The Baffler has been irritating the powerful and the complacent since 1988, when Thomas Frank and Keith White founded it as an undergraduate literary magazine at the University of Virginia. The publication moved to Chicago, where Frank developed the corrosive critique of American consumer culture that would eventually become his bestselling book The Commodification of Cool, and established The Baffler as the most intellectually aggressive magazine on the American left — a journal that took aim not only at corporate capitalism but at the liberal establishment that claimed to oppose it.
The magazine's history has been as turbulent as its politics. It nearly died in 2001 when a fire destroyed its offices and archives. It was revived in 2010 under new editorial leadership and is now published by MIT Press, which gives it institutional stability without blunting its editorial edge. Contributors over the decades have included Barbara Ehrenreich, David Graeber, Rick Perlstein, and Evgeny Morozov — writers who share The Baffler's conviction that the most dangerous ideas in American life are the ones that everyone agrees with.
Each issue combines long-form essays, cultural criticism, poetry, and fiction with the magazine's signature blend of intellectual rigour and barely contained fury. The targets are bipartisan: Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, the gig economy, the wellness industry, the credentialist meritocracy, and the particular American delusion that every problem can be solved by an app. For readers who want their cultural criticism to have teeth — and who believe that a magazine's job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable — The Baffler has been doing exactly that for more than three decades.
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