The Classroom and the Cell
Who benefits from prison education?
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
Chamber Music
It was midafternoon on one of the hottest days of the year. But as we descended the spiral staircase into the underground prison, the light quickly vanished. By the time we reached the main corridor it was as dark and cold as night. I tried to keep pace with my guide as his ...
Dead Pools
The palm-lined pool at the Ritz Carlton, Paradise Valley, will be, upon its completion next year, the longest in North America, possibly the Northern Hemisphere—a cerulean gash that will run four hundred feet through twenty “verdant” acres of “secret gardens” and ...
Rough and Unready
The pandemic has shined a harsh light through every gaping hole in the tattered American social safety net, which has been deteriorating for decades. People who get sick with Covid still aren’t guaranteed any paid sick leave. Our unemployment insurance program has been ...
The Extractive Circuit
The machinery—the actual form and function—of twenty-first-century capitalism is an extractive circuit which quite literally crisscrosses the world. Its global value chains stretch through physical infrastructure and “frictionless” financial flows at the speed allowed by ...
Land of Thirst
I first visited Sudan in 2004, when the war in Darfur was just over a year old. Flying to Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state, I began reporting on the mass atrocities committed by Omar al-Bashir’s pro-Arab junta against non-Arab communities accused of supporting a small ...
Beckett on the Richter Scale
The characters of Evan Dara’s Permanent Earthquake inhabit an unnamed Caribbean island held in the shaking fist of the eponymous seismic event. The island could be Haiti or Martinique—names are in French, the local constabulary are referred to as gendarmes—but it could ...
See Your Trash
Every time I throw something away, I take its photograph. I’ve been doing this since February 2016. I post the images of each day’s trash to Instagram. Almost six years later, the account comprises the most detailed and consistent diary I have ever kept.
The ritual began in ...
Exploding Plastic Inevitable
On a hot Wednesday afternoon in late August, I loaded a plastic bag of rubbish into the car, along with paper bags filled with theoretically recyclable materials—newspapers and glass and plastic—and drove to the transfer station maintained by the department of public works ...
History Won’t Judge
We cannot cede today’s political imperatives to the good favor of tomorrow’s retrospection.
The Suburban Strategy
On November 7, 2020, I made my way to the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. Officials had been counting ballots inside this stiflingly generic building for days, and now protesters and counterprotesters stood (and danced) outside, within view of TV cameras. There ...
100 Percent American
The easiest thing to believe about J.D. Vance is that he believes nothing at all. The GOP Senate candidate in Ohio first came into prominence, of course, as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir published just ahead of Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. Vance’s ...