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.

Good luck finding respite at home from whatever horror casts a pall over your life, as it’s hard to find quietude, peace, hygge, etc., given the outside world’s constant intrusions into the domestic. Chemical spills kill our pets, inflation halves our grocery budgets, and that’s holding aside the question of housing insecurity itself. After the glory days of zero interest rates, the twenty-first-century spin on the American idyll of homeownership has come crashing to a halt with the end of easy money on tap (and the rise of gas prices, which has upended even van-life dreams). Many are realizing what the poor have always known. “Rent eats first,” to quote sociologist Matthew Desmond’s work on eviction—or your mortgage payments do. In Baffler no. 68, “Fool House,” we ask: How do we put more people in homes, and how do we make sure they’re able to stay there?