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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Speak, Reenactment
January 04, 2021
Black smoke rises into the sky. Clumps of dirt and shattered debris hang in the air. A deep and narrow trench snakes along the scorched earth, with men in gray uniforms flowing through it. Peeking out of the trench, the soldiers aim and fire muskets as reinforcements rush ...

Coup d’Etats and Cartoons
January 04, 2021
Many documentaries that look interesting nonetheless often seem skippable to me when they’re playing in theaters. The ones I want to see I tell myself I’ll catch up with at home. I almost never do. It’s enough for me to know there’s a documentary out there about weird ...

Normal People
In a curious document written on the occasion of Heidegger’s eightieth birthday, Hannah Arendt recalls the hushed tones in which admirers in the twenties had spoken of him as “the secret king of philosophy.” I have the sense that Gary Indiana occupies a similar position in ...

Without a Reader
“The mere fact that I want to write fiction for a livingis evidence that I’m mentally deficient,” Percival Everett told an interviewer in 2002. “But I do want to participate in making truth, and I can’t make it without a reader. . . . The work isn’t complete until ...

The Descendants
January 04, 2021
An old black-and-white portrait of him hung in our living room. His slanted signature marked the books on our shelves. And once a month, cousin T. and I walked my grandmother, Agnes, to the post office to collect his pension. Until the checks stopped coming in the late ...

Seize and Resist
Globalization is under attack from all quarters. It’s hard to pinpoint when the discord began: the concept, and the process it grasps, is nearly coterminous with the contention swirling around it. January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into ...

The World of Yesterday
November 08, 2020
In December 2016, after that now-infamous Western political cataclysm, my then-boyfriend, a German, gave me a book by Austrian author Stefan Zweig. He suggested that it might help me get a grip on my über-American shock at the apparent collapse of Western liberalism. He was ...

Black Hole Kingdom
November 08, 2020
I arrived in Saudi Arabia twenty years ago, as a young girl. Even now, the country exists in my mind most vividly in those early impressions: the stark lines of skyscrapers beneath a blinding sun, the blare of car-jammed roads hemmed in by vacant sidewalks, the menace of armored ...

I Turn My Camera On
Dancing teenagers all over the world are straining to fit the narrow dimensions of their phone cameras. Unlike the expansive style of a trained dancer, their movements are tight and tapered. The dances are deceivingly achievable, as though one could step into the routines ...

Leave or Die
Waiting for the school bus in Abu Dhabi one morning, age eleven, I sleepily registered the final moments of a man falling off an eight-story rooftop. His body splattered against the pavement a few dozen feet from where I was standing. The bus was behind schedule, and by the time ...

Deep Sea Rush
Gerard Barron aims to be the first person in history to succeed in commercial deep sea mining, and he is growing frustrated with his detractors. “If you read some of the commentary from some of the environmentalists, it’s so sensational,” he says. “And it’s so ...

Drugs for the People
November 08, 2020
“Hydroxychloroquine changed my life,” Michael McClintock told me. An active sixty-year-old who relocated to Tucker County, West Virginia, after more than twenty years in New York City, McClintock realized in February of this year that the inflammation in his joints, ...