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CHOOSE YOUR PRECIPICE. The grist that makes modern life will run out at some point—when will we tap the last barrel of crude, blow through the remaining stocks of helium, deplete those rare metals only getting rarer? More pressing than bismuth and boron as I write this in September is who will win the election; even more pressing than that is a ceasefire in Gaza, though one worries that the war will only widen. Perhaps by publication time the conflagration will have broadened—perhaps the very worst will have come to pass, the Doomsday Clock having finally struck midnight, the world set ablaze by intercontinental ballistic missiles. We have already endured years of near-misses by nuclear-weapons states—solar flares and training exercises mistaken for imminent attacks to be responded to with the most lethal capacity—as Emma Claire Foley points out in her essay for “Get in Line,” which considers the ways in which we wait today and for what exactly. Elsewhere on the nuclear question, Emily Harnett takes the reader on a tour of decommissioned missile silos in America’s heartland, Cold War weapons infrastructure now rented out on Airbnb or memorialized as patriotic kitsch. On the subject of cheap spectacle, Gabriel Winslow-Yost considers the promise of virtual reality, which seems to only improve in proportion to the real world’s degradation. Jess McAllen surveys the landscape of AI therapy bots: ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of mental health, they are yet another impoverishment of our health care experience. Few understand this more acutely than the poor, as Bryce Covert writes, pushed off of Medicaid across the country by the millions. Waiting on the powerful’s whims, too, are seafarers, who, as Laleh Khalili argues, have little redress against shipowners who fly flags of convenience and leave crews in limbo at sea. There can be promise in waiting, however: Jack Sheehan considers what a finally united Ireland might look like, even as a shifting party landscape and the political rise of an Irish far right complicate the picture. Eric Dean Wilson writes on more than a decade of cruising and whether the analog experience of patiently seeing who’s around might combat sex’s domination by the apps and the gentrification of queer life. His essay is accompanied by photographs from the late 1960s by Arthur Tress depicting cruising in New York’s Central Park, a series Tress has only recently begun to show publicly. Fret as we might over life’s various ticking clocks, art rewards such forbearance (though a race can be inspiringly bizarre, per the issue’s short story by Manuela Draeger, translated from the French by Brian Evenson). Ed Park describes his rediscovery of an unpublished 1998 manuscript during the pandemic, finding a “document of sustained artistic bliss” he had yet to experience again. And Justin Guthrie contributes a series of portraits of discarded objects picked out from an obsessive period of trawling the Los Angeles River, the photographer now waiting for the waters to deposit another haul of trash he can make his own.
 October 2024

no. 76—Get in Line

“In the United States, political change is evolutionary rather than revolutionary,” the Republican political analyst who helped devise the racial grievance-driven Southern Strategy, in 1969’s The Emerging Republican Majority. That book’s intensive taxonomy of which whites broke for Nixon and why—Phillips referred to his research as an outgrowth of “taking zoology in the classroom”—inaugurated a pop-Darwinist tendency among commentators: extrapolating prophecies of America’s political future from some supposedly imminent preponderance in the changing population. Accordingly, Democratic partisans have made Phillips’s titular locution their own, taking the country’s looming majority-minority status to mean a likely voting bloc perpetually blue. “Facing the Future” examines the use and abuse of the “emerging majority,” our contributors asking how the idea of a coming consensus has been used to manipulate voters and paper over dissension within ethnic and racial groups. In an examination of Phillips’s career, Astra Taylor argues that the bipartisan fondness for this essentializing trope occludes solidarity and organizing across both race and class. Geraldo Cadava and Rick Perlstein wonder whether predictions of a millenarian shift will ever lose their appeal, given that demography has not managed to be destiny in the past half-century. Political affiliations are not actually written into our DNA, despite the growing fondness among conservatives for Great Replacement fearmongering, as Gaby Del Valle describes in an essay on the recent eugenics revival. The current immigrant experience is less that of an invading Democratic foot soldier and more of a buffeted member of the precariat, per Pooja Bhatia’s report on the liminal protections provided to migrants. Dennis M. Hogan’s chronicle of Staten Island demonstrates the long and sordid history of mob violence against newcomers to this country, whose growing diversity hasn’t secured a permanent liberal stronghold. See Arizona, as Kyle Paoletta details, a rapidly expanding state more in thrall to a culture of economic growth than to either party; or Texas, where Dave Denison searches for a long-lost left populism now struggling to be revived. It may have been Americans who coined the term “emerging majority,” but the unpredictable politics of demographic change are playing out across the globe. Lily Lynch surveys the “demographic oblivion” faced by the Balkans’ native-born population, pinched by low rates of fertility and high rates of emigration; filling in the gap are migrant workers from countries like Nepal and the Philippines, as well as Russian émigrés fleeing Putin’s regime. Writing on the German trial of neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Underground, Michael Lipkin reconsiders the country’s famed memory culture in its current era, marked by an ascendant far right and a plentitude of citizens with an “immigration background.” What evolutions does the future actually hold? Probably not the matriarchal society of “wooms” and veiled men auditioning for the privilege of donating sperm, as depicted in Chantal Clarke’s short story. Perhaps we’ll look like the motley multiracial amalgamations depicted on this issue’s covers, or we’ll be uploaded to the cloud to live a pixelated life à la Gao Hang’s low-res portraits. Or we’ll be hunted like dogs by dogs—robot ones, to be exact, like those Rebecca McCarthy finds on campus at the University of Pennsylvania, already used today to police the southern border of a country terrified of what (and who) is to come.
 September 2024

no. 75—Facing the Future

You can trace the liberalizing contours of the American public’s relationship to drugs by way of the last few presidents’ consumption habits. Clinton famously didn’t inhale, only willing to admit to touching reefer in England. Before his religious reawakening at forty, Bush the younger by all accounts led a wild life. While author J.H. Hatfield’s claim in Fortunate Son, his 1999 presidential biography, that Bush had been arrested for cocaine use was met with skepticism—the book would be withdrawn by St. Martin’s Press upon reports that Hatfield had served prison time for hiring a hitman—polling at the time also suggested that people cared little if Dubya partook. His successor simply admitted to both pot and blow in a memoir, with little mainstream political backlash, though cocaine use is one of many real and imagined facts about Obama that feed right-wing conspiracies to this day. Afterward, Trump’s reign demonstrated the broadening of our nation’s pharmaceutical lens, as well as its darkening. White House doctors freely dispensed ziplocks of Ambien and Provigil in the executive offices as Trump would go on to hock hydroxychloroquine (and bleach) as Covid prophylactics. Hunter Biden’s crack use seems to bother people less than his being on the board of a Ukrainian energy company; if his father is on a cocktail of performance enhancers, as some allege, what truly rankles is not Biden’s possible Adderall usage but his advanced age. That’s not to say that drugs have definitively triumphed in the war on drugs, though the gradual mainstreaming of drug-assisted therapy does signal a certain kind of victory. Here, in “Altered States,” John Semley writes on the growing acceptance and commodification of MDMA, championed now for its psychic amelioration by veterans and ravers alike. Dan Piepenbring finds antecedents for the current vogue for ketamine clinics in the nineteenth-century “Anaesthetic Revelation” fueled by nitrous oxide and ether, whose users struggled to preserve the overwhelming wisdom fully available only during a fleeting high. That drugs can mean both so much and so little is Dylan Levi King’s takeaway from his survey of synthetic drug use by hobbyists in contemporary China. The dankly organic is now recreationally legal in twenty-four states. Ariel Fisher tours retirees wild for marijuana in their golden years, while Baynard Woods examines labor abuse in the growing cannabis industry. We’ve come far, then, from the 1980s heyday of antidrug propaganda chronicled by J.W. McCormack, when McGruff the Crime Dog might warn that a single puff could send you straight to the hard stuff. Still, many myths persist. This issue attempts to puncture a few: Zachary Siegel questions the “epidemic” framing of the opioid crisis. Ann Neumann argues that we continually demonize those seeking to minimize physical pain through the poppy plant’s derivatives, and Donald Morrison details how Oregon never really gave drug decriminalization a fighting chance. As Madeleine Wattenbarger writes, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s criticism of his country’s prisons as “five-star hotels” is only true with regard to the exorbitant costs of incarceration there, often borne by prisoners’ families. Edward Ongweso Jr. and Athena Sofides explain how patent “evergreening” allows insulin prices to soar year-after-year, despite Big Pharma’s lack of actual innovation in hormone production. Oswaldo Zavala lampoons claims that Hamas and Mexican cartels bonded over the fine art of tunnel building, the sort of political pipe dream it’s easy to imagine leaving the cosmetically plumped lips of former congressman George Santos like, as Dale Peck describes, so many other lies—the largest one, perhaps too easily believed by even his skeptics, being that Santos is uniquely duplicitous in a nation trashed in more ways than one.
 June 2024

no. 74—Altered States

FAILURE ABOUNDS TODAY, but also its recuperation. Who hasn’t been sold “resilience,” what with a vast industry of self-help hucksters and combination fitness-business influencers imploring you to grit your teeth and embrace the grind? Samuel Beckett’s call to fail again and better has been repurposed as prosperity gospel by BrainyQuote.com and by Buddhist nun and best-selling self-help author Pema Chödrön. It’s been consumed like so much protein powder by retired Navy SEAL, podcaster, and “leadership instructor” Jocko Willink, who militarizes the Irish playwright’s bleak, language-starved injunction in a YouTube video that’s been viewed twelve million times: “Get up, dust off, reload, recalibrate, reengage.” Some refuse this mandate to try again, differently. Take the Democrats, who, as Jennifer Berkshire shows, have failed to look beyond the neoliberal educational policies of the past thirty years even as conservatives lead an assault on public school teachers, who are leaving the profession in droves. Or the warmongers, berated by John Dolan in his survey of recent military trends, who are happy to march anyone but themselves to a bloody end despite dwindling numbers of the young, willing, and able across much of the globe. In the United States, as Jasper Craven points out in a profile of Willink’s fellow ex-SEAL influencer Eddie Gallagher, we seem to prefer our military members to hawk supplements and gun-themed coffee. How should the left recalibrate? Jules Gill-Peterson considers Judith Butler’s analysis of the reactionary anti-trans forces surging worldwide and finds the philosopher’s solutions less vital than fatiguing. Hannah Proctor places the major Anglophone electoral losses suffered by the left at the end of the last decade into a larger history of left melancholia and burnout, arguing for the necessity of mourning—and its acknowledgment—in politics. Drawing from the psychoanalytic tradition of the Middle Group, Sam Adler-Bell contends that at least a moment of lying fallow after defeat is necessary. Convents were once a place for such contemplation and renewal, but as Lauren Fadiman shows, the United States’ Catholic sisterhood is now shrinking to the point of nonexistence. When reengaging, best to avoid easy absolution and fictitious succor. This is often easier said than done, as Jess McAllen demonstrates in her study of celebrity endometriosis surgeons, who have flourished by offering supposed cures in an environment of misinformation and false promises. Hubert Adjei-Kontoh lambasts the too-easy conflation of dance music’s emergence from the marginalized with its supposed ability to bring about utopia, while Liam Baranauskas makes a plea to free ourselves from the isolating tyranny of the Netflix algorithm in favor of seeking ourselves in others, that “most affecting and holy of reactions to art.” He finds common cause then with Andrew Norman Wilson, who narrates his departure, replete with a rib removal and an episode of penguin-induced dissociation, from a contemporary art world whose works serve no one but yacht owners and curatorial bureaucrats with terminal degrees.
 April 2024

no. 73—Consolation Prizes

We’ve never been so old. There were 95,000 centenarians in 1990 and more than 450,000 in 2015, according to estimates from the United Nations. Global life expectancy doubled from 1920 to 2020; the pandemic saw a dip that was horrifying but comparatively minor in the scope of a century’s time. Simultaneously, there have never been so many of us of so many ages (nearly a third of the eight billion alive today are under eighteen), and so there is an unprecedented number of generations now existing, which is to say aging at the same time. “Life Alert” considers getting older and its consequences, for the aged and youthful alike. Chris Lehmann surveys the sclerotic class of gerontocrats from Biden and Trump to McConnell and Pelosi, tracing the question of how old is too old to govern back to the 1984 Reagan-Mondale debate, which inaugurated the concern in American public life. To be elderly is not necessarily to be empowered in this country, however, especially for those who’ve experienced lifelong bigotry: Ann Neumann details the discrimination faced by LGBTQ elders from a nursing home industry already struggling to care for its aging clientele, while Jeff Weinstein chronicles how hard it is for queer seniors to get adequate health care from Medicare when no one in the U.S. government seems to believe anyone over sixty-five fucks. Elsewhere in the issue, contributors consider how we navigate a changing world that remains hostile to its inhabitants. Aaron Gell places the RICO charges against the activists militating against Cop City within a long history of state persecution of dissidents in the American South, the recent charges echoing the 1930s prosecution of Black communist agitator Angelo Herndon. Britt H. Young considers the brand-new world of silicone penises and the prosthetic euphoria available to all at your local sex shop. And Adrian Nathan West examines the loosening taboos around steroids, making the case that it’s a laudable sea change for a particularly masculine kind of gender affirmation—with some qualifications, given the American appetite for excess. No one has, to my knowledge, used artificial intelligence to resurrect the likes of the bodybuilding YouTube greats Rich Piana or Joesthetics, gone at the tender ages of forty-six and thirty; one likely could, however, with the gimmicky tools scrutinized by Tamara Kneese in her survey of transhumanist technologists’ attempts to resuscitate the dead with data. A more deliberate approach, without the use of Amazon’s Alexa, might be that of Cecil Brown, the eighty-year-old veteran of the Black avant-garde attempting to digitally revive, as Matt Sandler writes, the enslaved antebellum poet George Moses Horton. Amid all this not-quite-dying and almost-living, how fare the youth? Some are funneled into Reaganite financial literacy programs where they play at being fifth-grade adults, e.g., work to pay off an imaginary bank loan and pretend to have carpal tunnel syndrome, as Anya Ventura reports from the immersive learning experience that is BizTown. Others might have the privilege of learning from Austin McCoy, who writes of his rap-soundtracked political education in the 1990s and his current efforts teaching university students the history of hip-hop. It’s an effort toward a tradition—the best we can do in our short time here, our lengthened dotages still falling short of the lifespan of, say, Niagara Falls, as Chris Maggio shows in his photo essay on the natural wonder and its tourist economy.
 January 2024

no. 72—Life Alert

THE FIRST QUARTER of the twenty-first century fast approaches its end, and all is not well in human welfare. According to the UN secretary-general, some 360 million people worldwide are in need of humanitarian assistance. Beset by challenges of its own making (corruption, abuse, influence-peddling), as well as developments, like climate change, beyond its control, the humanitarian industry faces down an era of permanent crisis. Whither humanitarianism? Straight to hell, according to Joshua Craze, in his history of “the angel’s creed” professed by the European bureaucrats who preside over never-ending famine and war. The humanitarian, he continues in his contribution to the issue’s titular symposium, might soon be held in as much contempt as the colonial missionary is today. Michael Barnett, Miriam Ticktin, Alex de Waal, Musab Younis, and Hong (Stella) Zhang offer their agreements, rejoinders, and addenda to the debate. Elsewhere, the actions of global leaders past and present offer little confidence on the matter. Tim Schwab writes on the Big Philanthropy of Bill Gates, who has attempted to trick the public into viewing his self-interest as charitable largesse, while Laura Robson details how the United Nations remade refugees as precarious, unprotected labor during and after the Cold War. The issue also features contributors considering the legacy of specific twenty-first-century humanitarian efforts. Pooja Bhatia describes how the UN tried to deny responsibility for bringing cholera to Haiti following the 2010 earthquake, refusing to this day to make adequate reparations for the deaths caused by their workers. Helen Epstein chronicles the failure of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (better known as PEPFAR) to end, per its Bush-administration architects’ ambition, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa once and for all. Domestically, Sam Russek considers “humonetarianism,” or conservative social reform which is derived from grievances over taxes rather than concern for human dignity, as applied to criminal justice in Texas. Elsewhere in the state, Caroline Tracey profiles the forensic anthropologists of Operation Identification, who attempt to identify and repatriate the remains of migrants too often carelessly buried in the borderlands. Tanvi Misra highlights the United States’ shoddy, patchwork, and often abusive system for dealing with unaccompanied migrant youth who survive that treacherous crossing. What can be done, in the face of all this failure? There aren’t easy solutions precipitating from these pages, though there is at least one rough consensus: no more dollar-a-day campaigns that use the supposedly pitiful as props and ultimately line humanitarians’ pockets. Consider the work of Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, or CATPC, a cooperative of Congolese artists purchasing back ancestral lands from Unilever with funds derived from the exhibition and sale of their work in a contemporary art world whose institutions have been financed by the very exploitation of said lands. On slash-and-burned palm oil plantations with depleted soil, CATPC plants forests and plans for self-sufficiency. Slow work, to be sure, but their own: tangible, direct, and with nary an angel in sight.
 November 2023

no. 71—Whither Humanitarianism?

TikTok chefs stir-frying and red-cooking in idyllic Sichuan countrysides, listicles of where to get not-your-nonna’s tagliatelle, Youtube channels featuring artery-busting barbecue smoked by men who seem, above all, engorged: What are we awash in today but endless food content? With issue no. 70, The Baffler overcomes the dyspepsia induced by such gluttony to consider the contemporary consumable. The issue features reports regarding the psychoactive substances of (semi)legal choice, with Adrian Nathan West taking on the craft cocktail bar and Kathleen Alcott scrutinizing the weed restaurant: the former home to a frenzy of ritualized “premiumization” and the latter a portal to an otherworldly catatonia. Equally replete with body horror is Will Self’s fiction contribution to the issue, featuring a surgeon’s diary of fantastical operations. Meanwhile, Chris Crowley writes on the gratuity-included attempts to solve the eternally vexed politics of tipping in America; and, across the pond, Ruby Tandoh visits the British seaside destination of Margate, which is caught between a creative class fairytale of cute restaurants highlighting seasonal ingredients and the hardscrabble town as it actually stands. Of course, every plated morsel is not the sui generis product of a noble chef working in harmony with nature but the precipitate result of a bewildering tangle of agricultural and economic policy, as Alan Guebert describes in his overview of farming in the United States. For millions of food-insecure Americans, to plate a morsel at all requires food stamps, which Christopher Bosso defends in his treatise on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Elsewhere, Karen Olsson’s history of the Texas Observer considers the often tenuous connection we have to the land, one made only stranger by online tradwives in Gaby Del Valle’s report on influencers on the range. Sometimes this connection is deliberately severed, as Sarah Aziza details in her essay on Israel’s history of “making the desert bloom” by planting water-intensive monocrops over the site of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages, while Jen Monroe depicts several victims through sugary sculptures of our messy agricultural present. Such distance can be remedied, argues M. Jahi Chappell in an interview with Zoé VanGelder, by the decommodifying principles of agroecology, a discipline which seeks to design more equitable and sustainable food systems aligned with the needs of local communities. Though the land itself must first be protected from the golf course-ification of the world, as the baker of a Wisconsin-famous whole-grain treat attempts to do in Dave Denison’s account of the Guerrilla Cookie and its erratic creator, Ted Odell.
 September 2023

no. 70—Out to Lunch

It’s been twenty years since Las Vegas debuted “What happens here, stays here.” The slogan is a winking celebration of self-containment that, of course, has never quite been true. (Hence, perhaps, the marvelously redundant update three years ago: “What happens here, only happens here.”) If Las Vegas is, as writer and resident Amanda Fortini has written, “a place about which people have ideas”—i.e. a locale whose specificity is often ignored for received narratives—the Nevadan mecca has at this point also sublated into an idea in and of itself. A beacon “more brighter than the sun,” to quote the Cocteau Twins’s “Heaven or Las Vegas,” the city’s icons and ethos are unbounded by geography and suffuse the rest of the country, if not the world. What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas, and Las Vegas is everywhere. The internet has turned into a massive casino (with painfully non-digital stakes), as William Powhida makes clear in his portraits of “GraftKings,” those profiting from other people’s digital bets on meme stocks and independent coin offerings. Elsewhere, Jacob Silverman skewers the DeFi-crazed pseudo-populists claiming that anyone can win big, framing crypto-leaders as a cartel; and George Scialabba considers two books on private equity’s captains of post-industry, who make money not out of things but of spreadsheets. In conversation with historian Avery Dame-Griff, Jamie Lauren Keiles discusses a more utopian period of emergent tech: the dawn of Web 1.0, which quickly became a way for isolated trans people to connect with and learn from each other. As manufacturing plummets, Sin City hospitality professors argue that the country’s future bends toward their home’s characteristic Fun Economy™: “tourism, plus sports, plus entertainment,” in the words of Bo Bernhard, vice president of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This issue’s authors examine the underbelly of our new leisurely present. In Vegas proper, Michael Friedrich probes the nostalgia-tripping cash grab that is the recently opened Punk Rock Museum, while Liz Pelly looks at Amazon’s failed Intersect festival and the corporation’s devouring of the music business. Nationally, Rachel Wilkinson chronicles amusement parks’ post-Covid experiments in attempting to serve their customers “authentic reality.” Maybe the question is who stays in Vegas, though the people who live there can be, as anywhere, peripatetic. Sam Sweet offers three portraits of gamblers and entertainers living between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and Erica Vital-Lazare contributes a personal essay about finding a home—and reconciliation—in the outlaw city to which her father fled when she was just four years old. Considering Pamela Anderson’s surprising (if brief) mid-career stint on the Strip as a magician’s assistant, Philippa Snow argues against simplified victimization narratives common to the recent boom in feminist reclamations of maligned women of the 1990s and 2000s. Isobel Harbison writes a requiem for Betty Willis, designer of the countlessly copied and globally reproduced “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, and the unsung women whose work is integral in making the city’s mythos. Labor indeed makes Las Vegas tick, as David Hill writes in his account of the Teamsters’ mob-assisted role in building the city as we know it. From the taxi driver that picks you up at the airport to the bellhop that lets you into your room, Vegas is a union town going strong, a labor bastion in the middle of a right-to-work state and nationally declining union density. Hopefully what happened there can happen elsewhere.
 July 2023

no. 69—Hell or Las Vegas

Good luck finding respite at home from whatever horror casts a pall over your life, as it’s hard to find quietude, peace, hygge, etc., given the outside world’s constant intrusions into the domestic. Chemical spills kill our pets, inflation halves our grocery budgets, and that’s holding aside the question of housing insecurity itself. After the glory days of zero interest rates, the twenty-first-century spin on the American idyll of homeownership has come crashing to a halt with the end of easy money on tap (and the rise of gas prices, which has upended even van-life dreams). Many are realizing what the poor have always known. “Rent eats first,” to quote sociologist Matthew Desmond’s work on eviction—or your mortgage payments do. How do we put more people in homes, and how do we make sure they’re able to stay there? The interminable debate has seen YIMBYs and NIMBYs become the Hatfields and McCoys of housing; Ian Volner braves the yay-nay vitriol to ask whether the whether is the problem, when there’s so much to be pondered with regards to the what—as in what exactly are we building in our backyards, and have built already? Poorly insulated buildings that are hazardous to our health, Patrick Sisson answers, in his survey of American construction. Nothing exemplifies this more than the country’s undying preoccupation with the McMansion, as Kate Wagner points out, which has survived financial crises and ecological catastrophes to become a suburbanite monument to this country’s will to self-annihilation. Not that the suburbs weren’t already memorials to housing failures, as Dave Denison argues while revisiting the 1985 classic Crabgrass Frontier, which chronicles the federal government’s mid-century role in keeping the suburbs lily-white. Focusing on the country’s capital, Kaila Philo traces the persistence of racial disparities in housing some fifty-five years after the Fair Housing Act, despite its intent to help realize a multiracial democracy in this country. Sadly, the most ambitious visions for housing now seem to come from tech billionaires dabbling in utopic urban planning, but as Charlie Dulik writes, these crypto-cities say more about their would-be founders’ fears and dreams than how we might actually accommodate anyone. These supposed marvels of technological splendor will likely run on salad, as do knowledge workers today, according to Aaron Timms—at least those not eating pastéis de nata in Lisbon and bandeja paisa in Bogotá while typing away in their Airbnbs, as Jessa Crispin describes in her reflections on the American cosmopolitan. Laura Grace Ford wanders through the blighted landscape of Coventry, where life crawls along through the ruins of industrial collapse.  When the state does actively decide to house people, it usually does so violently. Jess McAllen shows how politicians across the country have been rolling out forced treatment policies amid an increase in fearmongering about people with mental illness being violent. Meanwhile, those in jail face the increasing use of bails set by algorithms, as Bryce Covert reports; meant to provide a fairer measure of whether defendants should be released pretrial, such tools have failed to live up to their promise. As always, regardless and in spite of their conditions, people wrest autonomy from their surroundings, dream of better homes. Joshua Craze reports on deportees to South Sudan attempting to build new lives, despite widespread corruption and famine, in the youngest country in the world. In Dorothee Elmiger’s fiction, a narrator considers how prisoners in nineteenth-century London dreamed of new lives in the colonies. And a group of women in Tokyo known as the Koyama-san Notebook Workshop transcribe and reflect on the writings of a homeless member of their community, her diaries providing a glimpse into a woman’s struggle to maintain dignity despite the myriad forces arrayed against her.
 May 2023

no. 68—Fool House

“The nation is not a political fiction,” Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes in his 1990 treatise, Haiti: State Against Nation, “it is a fiction in politics.” Politicians, revolutionaries, concerned citizens—we all spin yarns in our attempts to take control of the very real powers of state. One such predominant tale is the national interest, a conception of a country’s definitive aims that is held by some as easily—even rationally—determined. As international relations realist Hans J. Morgenthau wrote in a 1952 essay on the United States’ national interest, “Taken in isolation, the determination of its content in a concrete situation is relatively simple; for it encompasses the integrity of the nation’s territory, of its political institutions, and of its culture.” Territory, politics, culture: these are quite a lot of inputs for such a monolithic concept. Morgenthau himself saw problems in his formulation, admitting the national interest could be elusive in concept and susceptible to interpretations “such as limitless imperialism and narrow nationalism.” One thinks, for instance, of the Bush White House’s security strategy of unilateral and extrajudicial force, based, in their own telling, on a “union of our values and our national interests.” In Baffler no. 67, we survey then the ways in which the idea of the national interest creates what Trouillot calls “the bleak homogeneity” pushed by those fighting for the nation’s reins. As Lyta Gold discovers while scrutinizing conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg’s career of half-baked answers to the question “What makes America great?,” a self-justifying eminence is often cited by those claiming to act in the national interest. Others find inspiration in less lofty sources: Ron DeSantis’s America First worldview owes a debt to the 1992 legal thriller A Few Good Men, as Jasper Craven uncovers in his examination of the Florida governor’s military service history and constant public defense of an abstract “freedom” even as he rolls back civil liberties. Also worshiped and rather nebulous is the Federal Reserve, whose supposed omnipotence as public economic authority is skewered by Andrew Elrod’s detailing of the institution’s recent struggles to tamp down inflation, and its powerlessness relative to the corporate boardroom. Rising prices are felt the world over, of course, as Shamira Ibrahim describes in her account of Ghana’s efforts to sell the nation as a pan-African tourist destination while the country’s working class struggles with a ballooning cost of living. Elsewhere in the issue, our authors consider those already subsumed by these bleak homogeneities. Vegetarianism is elevated to national creed in Sharanya Deepak’s report from an India shifting rightward, where Dalits and non-Hindus find themselves harassed and beaten for the act—and sometimes the mere suspicion—of eating beef. Tareq Baconi writes of the dilemmas faced by grassroot feminist activists in Egypt caught between imperial legacies and a neopatriarchal order. Umber Majeed’s collages imagine a world where Pakistanis dispossessed by the war on terror may virtually experience the country’s twenty-first century economic revitalization. And Gaby Del Valle chronicles the labyrinthine immigration bureaucracy that confronts migrants to the United States, where this country’s political parties are unanimous in telling them, to quote Kamala Harris in Guatemala nearly two years ago, “Do not come.” The weather cares little for lines on a map, regardless of how much money a nation pumps into border security and deportation proceedings. As rising temperatures make water ever scarcer, Ann Neumann examines Egypt and Ethiopia’s dueling claims over the Nile. Meanwhile, Thomas Geoghegan makes the argument for world government itself to confront climate change, with a half-utopic, half-utilitarian argument in favor of the European Union that reaches back to Kant’s musings on a perpetual peace. Which isn’t to suggest that forgetting about previous conflicts would be easy. As J.C. Hallman realizes on a trip taking in gun-themed graffiti, Kentucky Fried Chicken chains, and genocide memorials in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, at times the national interest is a desperately commemorative one, a furious insistence on not forgetting horrors past, nor dismissing them as fictions. Finally, in a short story by Damion Searls, a group of aging Gen Xers reminisce about mixtapes, documentaries, and strange encounters with the ineffable, against 2016’s bewildering backdrop of Trump’s rise to power—a time in which the national interest seemed, contra Morgenthau, far from simple. “We turned away,” the narrator recounts, from “everything that past generations and centuries had told us we should want, and we had no vocabulary to describe how their absence felt or what it might mean.”
 March 2023

no. 67—The National Interest

IN THE WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1990), the late, great Barbara Ehrenreich looked back on the rise of “aggressively ‘profamily’” activists of the 1980s. “They have invoked ‘the family’ when they trample on the rights of those who hold actual families together, that is, women,” she wrote. “They have used it to justify racial segregation and the formation of white-only, ‘Christian’ schools. And they have brought it out, along with flag and faith, to silence any voices they found obscene, offensive, disturbing, or merely different.” To this day, conservatives continue to manipulate and weaponize the term for their own ends. “Pro-family” rhetoric is used to disguise a morality that’s really about the preservation of the “traditional” order, about perpetuating a culture where the biological mother, father, child relationship is considered supreme, worthy of idolatry and protection, and must be maintained at all costs. It’s something sacrosanct that precludes any arguments against, whatever they might be. This issue aims to address the multifaceted complexities of family and the ways in which it’s used: for corporations and power, for health and wealth, for bodily autonomy and oppression. If a corporation can benefit from personhood, why shouldn’t dynastic wealth benefit from the protections afforded to family? Melinda Cooper details how legal entities known as “family offices” shield the ultrarich from taxation and regulation, guaranteeing generational prosperity. Kristen Martin delves into the vampiric world of evangelical foster care influencers, who take to social platforms to exploit those who they are meant to protect. In return for eroding the privacy and welfare of foster children, they receive clothing, sponsorships, and nonprofit status that sustains their schemes. Even when it’s not being invoked cynically, family has a dark side. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, this became especially clear: Ann Neumann explains that during the last three years, domestic violence has increased worldwide by 33 percent—which makes sense, given that leaving one’s home could also mean certain death. So who will protect the vulnerable? An entire movement has been born out of the premise of protecting women, but to caustic ends. Emily Janakiram describes how anti-abortionists have rebranded as “pro-woman” with some success, thanks to their appropriation of radical language and tactics learned from the left. But family is not always a tool for exploitation; it can provide care to those who are neglected or harmed by the state. Olivia Heffernan details the story of Jonel Beauvais, a woman on a mission to repair the destruction of “traditional kinship systems and family units,” and to reconstruct the lives of Indigenous families torn apart by prison, drugs, and abuse—effects of centuries-long systemic racism and destitution. Other times, family exists in a gray area where rules become more anachronistic and debated with every societal advancement. Adam Gaffney delves into medicine’s midcentury pivot away from paternalism in determining an ICU patient’s “goals of care”—and the resulting tug of war between the medical industrial complex, families, and health care providers. And sometimes it’s just personal. Sam Adler-Bell tells us about the shadow of John le Carré’s father that haunted the critically acclaimed author until his dying day, while Haley Mlotek explains how divorce within the billionaire class has resulted in its own proliferation. But why would they marry in the first place if it could ultimately divide their wealth? According to Mlotek, there may be one way that the superrich are just like us: their willingness to risk it all for love.
 December 2022

no. 66—The Ties That Bind

Makepeace Sitlhou’s report, in this issue of The Baffler, on the agonies of Bengali Muslim Abubakkar Siddique, finds the worker stripped bare by his rulers, cast into statelessness and monitored by militant immigration enforcers in Assam, India. Sitlhou writes that in more than one-fourth of cases like Siddique’s, where proof of citizenship through records was produced, the Border Police booked the person anyway, citing the “illegibility” of names written on voting rolls. Siddique can show his voting card and record of attendance at court, to which the state can always respond: it’s your word against ours, but we can’t hear you, and no one can read your name. Whose names are legible in America’s so-called democracy? Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is what Siddique is not in India: a recognized person with democratic speech rights. Ironic, then, is Google’s recent firing of Blake Lemoine, an AI researcher who claims the company’s LaMDA bot is sentient because of its ability to convey emotion in language. In “Sentience and Sensibility,” Meghan O’Gieblyn reminds us that Google silences in-house critics like Lemoine while using its formidable speech power to fund groups that lobby for conservative Supreme Court justices. It’s a foundational neoliberal scheme: corporate personhood leads to the elimination of a non-corporate person’s rights—for example, the right of anyone to have an abortion. Both parties are implicated, if you’re checking boxes ahead of an election. For its part, the Democratic Party, Dave Denison writes in “The Democracy,” evolved from an organism that can’t hear itself into a New Democrat cyborg that listens only to the market. “The so-called New Democrats believed they could use market-based approaches that would create ‘win-win’ policies,” Denison writes. “They would do it by harnessing the power of credit.” Bankers would help solve poverty and inequality. Credit became the signal and democracy the noise. But while the Democratic Party followed the market, a proto-Trumpist faction grew stronger under the guidance of the “emblematic intellectual of the twenty-first-century American right,” explains Daniel Luban in his essay about the late writer and scholar Angelo Codevilla. The noise of democratic deliberation has grown louder, in the aftermath of the New Democrats, with the frustration and exhaustion that leads to radical politics. Austin McCoy’s “After Floyd,” which documents attempts to organize before and after the police murder of George Floyd, finds the author pushed further into abolitionism, not away from it, by the “insult” of an “entrenched power structure that is resistant to basic democratic dialogue and negotiation.” In Bryce Covert’s “We Mean Nothing to the Company,” Starbucks updates its legal tactics with “the worst excesses of their accumulated authoritarian power” against growing union membership. One of the company’s tricks is familiar: fire an organizer with good attendance by stating, without evidence, that they never showed up for work. No one can hear you, and we can’t read your name on the list. Jake Bittle chronicles a similarly frustrating tale in the face of climate change, wherein “decarbonizing the power grid on the timeline that scientists have agreed is necessary will require facing up to a fundamental paradox of climate action in our idiosyncratic democracy.” How do we address the people if the people won’t acknowledge our collective reality? Jules Gill-Peterson has these rights and this speech in mind with “Doctors Who?,” a history of DIY transition that doubles as a political lesson from trans feminism. “You can steal your body back from the state,” Gill-Peterson writes. “DIY treats legitimacy as arising from the people.” Here democracy is treated not as a form of government, or the fair election of a certain political party, but as an action. It’s the rejection of the authority, the taking of the list, the signal breaking through the noise, and the realization of an equalizing power that can’t be given away, even by the enemies of the many who claim they cannot hear or read the names.
 October 2022

no. 65—Undemocratic Vistas