The Baffler, Issue 82

About The Baffler:

The Baffler is America’s leading voice of incisive and unconventional left-wing political criticism, cultural analysis, short stories, poems, and art. Founded in 1988 by Thomas Frank and Keith White as “the journal that blunts the cutting edge,” the magazine is currently edited by Matthew Shen Goodman and headquartered in New York. It prints five print issues annually and publishes online nearly every day of the workweek.

About this issue:

Pour one out for the Chinese paddlefish, its habitat destroyed by dams on the Yangtze; the cryptic treehunter, the bird’s range in the Brazilian forest cleared for sugarcane plantations; or the gastric-brooding frog, one of over a hundred native species of plants and animals that have gone extinct in Australia since the continent’s European colonization. The death of a species is a tragedy, that of a genus an unfortunate statistic, what with vertebrate genera being lopped off the tree of life at thirty-five times the extinction rate of the past million years. All this at the behest of Homo sapiens, whose single-minded drive to render all of nature into commodities causes the pH of the oceans to plummet and the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to soar without pause.