The Baffler

I used to believe I could spot a common trap that would ensnare politicians of middling talent. You would watch them study a successful figure in a higher position, someone who made winning look easy. The superior politician seemed to have a kind of magic. The lesser pol desperately wanted to imitate the confidence, the calm, the ability to swat away all difficulties, sometimes with just a flippant remark. But the magic, almost inevitably, was not reproducible, and the understudy would flop.

If housing is a human right, whose responsibility is it to provide and protect it, and therefore who, exactly, is letting us down?

Chronovisor directed by Jack Auen and Kevin Walker. Magnolia Pictures, 96 minutes. 2025. In his memoir Working, Robert Caro recalls his first glimpse of the LBJ archives in 1976, when he embarked on his five-volume biography of the former president and found himself faced with 175 rows of boxes of documents with the gold presidential seal.

The province of Govisümber, like much of surrounding central Mongolia, is a land of extremes. A treeless steppe situated at the edge of the Gobi Desert, it is intensely hot in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter. Pastures that are a dusty tan for most of the year flush a vibrant green after the summer rains, supplying fodder for herds of sheep and goats.

The Narrow Road of Oku by Matsuo Bashō, translated from Japanese by Meredith McKinney. New Directions, 96 pages. 2026. Matsuo Bashō died very far from home. The great haikai poet and travelogue writer had left Edo in the spring of 1694 with the aim of reaching the northern edge of Japan. By that November the fifty-year-old had reached Osaka, where he visited with friends, composed poetry with his disciples, and came down with a bad case of dysentery.

The only guarantee in today’s America, it seems, is that you’ll pay more for less. That’s if you receive anything at all: A study published recently by the Commonwealth Fund found that one out of every five Americans was denied coverage for doctor-recommended care in 2025. The Wall Street Journal reported that same year that the five largest home insurers didn’t pay out on 44 percent of claims.

I used to ghostwrite SEO-optimized promotional web content for a living. I thought the good times would never end. Each morning, people I’d never met, flacks for various midsize B2B tech startups, would put in their orders. A Forbes editorial on improving business practices “during times of economic uncertainty.” A press release for a high-performance modular battery solution. A LinkedIn post, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, about the challenges faced by black women in STEM.

It was Valentine’s Day 2005, and hearts were breaking at 70 Pine Street in Lower Manhattan. Over the preceding several decades, American International Group (AIG) had grown astronomically under the iron-fisted rule of CEO Maurice “Hank” Greenberg to become one of the largest insurance companies in the world. Now the firm had to break the news that, days earlier, it had received subpoenas from both the Securities and Exchange Commission and New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

At first glance, the humpback chub doesn’t look as if it could determine the future of nations. Its lower body is par for the fishy course: a pearlescent ombré going from green to gray, its trunk girthy, its tail tapering and lithe. But the chub’s head seems borrowed from another fish entirely, with a grumpy, vaguely prehistoric face under the bony hump that gives the species its name.