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Baffler Archives: Outbursts

Columns

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 ...

The Topeka Fools
I think I debated Ben Lerner in high school. I’m almost positive of it. He’s only a year younger than me, and my school definitely went to the same tournaments as the Topeka team. If we did go head to head, he most likely won. He was, after all, a 1997 national forensics ...

Dinner with Schmucks
Welcome to TAK Room. Take a seat right here, in one of our cushioned banquettes. Settle in. Let your eyes wander out onto Hudson Yards—our view of The Vessel simply can’t be beat. Have a flute of blanc de blancs while the jazz band tunes up and you look over the menu. You ...

Networked Up
January 06, 2020
One morning last year I woke up in my van. It was late November, and I was parked in a sun-bleached lot in Santa Cruz, California. I had tried to keep pace with T-shirt weather as it crawled down the coast, but my insulation was shit, and the tip of my nose felt like frost. I ...