Operation Kill Everybody
The war on drugs is a politics of extermination.
Publication
The Baffler
Recent coverage
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.
Eyes of Lillian Bassman
Lillian Bassman finally gets her due.
Betting the Farm
In Ukraine, the corporate consolidation of farmland poses a number of risks.
March into the Ruins
Kluge always wanted to give people, and the principles to which people try to be faithful, some extra lift.
Cherish Your Memorized Weakness
"The Comeback" is by no means happy to be here.
Vigilante Injustice
Two books revisit the Bernie Goetz shooting.
What’s in a Name?
“Ain’t that so? You never never know.”
West Memphis Three
Love is the law, love under will.
They Came to See Us Suffer
In the influencer novel, the work is the pain.
Cloud Control
The struggle between the White House and Anthropic raises public questions of private power.
Frothing Mad
Radicalized by the betrayal of a meritocratic promise.
Papers, Please
Age verification laws harm sex workers.
The Crisis Response Trap
Naming an emergency while protecting the status quo.
Think Nothing of It
Nothing is inevitable about the future of AI.
Dan and Daisy
Don’t get me wrong. I also want to kill you.
Known Horrors
We need not distract from known horrors with conspiracism.
La Vida Loca
Even as the stories gets dark, Jaime Hernandez’s linework maintains a tangible lust for life.
Past the Firewall
Freedom and control on the contemporary China internet.
Clinging to a Scheme
The United States is in too much of a groove to break away.