Spring 2025

Jason DeParle’s American Dream

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio The Free Press, 2003, 576 pp., $35.00Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin Devon W. Carbado and Donald Wiese, eds. Cleis Press, 2003, 355 pp., …

Searching for America’s Heart: RFK and the Renewal of Hope by Peter Edelman Houghton Mifflin, 2001, 262 pp., $26   The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State by Michael B. Katz Metropolitan, 2001, 469 pp., $35 The London …

Before we talk about Seattle, a few words about Milwaukee. In February 1839—less than a decade after they’d dispossessed the Menominees and other local Native Americans—the settlers of southeastern Wisconsin had a problem to solve. Hundreds of farmers had staked …

Andre Gide: A Life in the Present by Alan Sheridan Harvard University Press, 1999, 634 pp., $35 One of the hardest tasks of André Gide’s long life was a translation of Hamlet, which he completed in 1942 after twenty years …

A kind of euphoria surrounded this summer’s UAW picket lines in Flint, Michigan. Nearly everyone who drove past the lines honked a horn or pumped a fist in solidarity; hardly an hour went by without a restaurant van pulling up …

The November 1997 defeat of “fast track” was arguably the AFL-CIO’s greatest public-policy triumph in a generation. The failure of Congress to extend presidential fast track negotiating authority—which would next have been used in an attempt to broaden the North …

On July 2, 1977, a seventeen-year-old boy set fire to an abandoned tenement building on New York City’s Lower East Side. This fire was just a flicker in an enormous mid-1970s arson wave that struck New York’s poorest neighborhoods; it …

A few years ago, it was revealed that the Southern Baptist Convention had compiled elaborate demographic maps of the United States. The maps displayed painstakingly calculated estimates of the number of citizens in each state who had been saved (46.1 …

How successfully has the American labor movement revived since John Sweeney took the reins a year and a half ago? One measure is the return of full-throated labor bashing in our public life. For the past generation or so, attacking …

The Baffler is a Chicago-based political and cultural journal produced by a circle of writers, activists, and musicians in their twenties. But you knew that already: for the last few years, the buzz surrounding the magazine has been difficult to …

Recent mass marches on Washington, no matter how noble or well-attended, have generally been dispiriting affairs. On various days in the past six years liberals and leftists have gathered on the Mall by the tens of thousands in support of …