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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

Shitty Men du Jour
If in America the #MeToo movement came to be associated with prominent, highly paid actresses, the face of the new feminism in France is that of an adolescent between the ages of eleven and fifteen. She does not tell her story on Twitter or Instagram; she does not go to the ...

Unexamined Life
I was six years old when I first heard the word orientalism. In a suburb of Cairo, an American family friend explained to me that the release of Aladdin had been delayed because the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee objected to Disney’s “orientalist” opening ...

Except for the Miracles
Being on hunger strike was torture enough. But suffering comes in levels, and Dolours Price was about to experience the next level. They came on a cold morning in the winter of 1973. As Patrick Radden Keefe recounts in the recent book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and ...

The Long Brutality
When police officers knocked on Eleanor Bumpurs’s door on October 29, 1984, they must have startled her. But they knocked and knocked again, determined to get an answer from the resident inside the Bronx apartment. An elderly and disabled Black woman, Bumpurs was $400 behind ...

When the Party’s Over
In the 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness, Hungarian communist Georg Lukács reflected critically but not cruelly on the “messianic sectarianism” of his youth: “Our enthusiasm was a very makeshift substitute for knowledge and experience.” After the 1917 ...