The Baffler

The Baffler is America’s leading voice of interesting and unexpected left-wing political criticism, cultural analysis, short stories, poems, and art. Through its six annual print issues (and daily online content) it skewers every facet of our debauched social order.

Founded in 1988 by Thomas Frank as “the journal that blunts the cutting edge,” the magazine is currently edited by Jonathon Sturgeon and headquartered in New York City. It spotlights both new and established writers, and our regular contributors include Barbara Ehrenreich, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, George Scialabba, Rafia Zakaria, and Kim Kelly, among others.

Regular targets include Silicon Valley snake-oil, the deadening weight of consumer capitalism, our faithless media, the authoritarian overlords of our decaying body politic, and their undead neoliberal consensus. 

Read The Baffler for essential dispatches from the front lines of the dystopia we all call home.

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, “The Ties That Bind,” 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.