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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Apartheid in Fancy Dress
Indian cinema loves love. It celebrates love between the poor and the rich; love across the lines of religion, region, and language; love that upends conventional notions of gender and sexuality. A foreign viewer of such films would be forgiven for concluding that India is a ...

Brutality and Spectacle
Sometime in 2003, the year that George W. Bush sent U.S. forces into Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, I was sitting in a graduate seminar with Harvard history professor Roger Owen when he made a comment that lodged in my mind. Like other scholars, Owen was not entirely ...

Gimme Shelter
Every day in February, Rosa Ortez Cruz waited for the mail at four o’clock. Sometimes the secretary brought it to her. Sometimes the secretary left early, and Cruz ran to search through the wire mailbox for it herself. To reach the mailbox, she had to pass through a communal ...

We Keep You Alive
A surprising number of people start their working life at McDonald’s. Paul Ryan claimed flipping burgers was central to his understanding of the American Dream. Pharrell Williams was fired three times from the chain. James Franco penned a mildly off-putting love memoir to the ...

Misery Makers
Late last year, Goldman Sachs held its annual Builders+Innovators Summit in Santa Barbara, California. It’s the kind of event where elite members of society gather to congratulate themselves for being rich and powerful, while listening to speakers like Hillary Clinton lament ...

The Loser King
It’s easy to imagine much of recent political history being recorded in tell-all memoirs with titles like Maybe I Did It, What’s Your Problem? or Yeah I Did It, What’s Your Point? Three years into the Trump era, you can be sure that if the president or one of his henchmen ...

Led Astray
There is a disjuncture at the heart of the American Jewish politics. Most American Jews know very little about the institutions that claim to represent them, and the leaders of these institutions share few of the political and religious commitments held by most American Jews. ...

An Open Letter to Leon Cooperman
Leon Cooperman Omega Family Office, Inc. 810 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10019   Dear Mr. Cooperman, It is with a great sense of agitation that I write this. But I am going to try to be reasonable with you here. You present yourself as a reasonable man, an astute observer ...

I’m Not Feeling Good at All
The young woman works in an office. Her job is tedious: data entry, or coordinating the logistics for meaningless products, or proofreading niche trade publications with improbable names. She has no friends or resents the one she has. Her boyfriend is distant. Perhaps he’s not ...