Seize and Resist
The global supply chain is up for grabs.
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
The World of Yesterday
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
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
The environmental risks and regulatory complexities of deep sea mining.
Drugs for the People
“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, ...
Pain on a Sliding Scale
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 ...
On the Rudeness of Mobs
America’s plutocratic love affair with cancellation.
Abolish the Senate
Only the House is the house of our dreams.
New Centuries Are Rare
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
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 ...