Established in 1988 by editors Thomas Frank and Keith White, it was headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, until 2010, when it moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[7] The magazine is credited with having helped launch the careers of several writers, including founding editor Thomas Frank, Ana Marie Cox, and Rick Perlstein.

[4] The magazine published sporadically, first once a year then slightly more often, but that slowed down after the Chicago office of The Baffler was destroyed in a fire on April 25, 2001.

In 2014, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, and David Graeber, an anarchistic anthropologist and The Baffler's contributing editor, publicly debated the future of technology.

The Baffler has previously hosted the podcasts Whale Vomit, by Amber A'Lee Frost and Sam Kriss; News from Nowhere, by Corey Pein; and The Nostalgia Trap, by David Parsons.