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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Bachelor Nation
January 06, 2020
The pitch, which mercifully for my sense of self-preservation, was not unsolicited, began like this: “Will you accept a piece about the reality TV franchise The Bachelor?” This phrasing was, I imagine unbeknownst to my editor, a riff on the question that has been asked ...

Staring at Hell
January 06, 2020
When I was an eleven-year-old child struggling with nascent mental illness, I received some perhaps ill-considered advice from one of many therapists: “Knowledge is power.” The idea was that by learning more about the things I feared, I would become less scared about them. ...

Toward a More Perfect Union
For some on the left, one way to end our Trump-era divide—or to answer Trump at least—is to push our own form of “nationalism.” That’s the argument of Jill Lepore in her little book, This America: The Case for the Nation (2019), which is selling at the cash register at ...

On the Waterfronts
January 06, 2020
When Hurricane Harvey struck Houston in August 2017, Giselle Mendoza was coaching gym class at Earl & Hazel Harris Elementary School on the city’s northern edge, about a mile from her house. As more than thirty inches of rain filled creeks, culverts, streets, and empty ...

The Humanoid Stain
In 1940, four teenage boys stumbled, almost literally, from German-occupied France into the Paleolithic Age. As the story goes, and there are many versions of it, they had been taking a walk in the woods near the town of Montignac when the dog accompanying them suddenly ...

The Sexual Risk Avoidance Regime
November 04, 2019
Passing by a local strip mall known, as if in confirmation of the longstanding fangless-ness of irony in the United States, as “Miracle Mile,” I’m sometimes compelled to pause. I’m at a light in my car, idling between the two major commercial and residential hubs in the ...

The Future is Menopausal
November 04, 2019
An unhappy husband walks into Dr. Robert A. Wilson’s office in the mid-1960s and says, “Doc, they tell me you can fix women when they get old and crabby. She’s driving me nuts. She won’t fix meals. . . . She picks on me all the time.” It sounds like the set-up to a ...

Stammer Time
November 04, 2019
The lights dimmed in the hotel ballroom. Several hundred people, including myself, waited for the surprise announcement. We were in Baltimore in 2015 for the annual convention of the National Stuttering Association (NSA). It was an emotional weekend, as it always is when ...

Cyberpunk is Dead
November 04, 2019
Held annually in a downtown L.A. convention center so massive and glassy that it served as a futurist backdrop for the 1993 sci-fi action film Demolition Man and as an intergalactic “Federal Transport Hub” in Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 space-fascism satire Starship Troopers, ...

Cancer Culture
November 04, 2019
In 1971, after the United States had declared a War on Poverty but before the Wars on Drugs and Terrorism, Richard Nixon declared a War on Cancer: a battle against the bad cells that attack our bodies. Three months earlier, Lewis F. Powell, a lawyer on the board of Philip Morris ...

R.I.P., Kill Your TV
When HBO announced it was making a movie of Fahrenheit 451, it was a bit of a headscratcher. Ray Bradbury’s novel depicts a society gone numb on endless loops of home entertainment. Why would HBO, the nation’s great pioneer and name-brand purveyor of endless loops of home ...

Sofar, So Bad
November 04, 2019
“Thank you so much for this magical moment,” whispered a French singer with a leather jacket and harmonica. “I never thought in my life I’d be playing on the top of the American Copper,” he told a crowd of about fifty, referring to the name of the Murray Hill luxury ...