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Baffler Archives: Outbursts

Columns

The Prosperity Hoax
November 08, 2020
No one denies that a large number of people worldwide live in drudgerous poverty. But it would appear that we are in the midst of a historic transformation. In recent years, a spate of articles in the anglophone press and academia have suggested that global poverty has entered ...

Monsoon Dread
November 08, 2020
In the late eighteenth century, in the Indian town of Deeg, in the desert state of Rajasthan, there was a palace garden where it rained all year round. Even on still, shimmeringly hot summer days, you could get caught in a downpour: the Jat rulers had installed copper pipes in ...

Something Cataclysmic Every Week
September 07, 2020
It is January. Weeks ago, I was invited to give a talk at the University of Tehran. I am to speak at a program hosted by the sociology department on “The Social Thought of Muslim Thinkers.” This used to be a subject under the purview of “Religious Studies,” a kind of ...

Who Keeps Us Safe?
September 07, 2020
A New York City march descended upon a jail in mid-June, with protesters pumping fists and waving signs at the facility’s imposing brown exterior. “We love you; we miss you; we will get justice for you,” they chanted, as cellphone videos recorded the moment outside the ...

Poetry Lessons from the Advanced in Age
September 07, 2020
Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements, I seem to remember, conjured the shape of an imperfect H. Ezra Pound claimed in Literary Essays that the lyric age (like the mathematical age) is seventeen to twenty-three, with the possibility of a second efflorescence, another ...

Meditations in an Emergency
The world, we are told, is in crisis. We hear of medical crisis, financial crisis, and crisis of leadership, suggesting that the scope of the term is almost unmanageably broad. Now these crises converge in the suspension of the everyday social order sparked by police violence ...

Another Country
The long crisis that was the Middle Passage and slavery gave rise to dreams of a black republic in the New World that date as far back as the seventeenth century. In Brazil, enslaved people fled their masters and formed fugitive communities as early as 1605; by 1630, they merged ...

The Gray Zone Lady
“The New York Times was a timeless blend of past and present, a medieval modern kingdom within a nation with its own private laws and values and with leaders who felt responsibility for the nation’s welfare but were less likely to lie than the nation’s statesman and ...

Replacement-Level Billionaires
March 09, 2020
Major League Baseball’s hothouse economy is not any more logical or predictable than the broader one from which it is carved out by a federal antitrust exemption, but then, any marketplace that includes the New York Mets is by definition not a rational one. Baseball’s ...