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Baffler Archives: Salvos

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The Trolls of Academe
On the occasion of the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies, which convened last May on the campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Richard Utz, president of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism and chair of the School of Literature, ...

They Made a Movie Out of It
January 06, 2020
In early 2018, I was spending a warm West Hollywood Sunday evening on the balcony of a young director of film development, drinking a beer and hoping for an early night[1]. I had planned to sleep on his couch, but when I suggested we turn in, he said, “Nah, just take my bed, ...

Smoke from Underground
January 06, 2020
Until the 1980s, it was possible to ignore the fact that Centralia was on fire. By then, the mines in this Pennsylvania coal town had been burning underground for nearly twenty years, but there was no roaring blaze, no Biblical conflagration. What you saw was mostly steam ...

Montana’s Money Pit
In southwest Montana in the mid-1870s, a seam of silver was found in a wide basin in the mountains near the Continental Divide. By 1879, a growing miners’ camp was incorporated as the city of Butte. To Butte’s northeast, there was a hill containing some of the world’s ...

Afternoon of the Pawnbrokers
The bankers, inconsolable in the face of their lawbreaking, wept in slow-moving subway cars; I witnessed this phenomenon myself one day in late 2008 as I commuted to an Upper East Side townhouse, where my employer, an oil man who had lost considerably in the crash, fired me. ...

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 ...

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 ...