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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

Who Cares?
This was the year everyone discovered that caring is actually hard work. The New York Times told us “America’s Mothers are In Crisis” in a package titled “Primal Scream.” The Washington Post wants us to know that “Working moms are not okay.” NPR ran a special ...

The Judgment of Paris
In August 2019, Facebook settled an eight-year legal dispute with a French schoolteacher. The complaint, made by Frédéric Durand, accused the platform of deleting his account because he posted an image of Gustave Courbet’s iconic oil painting, L’Origine du monde. A closely ...

Going Beyond the Veil
When I was growing up, my mother taught me about sex and sexual politics in two different ways. The biological mechanics she imparted via books that were all in English, assuring me that these meticulously labeled cross-sections of the male and female reproductive organs in fact ...

Battle Hymns of the Old South
Before he rounded the corner into downtown Graham, North Carolina, the Reverend Gregory Drumwright hushed the hundreds of marchers who had gathered on a steamy July day. He lifted his microphone and offered a morsel of history, some sustenance for the final stretch of the ...

When My Brothers Fell
March 01, 2021
As we grapple with the relentless Covid-19 outbreak, now in its second year, it may be easy to forget that we are already in the midst of another, older pandemic: HIV/AIDS. When it was first identified in the United States in 1981, the disease that would soon be named Acquired ...

Sonar Wildly
Only the most famous cemeteries have maps at the entrance locating the tombs of the dead. In the average graveyard, you have to follow the dirt paths that other feet have marked out. It is difficult to orient yourself among these pathways and shortcuts, especially the first time ...