The Best of The Baffler

Covid-19 showed us what the ICU was made to do—but we must grapple with the reality that it has a dark side too.

Thelonious Monk had a gift for reconciling musical experiment with the immediacy of pop.

Interest in astrology can be tracked from alternative social media spaces and blogs, through more popular memes and viral astrology accounts, to merch at Urban Outfitters.

Bodybuilding is routinely presented as the very apex of male heterosexuality—but its history is a bit gayer than you might think.

When a whistleblower outed Cambridge Analytica for the inappropriate use of Facebook profile information for the purpose of influencing US elections, people around the world were understandably outraged. But, as author Yasha Levine explains in his analysis of the situation for The Baffler, this was a symptom of much deeper privacy concerns that involve the biggest tech companies in the world. getAbstract recommends this sprawling article to anyone interested in learning the truth behind personal privacy in the era of big data.

In cyberpunk, the physical configurations of human bodies tend to express their own utopian political dimension.

The air in Iran has been throbbing with revolutionary fire, and we, the exiled, can feel its warmth from afar.

#MeToo has not much altered the science professions, and it likely won’t until the culture of science is dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.

Eschewing any concrete political stance, Transcendental Meditation deals in vagaries: world peace, widespread happiness, perfect government.

Blind is an anonymous forum used by tens of thousands of tech workers to vent and gossip. Now, its insights are repackaged and sold to bosses.

In the wake of electoral rejection, the orange beast of Mar-a-Lago slouches toward another run for the White House.

The nameless protagonist of Henry James’s 1898 novella “In the Cage” finds her counterpart in the modern-day social media manager.

Memories are what we are made of.

«Plato marked the difference between hypomnema (material memory, the importance of keeping a record) and mnemo (remembrance). Hegel used the term Gedächtnis to refer to anamnesis, and Erinnerung to denote the actual things that are recalled. But this is far from the rule.»

Afewerki’s attack on Tigray is the culmination of the Eritrean dictator’s ambition to become master of the Horn of Africa.

When it comes to understanding animals and nature, humans aren’t nearly as intelligent as they believe themselves to be.

Caregivers and disabled people have been left to hack their way through a world indifferent—if not outright hostile—to their actual needs and desires.