Consolation Prizes
The White House Council of Economic Advisers can officially report that we live in the best of all possible economic arrangements.
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
The Whitest News You Know
We need a far more profound conception of white supremacy and how the mainstream press has always been complicit in it.
After the Storm
We are in thrall to the fetish of progress: the belief that history has a direction and a purpose.
Who, the People?
Who counts as the people, and how can that definition be revised and updated in shifting historical circumstances?
Known Assailants
Unless you’re here, living in this particular blue-collar, working-class world, it’s hard to see the fault lines . . .
Nothing Before Us
Assurances of progress alternate with threats of catastrophe; promises of improvement are answered by warnings of decline.
Fables of School Reform
There’s precious little evidence suggesting that the ed tech boom has done anything to improve teaching and learning.
404 Page Not Found
The artifacts of internet life are personal—that is, not professionally or historically notable—and therefore worthless.
The Populist Morass
Populism originated not as a readymade platform for strongman demagogues, but as an economic insurgency of dispossessed farmers
A Conspiracy So Dense
Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” catchphrase has only gained currency as his academic renown has waned.
Sorry to Bother You
For eager recruits to the cause of reform, participation is the most direct path out of the morass of messaging.
American Ghostwriter
This was glorified ventriloquism, in which the Author called upon the American Ghostwriter to play the dummy.