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Columns

Hide the Husbands, Prostitution’s on the Interwebs
August 28, 2014
It seems that every few years, some intrepid reporter feels the need to make the game-changing discovery that a lot of people use the Internet to conduct their business. Though this sounds like an absolute non-story, when the people in question are sex workers and their business ...

Food is the First Thing: Hunger in America
August 26, 2014
Food is one of the most basic human needs, and feeding people is among the basic functions of any remotely competent civilization. Our ancestors’ efforts to avoid starvation are arguably the reason we have a civilization in the first place. If the Neolithic Revolution in ...

Banana Republics and Bad Apples Abroad
August 22, 2014
Last month, quietly overshadowed by a summer of celebrity deaths and violent instability in the Middle East, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit against the American produce company Chiquita. Filed on behalf of over 4,000 Colombians, the suit alleged that ...

Redlining and Reckoning in Ferguson
August 19, 2014
As I write this, it’s been about three months since the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic cover story about reparations. That’s not a very long time relative to the span of a human life, but it’s significantly longer than the average lifespan for most Internet ...

Reality TV Workers and Walkouts
August 19, 2014
Last week, the postproduction crew of the reality television show Survivor walked off the job and formed picket lines outside the production company’s Santa Barbara headquarters. The editors and producers had requested contract negotiations with Mark Burnett’s Island Post ...

A St. George Segregationist Update
August 18, 2014
[This is an update on the situation Tom wrote about in The Baffler’s current issue, published last month. – Ed.] In mid-July, Frontline devoted a half-hour to the unfolding secessionist fight in Baton Rouge. The investigative PBS special zeroed in on consequences of ...

S.W.A.T. USA
August 18, 2014
Sunday night in Ferguson, Missouri, the second night of an imposed curfew, brought not calm, but more chaos. The world watched the scene unfold on several online livestreams and read rapidly-changing reports over Twitter. (Broadcast television news was largely useless.) At 10 ...

What’s the Matter with New Atheism?
August 14, 2014
  Taken in its original context, Nietzsche’s famous dictum “God is dead” sounds more like a warning than a triumphant boast. When the line appears in The Gay Science, Nietzsche places it in the mouth of a village madman who soon realizes the world is not yet ready to hear ...

Anne Manne and the “Asshole Effect”
August 13, 2014
In a recent article in Aeon, Eric Schwitzgebel suggests that in order to fully understand the problem of “moral ignorance,” we need “a theory of jerks.” In her new book The Life of I, Australian writer Anne Manne gives us one: late capitalism breeds jerks, rewards ...

The Masons, the Rotarians, and You
August 11, 2014
© Mark Dancey In our current issue, Thomas Frank examines the long, strange history of the Masons, the Rotarians, the Elks, the Lions, Shriners, and all the other fraternal orders that have gradually fallen out of fashion. “The Freemasons,” he writes in “Veiled Pensioners ...

The Assassin’s Fate: Paul Berman Shoots and Misses (Again)
August 08, 2014
  We Sicilians are connoisseurs of malevolence. So I approached Paul Berman’s hatchet job on Alexander Cockburn (The New Republic, August 1) with an alacrity tempered only by my apprehension that Berman wasn’t quite up to the job. His previous attempts at character ...

Rick Perlstein on America’s Nervous Breakdown
August 04, 2014
This past weekend brought bright and starry reviews for Baffler contributing editor Rick Perlstein’s new book about the tumultuous 1970s, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, out now. Max Boot in the Wall Street Journal admires how ...