Wholesale No. 41

Nearly two years out from our nation’s most recent collective psychotic break, we asked Baffler contributors to reflect on the various therapies, cures, and psychological fixes available in our spiritually and financially bankrupt age. And so in Baffler no. 41, Miya Tokumitsu tracks the neoliberal rhetoric of self-care, which has “steadily eradicated the language of solidarity and class consciousness, honed through collective struggle, and replaced it with exhortations to ‘do what you love’ and ‘live your best life.’” Gary Greenberg recounts his travails as a psychotherapist in the wake of the 2016 election, and Becca Rothfeld anatomizes the particularly American cult of self-help from its eighteenth-century roots to its present-day iterations, offering a defense of the much-maligned “unhappy woman.