Skip to content

Author: Sarah Edwards

Columns

Spreading the Bad News
September 16, 2016
For dogged observers of America’s long-running culture wars, a quiet milestone was reached this year: the fortieth anniversary of pop theologian Francis Schaeffer’s enormously influential 1976 tract How Should We Then Live? This portentously titled, slim volume ...

Fairly Unbalanced
September 15, 2016
Never do our media savants look more blatantly biased than when they’re trying to wave off complaints about how they shape, and distort, the critical flow of political information. A case in point: New York Times public editor Liz Spayd’s absurdly complacent recent ...

A Trip to Trump’s Grocery Store
September 14, 2016
Clinton’s strangely specific phrase “basket of deplorables,” coined in reference to some of Trump’s more David Duke-ish supporters, is like jet fuel for the satirist’s imagination. What political cartoonist could resist drawing a giant wicker basket filled with ...

It Takes a Spillage
September 13, 2016
The scale of the revelations in the Panama Papers leaked this spring can lead to a feeling of helplessness. There are 11.5 million documents concerning 214,000 shell companies, which implicate hundreds of international politicians and officials including presidents, prime ...

Daily Bafflements
September 12, 2016
• Epigenetics, the idea that we can inherit some DNA changes from our parents and ancestors, is in the spotlight these days. So it would be remiss of us not to point out that Jackson Lears made the argument that scientists have a thing or two to learn from historians ...

Our New War Machines
September 12, 2016
For an institution synonymous with tradition and continuity, the American military is in quite a radical state of flux. In just the six or so years since I left the Army, two major demographic shifts that might superficially appear unrelated (or even contradictory) have taken ...

The Night Phyllis Schlafly Went Over the Rainbow
September 09, 2016
Phyllis Schlafly was one of the scariest people I ever met. I suspect her personal role model was Torquemada. Certainly she was absolutely convinced of her rectitude—while being at least as ambitious as any Spanish crusader prosecuting a holy war. She nearly succeeded in ...

Cashing in on the Culture Wars
September 09, 2016
The University of Chicago’s Dean of Students, Jay Ellison, recently became a folk hero of sorts on the right flank of the culture wars after sending out a blunt warning to the incoming U of C freshman class. To the hand-wringers worried about creeping “political ...

The Fabled and Enabled
September 08, 2016
We interrupt the cloddish accumulation of campaign effluvia to bring you Nick Bilton’s epic anatomy of the downfall of Theranos, the smoke-and-mirrors Silicon Valley startup that was allegedly poised to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Its very name said ...

From Punk House to Penthouse
September 07, 2016
Like many radicals, I assume, I burnt myself out in my early to mid-twenties trying to work on activist campaigns full time, and sold out a few years ago for an entry-level job at a software company. There are some legitimately great things about this job compared to being a ...

Daily Bafflements
September 06, 2016
• Last night the planets aligned to give us a celestial new Baffler! Issue 32, “Muzak of the Spheres,” is an almanac that just might help decode the cosmologies and religions attendant on America. Buy one if you want to know how the Broadway hit Hamilton excised ...

Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal
September 02, 2016
What are the uses of enchantment? As the wizarding world charms its way into our collective cultural forebrain once more, that’s the question I find myself revisiting. It’s been twenty years since Joanne Rowling finished Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s ...