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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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, ...

Strike with the Band
September 01, 2019
The union for the musicians of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, late this June, refused to sign a contract that would cut its unionized musicians’ income by some 20 percent. The musicians were, in turn, locked out by management, which meant facing months without pay or health ...

Hollowed Out
September 01, 2019
On a recent balmy morning, I left my house for a walk. I live in a small town in far eastern Kentucky with a walking path running through it that used to be a railroad. The path is now paved, with large wood-and-iron structures alongside it, and next to these structures are ...

Call Off the Cops
TS Candii had already been awake for seven hours when she stepped up to a bouquet of microphones at the base of the elaborately carved Great Western Staircase in the New York State Capitol on the morning of May 7. Behind her stood more than one hundred sex workers and advocates, ...

Plight of the Squeegee Kids
In 1982, political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George Kelling published an essay in The Atlantic outlining a new form of policing that aimed to preempt a perceived threat. They argued that “disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked,” and that, ...

Foucault in the Valley of Death
The first time that Simeon Wade read Michel Foucault was in a graduate seminar at Harvard in the 1960s. Madness and Civilization had been translated into English in 1965, and the book excited Wade, who had been vice president of the Baptist student union at the College of ...

Locked Up
The United States’ experiment with a relentlessly punitive criminal justice system is now more than four decades old. But it’s worth remembering that things were not always this way. For most of the twentieth century, America was not too different from Canada or Europe in ...

The Prisoner Dilemma
When Texas inmate David Ruiz filed a handwritten petition to sue the Texas Department of Corrections in 1972, it led to a landmark case that turned on whether Texas prisons violated the United States Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. In 1980, a ...

The Women Who Knew Too Much
Horror films might be the only genre that punishes black women credibly, or at least in a way that’s true to our lives. Modern comedies are often too slapstick to approach us accurately, whatever their intentions. Dramas tend to give us the Madonna-Whore treatment, or else ...