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Baffler Archives: Odds and Ends

Columns

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 ...

Possibility of Infection
I remember going to the British museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to ...

Against Merit
The National Lottery of Mexico is a government institution that organizes drawings for cash prizes. Introduced in 1770, the lottery was once a monopoly that sold tickets in even the smallest of cities. It fell into decline when casinos were legalized, and now it loses money, but ...

Nerds on the Knife Edge
Silicon Valley is not an entirely new phenomenon. What’s new is the rise of a sterile nerdiness as a dominant personality. It’s almost an eschatology: the world is a giant program that we’re optimizing, and we’ll make ourselves obsolete as part of that—the grand ...

God’s Game
It’s sadly easy to forget all the good Christian work football does. Leaving aside the divine manifestation of a career-ending hit (how else to interpret a pregame prayer that ends in a gametime fractured spine?), there are numerous other examples of the marriage of Jesus and ...

Brown Noser
Amid all the renewed attention that Monica Lewinsky has won from a pundit class unable to wean itself off the lubricious soap-saga of the Clinton years, a weird, um, lacuna in the record has escaped notice. According to Lewinsky’s 1998 deposition, she orally “stimulated” ...

Zapped by the Invisible World
At some point in my predawn walk—not at the top of a hill or the exact moment of sunrise, but in its own good time—the world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. ...