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Baffler Archives: Outbursts

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Absence of Malice
My mother’s family comes from a small village in Transylvania, a province horseshoed by the Carpathian Mountains and smack in the center of Romania. A shallow, purling river, the Sebeş, flows down from the foothills, cutting the village in half. With cemeteries at the edge ...

Mr. Garbage
November 01, 2021
Biography at its best may only manage to capture the fanny packs and Groucho glasses of an author’s inner world, but sometimes there comes a telling quirk that gives the game away. To wit: a habit peculiar to Donald Barthelme—the legendary square-bearded author of nine short ...

Faulty Towers
November 01, 2021
A building is considered “ultra-thin” when its width-to-height ratio is at least 1:10. For context, the Empire State Building is about 1:3. The old World Trade Center was close to 1:7. The new 111 West 57th is about 1:24. This super-luxury project designed by SHoP Architects ...

The Masters Own You
November 01, 2021
“Ain’t singin’ for Pepsi / Ain’t singin’ for Coke / I don’t sing for nobody / Makes me look like a joke.” So goes the first verse of Neil Young’s 1988 hit “This Note’s for You.” In the second verse, this shitlist expands to cover Miller, Bud, politicians, ...

Traumatic Monologues
In 2016, over two hundred organizations signed on in support of a congressional resolution to establish May 5 as National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls (MMIWG). Long ignored—the need for an acronym itself is telling—the issue has belatedly ...

The End of Excellence
In 1982, McKinsey & Co. management consultants Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. published one of the most influential tracts on management ever written. Titled In Search of Excellence, it quickly became a sensation, and Peters went on to write many more books and sell ...

Bad Faith
September 06, 2021
Andrew Sullivan first showed up on my radar in 1991, an innocuous blip that gave no indication of the full-frontal assault about to be launched on the American left. I was working for OutWeek at the time, and I’d been tasked with proofing an interview between a seraphically ...

Masters of Reality
One of the immediate casualties of Trump’s rise to power, or so we were constantly told, was the truth. Scores of pundits appeared on television and discussed Trump’s habit of obscuring or ignoring the truth altogether. Journalists here and abroad catalogued and constantly ...

Letter from Texas
The remains of Hugo Domínguez Aguilar traveled 1,110 miles. Leaving Dallas, the largest city in north Texas, his ashes headed south for La Reforma, a tiny village in the coastal state of Veracruz, Mexico. On a map, the journey is a straight line across the Gulf of Mexico. If ...

The Bimbo’s Laugh
“You’re breaking up with me because I’m too . . . blonde?” Elle Woods drives up to the Harvard campus in her Porsche convertible wearing a hot pink leather suit and a Bottega Veneta bag. Chihuahua in tow, she looks like the fever dream of all the blondes who came before ...

Lose Your Self to Dance
One of the last pieces of dance I saw before New York’s Covid shutdown, in March of 2020, was Brendan Fernandes’s Contract and Release at the Noguchi Museum. Traversing the concrete expanse of the institution, his dancers moved among patrons and Noguchi’s spherical ...

Miraculous Feelings
The exclamation “You’re obsessed,” no matter how it’s uttered, amounts to a layman’s diagnosis or charge, a way of saying something’s wrong with you, and thus a spur to recognition and betterment by the one exclaiming, since the knee-jerk assumption is always that ...