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Baffler Archives: Odds and Ends

Columns

Land of Seven Huts
The Khasis are a matrilineal community residing predominantly in Northeast India, in the states of Meghalaya and Assam, as well as in neighboring Bangladesh. According to Khasi cosmology, the community originated from the seven families who remained on earth when the tree ...

Satellite Landscapes
November 01, 2021
Much of the strangest architecture associated with humanity is infrastructural. We have vast arrays of rusting cylinders, oil rigs dotting wastelands like lonely insects, and jewel-toned, rhomboid ponds of chemical waste. We have gray and terraced landfills, five-story tall ...

Branding Hillary
When it comes to politics, content is king. Our obsession (mine included) with the horse race of presidential politics leads us to obsess over the minutiae of campaigns, and in this endeavor graphic design is tasty chum. After all, in a world this batshit insane, analyzing ...

Say Their Name
March 01, 2021
STREET TRANSVESTITES ACTION REVOLUTIONARIES FONT “AS A TRANS LATINA, SYLVIA RIVERA WAS AN OUTLIER AMONG WHITE GAY MEN AND LESBIAN FEMINISTS. IN 1970, SHE COFOUNDED THE MILITANT GROUP AND YOUTH SHELTER STAR (STREET TRANSVESTITE ACTION REVOLUTIONARIES) WITH AFRICAN AMERICAN ...

Robert Lynch Remembered
I was first introduced to the papers of Robert Lynch, a Black gay man from North Carolina who died of AIDS in 1989, by Brenda Marston, the curator of Cornell’s Human Sexuality Collection. She showed me, as evidence of her commitment to collecting pornography, a set of slides ...

All-Star Poets
September 07, 2020
GEORGE MOSES HORTON (c. 1798–c. 1883) George Moses Horton is the only American to publish a book while living in slavery. In his poem “On Hearing Of The Intention Of A Gentleman To Purchase The Poet’s Freedom,” Horton summoned something grand to say about his ...