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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

Hot and Scared
When Cameron Parks was eighteen years old, he dropped out of college, got in his car, and drove to San Diego; it was only a matter of time before he began performing in gay porn. The kind of outrageously beautiful person who could induce hiccups in an unsuspecting stranger, with ...

Abolishing the Prison of the Dead
November 04, 2019
To get to Hart Island, a hundred-acre sliver of land in the Long Island Sound, you must first make your way to City Island, a slightly larger sliver of land off the coast of the Bronx. City Island is a small community that feels more Long Island than Bronx. Its streets are lined ...

Revolution on the Installment Plan
September 01, 2019
When then twenty-six-year-old Elle Hunt was asked to keep a money diary for the Guardian last year, the purpose was to dispel the common belief that millennials are spendthrifts. They, too, the thinking goes, could enjoy the delights of home ownership and flush 401(k)s, if only ...

Invisible Handcuffs
September 01, 2019
The regulation of technology capitalism is now a mainstream topic of discussion. Privacy scandals such as the misuse of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica, the rise of right-wing extremism, and the diminishing quality of public spaces in the digital age have generated ...

Strangled by a Safety Net
September 01, 2019
The year 2019 has been an anxious one for the American worker. In March, a report from the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas noted that corporate layoffs had hit their highest level for a first quarter since 2009—a 35.6 percent increase from 2018. As a result, ...