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Baffler Archives: Salvos

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The Descendants
January 04, 2021
An old black-and-white portrait of him hung in our living room. His slanted signature marked the books on our shelves. And once a month, cousin T. and I walked my grandmother, Agnes, to the post office to collect his pension. Until the checks stopped coming in the late ...

The World of Yesterday
November 08, 2020
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
November 08, 2020
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 ...

Drugs for the People
November 08, 2020
“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
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 ...

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 ...