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Baffler Archives: Odds and Ends

Columns

The Blue and the Gray Zone
Early on a Saturday morning in May, I pulled off a highway in northern Virginia and drove into an imagineered Civil War past. Across from a stately old plantation stood some reconstructed slave quarters, and just past them I found the designated encampment. On this particular ...

Captive Audiences
The social myths spurring on the American incarceration state all revolve around the vague, civically agreeable method of stigmatizing the offender, segregating the wrongdoer, and establishing a clear divide between “us” and “them.” We need to keep locking up criminals, ...

Live Nice (or Else)
 “Mean Stinks!” is Procter & Gamble’s campaign to stomp out bullying, sponsored by Secret deodorant. Why deodorant? Why not? Cause-related marketing is at least as old as aluminium zirconium tetrachlorohydrex gly. And as Monica Lewinsky said in her TED Talk in March, ...

The Bourne Identity
A hundred years ago, Randolph Bourne was a hot property—an intellectual wunderkind who was taking the American intellectual scene by storm. Bourne was the complete package: brilliant, charismatic, filled with social energy, and exquisitely attuned to the moment. Bourne’s ...

Mission Creeps
Jagged 1:06 (Pilot): JAG25/ KIRK97, your comms are weak and extremely broken, uh, understand we are still looking for PID. We are still eyes on the east side working on PID. We have possible weapons but no PID yet, we’ll keep you updated. 1:07 (MC): Screener said at least one ...

Keeping Up with the Babadooks
From Rosemary’s Baby to The Exorcist to Carrie, many of the finest horror genre standards fixate on the ways mothers make monsters of themselves or their progeny through neglect or abuse, through mistake or design, and in their most chilling incarnations, through mundane ...

Bubble Butts
In the late 2000s, right about when the economic bubble burst in the United States, Colombia’s government finally began making headway against the narco-crime that had plagued it for decades. Homicide rates dropped, drug production moved to Venezuela, and negotiations with the ...

Transcendental Rites
Edward Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the literary executor of the estate of W. H. Auden. His new book is Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (New York Review Books, $21.95), which contains portraits of ...

Star-Spangled Spam
Must remembering mean venerating? Sure, the past deserves our respect, as we all know. But does it also require spectacle? Some anniversaries—Warren Harding’s birthday or ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment come to mind—call for silence or the averted gaze. The less ...

Blips for Brains
November 01, 2014
I am wearing a weird, rubbery headband that not only makes me look like an escapee from some techno-hippie cult, but also uses flexible electrodes to peer inside my brain and relay the data over Bluetooth to my smartphone, which at the same time plays a repetitive, New Age piano ...

This Brat’s for You
Sometime in 2011, before the gestation of my second son, my employer, Boston University, implemented paternity leave for its male professors. A colleague informed me of this news with much envy and astonishment: his four young children had been born before BU joined the ...