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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

Free and Worldly
At the end of the Second World War, the United States, with 6 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 50 percent of the world’s production. Militarily, it was invulnerable: it controlled both oceans and had sole possession of the most fearsome weapon ever invented. ...

Freedom on the Line
All night it had rained: a furious, unseasonal rain from a wavering sky. God had lost all sense of proportion, the locals said, like a bus driver who crawls on a highway and flies over a speedbump riddled road. But the morning was clear, and the water in the river, swollen with ...

Free as in Fred
Fred Hampton showed up in the streets of my city last summer. The windows were boarded up throughout downtown Madison, Wisconsin. Most of the businesses had been closed for months by this early June morning, as the coronavirus pandemic had swept into the normally bustling ...

Sorrow, Tears, and Blood
The Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a Nigerian police unit, was formed in Lagos State in 1992. This was a period when the country was reeling from massive inflation, triggered by the devaluation of the naira, part of the IMF-inspired structural adjustment program pushed ...