“Sirāt” sends itself into the unknown—and then further and further, until the destination has been lost, and there is no return. @robrubsam.bsky.social writes on three new entries in the canon of spiritual cinema.

“The breathless panic that AI is an existential threat to human labor functions as a constant commercial we’re all forced to live inside of, until we can no longer recognize the difference between marketing and reality.”

“Spiritual cinema is fundamentally an aspiration: it must reach out toward something it cannot ultimately depict.”

In a quiet office in the forgotten corner of a news network, a divorcee drowns in images: press conferences and car chases, misjudgments and missed opportunities.

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The tech industry promises a future where an autonomous assistant handles all your little to-dos: finding an outfit for a wedding, buying concert tickets, planning trips. To accomplish this, they’ll need access to your data—all of it.

When surgeons operate on a dead body, it is often in the name of organ transplant, research, or medical training. But Israel uses the bodies of dead Palestinian prisoners to further its political project and dehumanize the living.

The skin is the largest organ in the body, and Israel has the largest skin bank in the world. Mary Turfah describes the country’s ill treatment of Palestinian corpses.

With “The Testament of Ann Lee,” Mona Fastvold shows the viewer how mystical ecstasy feels. The film centers on the founder and history of Shakerism—but more importantly, it expresses their existential mode.

“You have to buy a day of childhood at Disney World, and this is not remotely right. But on the other hand, where else can you go, in America today, to buy such a thing?”

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As the tech industry struggles to justify its investments in AI, firms are now pitching “agentic AI” as one route to profit. As Sohini Desai explains, these bots are meant to juice consumer spending—and help bosses put the squeeze on their workers.

Every day in the Navy Yard, he sifts through hours of news footage looking for a single usable still—and burrows further and further into his past. Read “Replay” on our site now. thebaffler.com/fiction/repl...

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.

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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.”

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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.

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“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.”