Deep Sea Rush
The environmental risks and regulatory complexities of deep sea mining.
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
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 ...
Outside the Man Box
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
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
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
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 ...