The Baffler was formative to my intellectual development. Founded by Thomas Frank and Keith White in Virginia in 1988, and published out of Chicago throughout most of the 1990s, the journal of political and cultural criticism was one of the brightest lights in the otherwise dim constellation of left-wing writing during those years. Hence I take comparisons between the Baffler and Jacobin as the greatest of compliments.

More than simply a collection of essays, each issue of the Baffler sang with a single voice, theoretically coherent, and yet undogmatic, led by Frank’s vision but sprawling beyond it. Compiled into two book collections, its greatest hits dissect the spirit of the era, making it not implausible to speak of a “Baffler school” of criticism. Clear-eyed, angry, and free of jargon, the essays in Commodify Your Dissent exposed the fatuity of “alternative” culture and its corporatized rebellion, while those in Boob Jubilee tackled a dominant neoliberal populism that praised the market as democracy’s purest form.

The Baffler was an important tributary of the faltering 1990s left, which helped form many of us who would later create Jacobin. It represents impulses that we strive to live up to and continue.