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Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
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
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
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
In America’s flood-vulnerable places, wealthy communities get fortified—and poor ones get broken up
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
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
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
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
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
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 ...