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Baffler Archives: Salvos

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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 ...

The Accelerating Gyre
Though it was just one part of Donald Trump’s disastrously incompetent and cruel response to the coronavirus crisis, the president’s executive order on immigration in April revealed the dynamics that shape his administration better than just about anything he’s done in the ...

The Empire of All Maladies
One of the most potent myths of mainstream U.S. historiography concerns what Indigenous archaeologist Michael V. Wilcox calls “terminal narratives”: an obsession with the death, disappearance, and absence of Indigenous people rather than their continued, visible presence and ...

Driving into the Wreck
In the past half decade, a small publishing miracle has taken place: many books about driverless cars are available for purchase, whereas driverless cars are not. For what feels like the first time in the twenty-first century, prose has outrun product. Book-length analysis has ...

Electric Crypto Balkan Acid Test
In early 2018, millions of digital clocks across Europe began falling behind time. Few took notice at first as slight disruptions in the power supply caused bedside alarms and oven timers running on the frequency of electric current to begin lagging. Three minutes were lost in ...

Zero Hour Contracts
Cinema does not currently exist, or if it does exist, it’s in the form of videos from the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality, shot on smartphones and put on Twitter, which viewers can watch from anywhere. These videos, hundreds of them from all over the ...