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Baffler Archives: Outbursts

Columns

America and Its Discontents
September 03, 2018
It will be left to future historians, if there are any, to explain to their contemporaries why a profession came into existence in the twentieth century whose well paid practitioners sat in an office while people otherwise unknown to them talked about their unhappiness, one ...

Hitler ENTJ
September 03, 2018
In an essay that she wrote in 1937 but never published called “My Country ’Tis of Thee—The Cult of Leadership,” Katharine Briggs, co-creator of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, took a faithfully Jungian approach to typing Adolf Hitler’s personality. On a ...

Storified
September 03, 2018
In 1995, the story goes, a woman complained to her fiancé that she was having trouble expanding her collection of Pez dispensers. So he built an online marketplace to help her track down fellow traders and launched the site as a “love token” on Labor Day. Within months, ...

Habitual User
September 03, 2018
What is it about social media that’s so depressing? I’m asking for myself. And I mean beyond the obvious: that much of the imagery and information presented there accelerates suffering and despair; that many people who use it are themselves plainly, often explicitly ...

Body Work
Sometime in my fifties I lost faith in conventional medicine, which, I had come to see, is more a collection of rituals than anything evidence-based. Alternative medicine did not attract me, since it is even goofier than the regular kind; I wanted an alternative to medicine. I ...