Pixar’s recent output smells like fear. As Eli Cugini writes, the studio isn’t just folding to conservative backlash—it has become visibly frightened of childhood itself.
10.03.2026 14:33
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Pixar’s recent output smells like fear. As Eli Cugini writes, the studio isn’t just folding to conservative backlash—it has become visibly frightened of childhood itself.
“It is only too human that we wish our suffering to be gravid with significance, to indicate meaning beyond the apparently wasteful stranglings and strafings.”
“While those below the Mason-Dixon line were vulgar and barbaric, his fellow Northerners were soulless, financially-obsessed zombies and the only true remedy he saw for this state of affairs was a massive bloodletting.”
Since 9/11, video games have become both the subtlest and the most effective kind of military propaganda.
“Taming the land to make way for petroleum-powered tractors would prove devastating for western France’s bocage country, a tangled matrix of woodland, heath, fields, hedgerows, and orchards laced between brooks, rivers, and ancient canals.”
What is the relationship between art and pain? Had Dickinson or Cobain known peace, would they have stuck to placid ballads or even made art at all? A new book wonders whether true, abject suffering offers immortality.
George Templeton Strong was in most ways a man typical of his time, place, and situation. Then the Civil War began. His diaries, newly published by Library of America, present a sobering object lesson for today’s reader.
In @thebaffler.com, accolades for George Templeton Strong’s newly published Civil War Diaries: "Watching him navigate this new territory . . . is to observe a concerned citizen do his best to adapt as the political world changed rapidly and shockingly, a sobering object lesson for today’s reader."
Military video games don’t just glorify violence. They habituate us to bloodshed—and our perpetual state of war. From the Archives: Scott Beauchamp explores the cozy relationship between the Pentagon and the gaming industry.
“Abdicating criminal justice policy to a retrograde, reactionary police department with a dismal record on brutality, racism, and civil liberties is a fraught prospect.”
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch has revived stop-and-frisk, cracked down on low-level “quality of life” offenses, and allowed her department to collaborate with ICE. Why has Mayor Mamdani kept her on?
With “This is the Door,” Darcey Steinke looks for words to communicate the infinite depths of pain, whether mental breakdown or physical torment. William Giraldi also wonders what lies beneath the suffering, beyond more suffering.
New fiction from Anelise Chen imagines the conscious experience of vegetables: the all-seeing potato, the striving asparagus, and mankind’s co-conspirator in ecological domination—the ear of corn.
The UFC has gotten away with charging its viewers higher and higher pay-per-view fees, raking in record-breaking revenues—all while leaving its fighters in the lurch.
The Civil War diaries of George Templeton Strong combine social commentary with significant reporting, soulful self-reflection with what we might today call “media criticism.”
“Am I happy or am I miserable? I hear that when asphalt and concrete are poured over old asparagus fields, packed down into parking lots, we find our way through the cracks. We push through, somehow.”
In her new memoir, Darcey Steinke recounts how crippling pain led her to a meditation on how suffering can both cut us off from the world and bring us closer to the transcendence described by saints and poets alike.
“How did a conceptual artist who spent the 1960s hobnobbing with the Beatles end up, in the 1970s, speaking in tongues on a farm in rural Iowa?”
The NYPD is a corrupt institution—one that, as @awinston.bsky.social writes, the city’s new mayor seems hesitant to challenge.
As I wrote in @thebaffler.com a year later, King's willful cruelty presaged Trump's family separation policy
"A country that would not only rip children from the arms of their parents, but then intentionally orphan and exile them just to “send a message,” risks not only losing them, but itself."
“To most of the class members, the settlement represents a financial buoy; to others, a sum that doesn’t even come close to what they sacrificed—and have continued to sacrifice—to be in the UFC.”
George Templeton Strong was a conservative man, conventional as befitting his station as a duty-minded Manhattan lawyer. In his diaries, we see him confront a series of events that demand anything but a conventional response: the Civil War.
“Steinke claims that pain itself is a kind of failure, though definitely not a failure of our nociceptors, those industrious nerve endings responsible for sending the stabs and stings straight up to our brains. No, they are successful beyond measure.”
Since WWII, France has transitioned away from small agriculture towards an American model: think massive farms and thirsty cash crops. The government has been building reservoirs to meet their needs. Locals aren’t happy.
“I retained the ability to hear vegetables for over a year. This period coincided with a total loss of taste and smell. It was as though, by losing two sensory receptors, another organ uniquely tuned to the frequency of vegetable chatter developed.”
Andrew Marzoni grew up in the Christian cult the Living Word Fellowship. Back in 2019, he wrote on breaking away—and broader influence of evangelical Christianity on American culture.
In Baffler no. 82, Caitlín Doherty reports from County Donegal, where the future of Irish bogs—and Irish peat—hangs in the balance.
Zohran Mamdani campaigned on a plan to spend $1 billion on a new Department of Community Safety, which would respond to calls for mental health episodes. But there’s no sign of it on his preliminary budget proposal.
