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Baffler Archives: Salvos

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Pain on a Sliding Scale
November 08, 2020
King John is an oddity among Shakespeare’s plays in being almost wholly about politics. No one comes off well. The promises and acts of the powerful, we are told, are actuated by self-interest, not principle. Unlike in Richard III, the bad do not meet their comeuppance. The ...

Abolish the Senate
September 07, 2020
There may be a worldwide depression, a bigger pandemic, and the burning of the planet to contend with, but if Joe Biden is elected in November, our first order of business will be to learn all over again how to govern ourselves. If Biden is elected and the Democrats take the ...

New Centuries Are Rare
September 07, 2020
Confronted with the thought that I would have to watch the Andy Samberg comedy Palm Springs on Hulu because it was getting so much attention while movie theaters are closed, I gave up. I didn’t want to subscribe to another channel to see this Groundhog Day retread, even if it ...

Department of Comstockery
September 07, 2020
When Netflix co-produced Kirby Dick’s 2006 documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, an exposé of the mysterious and powerful Motion Picture Association of America, it was the perfect alliance. With its lack of a rating, the documentary was likely fated for a limited theatrical ...

Outside the Man Box
September 07, 2020
When A.J. asked Faith to marry him, he considered it a practical question. He had returned in 2012 to Camp Pendleton in California after a tour of duty in Afghanistan, the war leaving him a quieter person than he’d been before deployment. He was less interested in socializing, ...

The House That Queer Theory Built
September 07, 2020
Thirty years ago, Teresa de Lauretis spliced together the disreputable queer and the esteemed theory for the title of an academic conference. An irreverent, deconstructive pairing, queer theory garnered critical cachet that distinguished it from gay and lesbian studies, in ...

Museum of Difference
September 07, 2020
In the last two years of his life Karl Marx took over a thousand pages of notes concerning world history. In ill health, unable to finish the promised third volume of Capital, and (according to the recent Gareth Stedman Jones biography) unpleasantly aware that he still had not ...

Commodity of Doom
September 07, 2020
Pfizer Inc., the multinational corporation responsible for pharmaceutical blockbusters Viagra and Lipitor, made Hollywood history in 2018 with a campaign for Chantix, a smoking cessation aid known to induce nightmares and suicidal ideation. The package features actor Ray Liotta, ...

Unnatural Disasters
Since 1961, we’ve been witnessing a slow-rolling cholera pandemic. Unlike earlier ones, it began in Indonesia, not India, and moved across Asia and the Middle East. It reached Africa by 1971 and Italy by 1973. By 1991, it was in South America, where cholera had been eradicated ...

Bill of Health
The intensive care units where I work as a physician were almost unrecognizable this April: doctors and nurses outfitted in head-to-toe Tyvek suits—bright white protective onesies with hoods—along with face masks, translucent face-shields, and shoe coverings. We squinted, at ...

The Money Printers
On a Sunday evening in late March, after a week of suddenly rising pandemic fears and falling U.S. stock markets, a banker went on national television and uttered a plain truth about the financial system of the United States: it can never run short of money. The banker was Neel ...