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Baffler Archives: Outbursts

Columns

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 ...

The Short Story Priesthood
When George Saunders first arrived at Syracuse University in 1986, he had three hundred bucks, an aging pick-up truck, and a prodigious, blond mustache. His proletarian look and habit of sleeping in the beater’s camper extension only added to the mystique of being the only ...

Far from the Maddening Crowd
In the spring of 1973, the Italian writer Guido Morselli returned from vacation to his home in rural Lombardy, where he lived alone, to a fateful letter from the publisher Mondadori. Before departing for a foray into the mountains, he sent off the manuscript of his most recent ...

California Elegy
This year much of California was ablaze, the skies in San Francisco a warm, fire-and-brimstone orange. More than four million acres burned, in fires that included five of the six largest conflagrations in the state’s recorded history. One of them, the August Complex, stretched ...

Grief’s Anatomy
I have found myself having a hard time with all of the talk about eras. The ability to rewrite history—to forget the past and pretend that the present is a unique experience, to talk about a particular moment’s violence and upheavals as if they’ve just arrived, floated in ...

The Kindness of Strangers
At the end of Moby-Dick, after the Pequod is splintered by the white whale, a coffin bobs up from the sinking wreckage, and Ishmael, treading water in the South Pacific, climbs on top of it. Over the next day, as sharks glide peacefully by, Ishmael floats “on a soft and ...