Overmedicalization and Its Discontents
The MAHA camp turns to psychiatric reform.
Publication
The Baffler
Recent coverage
There’ll Be Health to Pay
The “reinstate and compensate” movement is not about workers’ rights.
Blindsighted
Silicon Valley wants to “optimize” your eyeballs.
For Christ’s Sake
Does James Talarico deserve the faith of voters?
The Lever
Every vortex closes to a single point.
Feels So Good
A sound without a story, a song without words.
It’s Not Easy Being Green
Can the music industry be made green?
Catholic Bloc
The right-wing embrace of popery is, historically speaking, strange.
Seeds of War
The effort to feed Lebanon’s people is up against more than just Israel’s brutality.
The Old Gods Return
Reality welcomes the arcane.
Proximity Mines, Archives
A Canadian hasn’t graced our lot in weeks.
Virtue Signaling
In the 1990s, as now, culture war skirmishes played out in the media.
The Music of Destruction
“No one’s particularly keen to die.”
Over a Barrel
In oil-rich Kazakhstan, disparate dealmaking and the government’s widespread corruption is an open secret.
Family Values
A traditionalist bent has always been present in American housing policy.
Autopsying Abortion Rights
On the critical missteps the abortion rights movement.
Privation Nation
Is legibility a precondition of rights?
Call of Duty
Without The Conspiracy Theorist who would The Listener listen to?
Operation Kill Everybody
The war on drugs is a politics of extermination.
Shorting God
With a narrative like this, the facts didn’t stand a chance.
Groypthink
Nihilism has become the cultural psychology of the young and downwardly mobile.
Warrior Pose
If only imperialism could be worked out through breath work.
Wicked Games
Resistance to the FIFA World Cup transcends borders.
The Information Wage
All that work would require human labor—a lot of it.
You Who Forsake the Lord
William T. Vollmann charts the rise, ruin, and refashioning of America.
Goldboys
“Gold shines like an angel, but she’s dense as a bitch.”
America on the Screen
“There’s a now, a was, and a gonna be."
Clinics and Collectives
What we need is not isolationism but solidarity.
God Save the Children
Exploring the perils of intercountry adoption.
Society of the Spectacle
Missouri Williams’s hall of mirrors.
The Loneliness of the Competitive Quizzer
It is not just a hobby—it verges on a way of life.
Poetry from the Factory Floor
A conversation with Xiao Hai.
Plastic Is My Second-Favorite Substance
Do I seem real?
Hunger Games
We must sweep leftovers of any kind off the bargaining table.
Boy Girl Problems
It’s a losing game to be understood by cis people.
the thing between the wall and my body
Tracing the physics of incarceration.
The Last Class with Balls
Bringing women into the military service academy system.
Beneath the Paving Stones, the River
Plotlessness is political.
A Whole New World
Disneyland taught Americans how to embrace the technologies that undergird our lives.
Tabula Raza
What comes after Asian American literature?
Rent Check Opera
Freezing the rent only alleviates tension on one side of the equation.
Econometrics, The Musical
The horizon is a prison for those who starve.
Topical Malady
You’re getting away with something too.
Slipshod Paradise
Is a wholesale retreat from the Palos Verdes Peninsula in order?
Generational Recurse
Who owns the truth of family history?
The Culture We Deserve
The only thing that can be preserved is what we hold onto past the point of reason.
We Bought an Orchestra
Oligarchy ruins everything, even Brahms’s First Symphony.
Red Noir
Sensitivity to the downtrodden informs the work collected in the new edition of Jim Thompson’s oeuvre.
The Wahlberg Express
“I am a big, bright, shining star!”
A Portrait of the Artist as an Artist Portraying the Artist
This offers itself as revelation.