The Best of The Baffler

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.

Books like Adina-Talve Goodman’s “Your Hearts, Your Scars” bring us visions of death, but they do not bring us any closer to understanding it.

By drawing on Susan Taubes’s novel “Divorcing,” a recent biography of the rabbi and scholar Jacob Taubes tests the limits of the genre.

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

What would a new carnivalesque even look like, if it’s not to be found at Burning Man or on Twitter, in a comedy club, or the Dark Web?

Until the nineteenth century, “The Iliad” had only been translated into European languages. But Suleiman Al-Bustani brought it into the Arabic.

India’s ruling party claims that the consumption of beef is practiced only by foreigners, invaders, and miscreants—but history tells another, more complex tale.

#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.

“The death of my grandma wasn’t funny until I thought about sending her into space.”

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

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

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.»

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.

The cycle of palm oil production relies on the violence of extraction to succeed.