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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Everywhere in Blockchains
When the global investment bank Bear Stearns went broke in March of 2008, I was a college senior on spring break in Florida. My two friends and I had one simple rule—free housing, no matter what—which is how Kelly and I wound up eating a burnt scramble one morning while our ...

Dawn of the Space Lords
January 10, 2022
They called it a “Sputnik moment.” In October, the Financial Times reported that over the summer of 2021, the Chinese government tested a new missile. It was reported to have been fired from a so-called hypersonic glide vehicle that circled the planet at speeds exceeding ...

Becoming Martian
The first Black woman in space, Dr. Mae Jemison, told poet Nikki Giovanni in a 1993 Essence magazine interview, “The Third World will be the ultimate beneficiary of space technology because we’re moving away from infrastructures.” Giovanni, who like Jemison has Alabama ...

Princes of Infinite Space
January 10, 2022
In the spring of 2016, with most of the United States suffering through a protracted nervous breakdown brought on by that year’s presidential primaries, the billionaire venture capitalist Yuri Milner called a press conference near the top of One World Trade Center in hopes of ...

Spoiling the Last Frontier
January 10, 2022
This past October, while scrolling through social media one Wednesday morning, I reluctantly clicked into a livestream of yet another billionaire joyride to the lower limits of outer space. It had been a summer of first launches, overhyped PR events intended to jump-start a ...

Get Thee to a Nunnery
January 10, 2022
We’re unsure, at first, whether to take her as a fraud, a mesmeric storyteller, or a woman improvising to survive. The nun writes that her faithless parents, loath to forfeit a costly dowry for an unloved love child, coerced her into God’s service. It’s eighteenth-century ...

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
November 01, 2021
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
November 01, 2021
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 ...