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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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
November 01, 2021
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
November 01, 2021
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
November 01, 2021
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 ...

The Suburban Strategy
September 06, 2021
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
September 06, 2021
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 ...

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 ...