The Baffler

@thebaffler.com

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Political and cultural criticism. Since 1988. Online and in print. https://thebaffler.com/

Tweet from Clavicular (@Clavicular0) "My new strategy is going to be Geomaxing. The United States is far too brutal of a dating market to compete in, so im going to geomax to countries with poor economies to mog people." Last edited on July 13, 2026 at 2:52 AM. 3.3M Views.
The local governments of the peninsula could—and probably should—mandate retreat through eminent domain, but the option is politically anathema. No politician has seriously proposed it, in part because doing so would be an acknowledgment that the area is no longer habitable, a message that runs counter to the interests of real estate developers, property owners, and officials seeking reelection. It would also theoretically require even bigger buyout programs at market rates that remain artificially high because the risks associated with building in hazardous landscapes have long been subsidized through disaster relief, infrastructure spending, and legal guarantees of compensation, effectively socializing the costs of risky private development decisions.
The accounts here describe the financial compromises, the emotional costs, the physical exhaustion, the moral injury, and the drain on the imaginative reserves that are the costs of a side gig. They describe the way that writing itself can serve as a form of spiritual recovery from the labor that funded it. They also detail the satisfactions of service work and manual toil, employment outside the cosmopolis, and mastering skill sets more material than putting words to paper. The forum, I hope, serves as a partial history of the hidden labor that makes possible the poems, stories, essays, books, and periodicals you read.