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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Bill of Health
The intensive care units where I work as a physician were almost unrecognizable this April: doctors and nurses outfitted in head-to-toe Tyvek suits—bright white protective onesies with hoods—along with face masks, translucent face-shields, and shoe coverings. We squinted, at ...

The Money Printers
On a Sunday evening in late March, after a week of suddenly rising pandemic fears and falling U.S. stock markets, a banker went on national television and uttered a plain truth about the financial system of the United States: it can never run short of money. The banker was Neel ...

The Accelerating Gyre
Though it was just one part of Donald Trump’s disastrously incompetent and cruel response to the coronavirus crisis, the president’s executive order on immigration in April revealed the dynamics that shape his administration better than just about anything he’s done in the ...

The Empire of All Maladies
One of the most potent myths of mainstream U.S. historiography concerns what Indigenous archaeologist Michael V. Wilcox calls “terminal narratives”: an obsession with the death, disappearance, and absence of Indigenous people rather than their continued, visible presence and ...

Driving into the Wreck
In the past half decade, a small publishing miracle has taken place: many books about driverless cars are available for purchase, whereas driverless cars are not. For what feels like the first time in the twenty-first century, prose has outrun product. Book-length analysis has ...

Electric Crypto Balkan Acid Test
In early 2018, millions of digital clocks across Europe began falling behind time. Few took notice at first as slight disruptions in the power supply caused bedside alarms and oven timers running on the frequency of electric current to begin lagging. Three minutes were lost in ...

Zero Hour Contracts
Cinema does not currently exist, or if it does exist, it’s in the form of videos from the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality, shot on smartphones and put on Twitter, which viewers can watch from anywhere. These videos, hundreds of them from all over the ...

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 ...