away with it.

“Shakespeare is no longer just a playwright; he is an industry. Beginning with the waning golden age of the theater in the late nineteenth century, Shakespeare became the property of academics, transformed from entertainment into high culture.”

From the Archives: Sarah Marshall describes the cruel fantasy that Disney sells to children—and just about everyone else.

“The project’s bedrock was the irresistible, oh-so-sixties notion that conversation was the stuff of social transformation.”

“It took more than two years for thousands of diplomats to arduously negotiate the UN Conference’s agenda. It took mere days for much of it to be cast aside.”

"In Chaudhuri's novels, every paragraph reads like the first; he writes fiction that gives these self-contained fragments 'primacy over the superstructure of narrative.' They exist for their own sake; they can be read and revisited independently." On Amit Chaudhuri at @thebaffler.com

Justice40, Biden’s government-wide environmental justice policy, failed to serve the marginalized communities it was meant to protect. So, too, did the IRA. And some of the blame for that rests on the shoulders of environmentalists. thebaffler.com/salvos/green...

Tana Wojczuk reviews “Hamnet,” a female-centered story of death, birth, and creative rebirth and considers the purpose of setting such a narrative in a Shakespearean world.

Disney has found itself a new CEO: Josh D’Amaro, the former chair of the company’s hugely successful parks division. Back in 2019, Sarah Marshall paid a visit to the “Happiest Place on Earth.”

A treat to begin the week — thanks @thebaffler.com!

In the 1960s, artists took a fresh approach to documentary photography, often arising from political need. Jackson Davidow writes on two early projects by Barbara P. Norfleet and Susan Meisalas in Cambridge, MA.

The fiction of Amit Chaudhuri refuses to distinguish between the significant and the insignificant, the “real” story and the still life humming in the background.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday! Back in 2017, David Roth wrote on how the NFL prioritizes the profits of the men who own the league’s teams above all else.

We’re still living in the world the war on terror built, one marked by ruin, poverty, and death. Its architects have faced no consequences. But we can learn from the bold actions of those who resisted it in the moment.

“This is what is so remarkable about Chaudhuri’s stories: they center the human, the random, the mundane, the spontaneous.”

From Jackson Davidow, on two photography projects that document life and the home in Cambridge, Massachusetts:

From the Archives: David Roth writes on the NFL’s very American kind of decline.

“Amid the excessive trimming, weeding, and pruning, there’s almost always a forgotten edge of the parking lot where wild plants persist, sprouting in pavement cracks by abandoned shopping carts and windblown litter.”

In a linear narrative made up of logical, relevant coordinates, every detail services the larger story. But as Apoorva Tadepalli explains, Amit Chaudhuri reverses this dynamic: a plot must arrange itself around the fragmentary details of life.

In short fiction from our new issue, a woman discovers a telepathic connection to produce and conducts a series of interviews with asparagus, corn, and a potato.

For a writer as well-known and widely adapted as William Shakespeare, death is not the end. Chloé Zhao’s new film of Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet” shows us the poet and playwright in his grief. But is this immortality or the living dead? thebaffler.com/latest/shake...

“His protest is a model of bold resistance, one that is at least as potent in a world of student activist abductions and deportations and undisguised perfidy from government officials.”