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Baffler Archives: Odds and Ends

Columns

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 ...

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 ...