{"id":60468,"date":"2026-04-01T00:07:44","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T04:07:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/?post_type=issue&p=60468"},"modified":"2026-04-06T14:00:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T18:00:19","slug":"no-83","status":"publish","type":"issue","link":"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/issues\/no-83","title":{"rendered":"no. 83\u2014Hirelings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finding yourself<\/span>\u00a0sliding down the lower leg of the K-shaped economy? You\u2019re not alone in facing the downturn: sunny prospects are saved for those with assets to inflate and the dwindling number of flesh-and-blood employees of the Magnificent Seven. Those tech companies\u2019 AI circle jerk has skyrocketed the fortunes of a select few while turning white-collar industries into charnel houses, with email job after email job vibe-coded into the grave. The gigification of American life means that you\u2019re never truly without employment opportunities: sell yourself as a solopreneur gun-for-hire and you too can join the freelancer majority that some predict will dominate more than half the American workforce by 2027.<\/p>\n

You could also take up actual arms, given the booming racket in private military companies, which has grown in tandem with global conflicts increasingly fought between PMCs in combination with\u2014and, sometimes, instead of\u2014state armies. In \u201cHirelings,\u201d an issue dedicated to the mercenary and the freelancer, Benjamin Fogel<\/a> writes on how South Africa\u2019s Executive Outcomes pioneered selling warfare in a box in the 1990s, the company\u2019s soldiers of fortune defining the modern military hireling as we know it all too well today. Lily Lynch<\/a> considers the long-lasting aftermath of another armed innovation from the same period: the Bosnian War attracted a motley array of jihadis, Cossacks, and white nationalists interested in an alternative to the armed intervention of NATO and the Atlanticists. (Elsewhere in turn-of-the-century reminiscing, Henry Rees-Sheridan<\/a> takes the reader from a Welsh instrumental rendition of a Red Hot Chili Peppers classic through a political history of Cymru before considering the country\u2019s politically groundbreaking present.) No one has yet set a\u00a0Call of Duty<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Battlefield<\/em>\u00a0campaign in Yugoslavia, developers preferring to stick to the tried-and-true chauvinisms of American troops on the ground\u2014unless, as Corey Pein<\/a> writes, Mohammed bin Salman says otherwise, the Saudi prince having made another foray into sportswashing his kingdom by flooding the video game industry with cash.<\/p>\n

While very little of that money seems to trickle down to those toiling to animate\u00a0Fortnite<\/em>\u00a0emotes, it\u2019s arguably more difficult these days to make a buck off the written word. In a forum<\/a> on writers\u2019 side hustles, we have collected stories about the jobs journalists, novelists, and poets take on to survive as they try to publish. In essays about, among other gigs, working as a fire lookout in New Mexico, moonlighting as a putatively platonic \u201ccuddler\u201d in Manhattan, and waiting tables in New Orleans after writing a\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0bestseller, the contributors detail the oft-obscured financial compromises, physical exhaustion, moral injury, and brain death that are the real costs of the non-writerly work required to pay the bills. (No exotic dancers of the sort documented by Molly Matalon<\/a>\u2019s exhibition turned up in our inboxes, but we welcome further submissions.) This isn\u2019t to say putting pen to paper can\u2019t also drain the imaginative reserves. It\u2019s hard to imagine something more stultifying than the work of the continuation novelist, as J.W. McCormack<\/a> describes, churning out the zillionth Bond sequel in a John Henry keyboard race with one of the Seven\u2019s large language models plundering the secret agent schlock of old. I\u2019d rather 007 finally die, and my wrists be free of carpal tunnel\u2014I\u2019d be destitute, maybe, but able to think of other things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":62787,"template":"","class_list":["post-60468","issue","type-issue","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue\/60468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/issue"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue\/60468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63409,"href":"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue\/60468\/revisions\/63409"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}