Skip to content

Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Conserving Liberalism
In the days after the 2020 election, when Donald Trump told his followers that the voting had been rigged and urged them to “stop the steal,” the reaction among prominent corporate leaders was somewhat panicked. At 7 a.m. on the Friday after the election, a group of about ...

Guru Shit
The yard fight over cancel culture reached what you’d call a good stopping point on July 17 of 2020, when J. C. Hallman, writing in Columbia Journal, recalled that the matter had been settled already with U.S. v. Alvarez, a First Amendment case decided by the Supreme Court in ...

Against Artsploitation
September 06, 2021
When I started working at the New Museum, I still wanted to be a curator. I’d spent the last two years in a prestigious master’s program for curatorial studies and devoted the summer after graduating to fruitless applications for jobs at museums across the country. The New ...

The Photographer’s Dilemma
September 06, 2021
In a period that began with such striking images of the collapse of the Twin Towers, it is notable that there are few memorable photographs from America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and fewer still taken by professional photographers. This is partly due to the changing ...

Rebel is Right
September 06, 2021
This July, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) celebrated its centenary. Next year will see the twentieth national Party congress, at which a successor to current leader Xi Jinping may or may not be designated. International attention has been focused on a new version of the Cold ...

United in Rage
The jail in Letcher County, Kentucky, is tucked away at the back of the courthouse in downtown Whitesburg, invisible to pedestrians except for an open-air concrete structure on the roof where prisoners are allowed to exercise. Its size—fifty-four beds stacked inside a space ...

Don de silentio
It was 1972, and a bookish young ad man was losing his mind. He’d come up too quickly in the business and was staring down the barrel at a life as an anonymous copywriter, pining for a more creative outlet. He didn’t just want to be a writer, he wanted to dismember the codes ...

America, Ex Post Facto
In April 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic phase-shifted America, and the world, into a grim, new reality, a story circulated via the AP wire about a post office in the microscopically small town of Deer Isle, Maine. There, a tattered American flag had been left to languish atop ...

The Scream
Lying on the therapist’s brown leather couch, next to a tissue box, I find myself returning to a dark memory. I am in an unfamiliar drawing room, sipping tea, my reporter’s notebook on the table before me. The house is old yet neat; a small altar for the Hindu god Ganesha is ...

Escape from Electrosmog
In the early hours of Christmas 2020, a sixty-three-year-old loner named Anthony Q. Warner drove into downtown Nashville, Tennessee, and parked his RV in front of an AT&T transmission building. Shortly thereafter, local residents were awoken by a computerized voice issuing ...

The Anti-
Anti​depressant Syndicate
Bruce Cohen grips the mic and begins mocking mental health diagnoses. Caffeine use is now a mental disorder! The audience laughs. Delayed ejaculation is a mental illness now! They laugh again. He rattles off more from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ...