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Robert Baird

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As seen in: The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, London Review of Books, Columbia Journalism Review, The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine
THE NIMBUS, my debut novel—and one of The New Yorker's "best books of the year so far"—is out now. Find blurbs, reviews, and more at my website.
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Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times

Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times

The Guardian — ast September, seven months after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder took a 16-hour train ride from Poland to Kyiv. Snyder knew the city well: he'd been visiting since the early 1990s, when he was a graduate student and the newly post-Soviet Ukrainian capital was dark and provincial.
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'The Left Edge of the Possible'

'The Left Edge of the Possible'

Columbia Journalism Review — At the end of the eighties, the left wing of the Democratic Party was in bad shape. Democrats had lost five of the six previous presidential elections. Four of those, including the three most recent, had been landslide defeats, with Republicans winning more than four hundred votes in the Electoral College.
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Inside the Democrats' Battle to Build Back Better

Inside the Democrats' Battle to Build Back Better

The New Yorker — House progressives delayed the infrastructure bill to protect the rest of Biden's multitrillion-dollar agenda. Did it work? On a humid Tuesday evening in late September, Pramila Jayapal, a congresswoman from Seattle, was finishing an appearance on "The Rachel Maddow Show," via Skype from her Washington, D.C., apartment, when she received a call from an unknown number.
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The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea

The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea

The Guardian —
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Benevolent Haze

Benevolent Haze

Columbia Journalism Review — It was an old dream. In 1854, just after the peak of the gold rush, Ferdinand Ewer started a magazine, The Pioneer, with the claim that "no attempt has heretofore been made to establish in California a periodical of a purely literary character." In 1856, J.M.
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Can Trump Really Speed Approval of Covid Treatments?

Can Trump Really Speed Approval of Covid Treatments?

The New York Times — Emergency-use authorizations, a formerly obscure corner of regulatory law, have become a centerpiece of the government's response to the pandemic. In a five-minute video posted to his Twitter account on Wednesday, President Trump stood in front of the White House and offered a lavish endorsement for a treatment he had received while hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
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The Recurring Trauma of California's Wildfires

The Recurring Trauma of California's Wildfires

The New Yorker — When Laurie Noble was growing up, in Fort Bragg, California, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, her family's home doubled as a government weather station. The house was equipped with rain and wind-speed gauges, thermometers, a barometer, and a recording barograph, and the family belonged to a network of part-time observers paid by the federal Weather Bureau, the forerunner of the National Weather Service, to fill in gaps between its professionally staffed stations.
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How Utah's Tech Industry Tried to Disrupt Coronavirus Testing

How Utah's Tech Industry Tried to Disrupt Coronavirus Testing

The New Yorker — At a White House briefing, on April 23rd, Mike Pence offered what he described as "encouraging news" about COVID-19 testing. Commercial labs, he said, were processing a hundred thousand tests per day, and a number of states had developed "methods that they are employing to significantly increase testing."
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How Much Testing Does the U.S. Need to Reopen?

How Much Testing Does the U.S. Need to Reopen?

The New Yorker — On a Saturday morning in mid-April, Maryland's governor, Larry Hogan, and his wife, Yumi, watched the landing of Korean Air Flight 9093 at Baltimore's Thurgood Marshall Airport, more commonly known as B.W.I. The pale-blue Boeing 777 would be the first Korean Air passenger plane to fly directly from Seoul to Baltimore, but that minor distinction was not why Hogan had come to greet it.
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How Doctors on the Front Lines Are Confronting the Uncertainties of COVID-19

How Doctors on the Front Lines Are Confronting the Uncertainties of COVID-19

The New Yorker — For Hooman Kamel, an intensivist at a Manhattan hospital, the weekend just before he started seeing COVID-19 patients in his I.C.U. was the darkest time. Kamel is a witty, blunt-talking doctor who grew up in San Jose and came to medicine by way of Harvard, Columbia, and U.C.S.F.
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Why Widespread Coronavirus Testing Isn't Coming Anytime Soon

Why Widespread Coronavirus Testing Isn't Coming Anytime Soon

The New Yorker — This past Thursday, Donald Trump visited the National Response Coordination Center for a teleconference with the nation's governors about how to handle the COVID-19 pandemic. The center, which is situated inside the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, in Washington, is designed, in the agency's words, to coördinate "the overall Federal support for major incidents and emergencies."
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What Went Wrong with Coronavirus Testing in the U.S.

What Went Wrong with Coronavirus Testing in the U.S.

The New Yorker — On February 5th, sixteen days after a Seattle resident who had visited relatives in Wuhan, China, was diagnosed as having the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, began sending diagnostic tests to a network of about a hundred state, city, and county public-health laboratories⁠.
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The Prosecution of President Donald Trump

The Prosecution of President Donald Trump

The New Yorker — Near the end of the first full day of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, a Democratic staffer working on the House impeachment team received a message from a sibling. "It's going really well," the text said. "Do you think there's a chance?"
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The Art of the Democratic Deal

The Art of the Democratic Deal

The New Yorker — Robert P. Baird writes about a trying week for Democrats in the House of Representatives, one which saw the approval of two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump but also the passage of a trade agreement between the United States,Mexico, and Canada known as U.S.M.C.A.
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"I've Never Seen Evidence So Clear": Inside the House Effort to Draft Articles of Impeachment

"I've Never Seen Evidence So Clear": Inside the House Effort to Draft Articles of Impeachment

The New Yorker — In February, 1974, just as the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry into Watergate was getting under way, John Doar, the inquiry's lead counsel, asked two young staffers to prepare a report.
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The Public Stage of the House Impeachment Inquiry

The Public Stage of the House Impeachment Inquiry

The New Yorker — Last week, the House impeachment inquiry, after weeks of depositions in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, three floors beneath the Capitol, emerged into public view, as televised hearings got under way. The change in audience was accompanied by a dramatic change in venue: the Intelligence Committee has borrowed the lavish assembly room that is traditionally the home of the House Ways and Means Committee.
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The Circus Comes to the House Impeachment Inquiry

The Circus Comes to the House Impeachment Inquiry

The New Yorker — A dispatch from the House impeachment inquiry.
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How the Hotshots of Helltown Fought the Deadliest Wildfire in a Century

How the Hotshots of Helltown Fought the Deadliest Wildfire in a Century

GQ — Last fall, when the deadliest blaze in America in a century blew through Northern California, thousands of people-including those in the tiny community of Helltown-were forced to flee. This is the story of four friends who stayed to fight. The canyon was burning.
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The ABCs of Jacobin

The ABCs of Jacobin

Columbia Journalism Review — A profile of Jacobin magazine and its founder, Bhaskar Sunkara.
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Poetry's Hanging Judge Tries On a Detective Hat

Poetry's Hanging Judge Tries On a Detective Hat

The New York Times — Nonfiction DICKINSON'S NERVES, FROST'S WOODS Poetry in the Shadow of the Past By William Logan 396 pp. Columbia University Press. $35. By the tranquil standards of poetry criticism, William Logan is a slasher, a burner, a brawler, a big-game hunter with a sleepless eye.
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LRB · Robert Baird · Several Doses of Wendy: David Means

LRB · Robert Baird · Several Doses of Wendy: David Means

London Review of Books — A review of David Means's first novel, Hystopia.
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