Mayberry Machiavelli
A Face in the Crowd’s primary appeal is to the liberal audience’s sense of superiority
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
The Tupperware Party
The groups backing lady Dems for office are the ultimate Tupperware parties: they all sell the same molded product.
The Year the Clock Broke
As 1992 drew closer, a specter haunted the Republican Party establishment—the white-robed specter of David Duke.
Tell Me It’s Going to be OK
Self-care and social retreat under neoliberalism.
The Promise of Misery
We are not shocked by naked women. Skinny women. Women forced to field abuses in the bedroom or advances in the workplace, women who have undergone operations to whittle their waists into fine points. But an unhappy woman appalls us, especially if she does not collude in ...
Beyond Goop and Evil
When Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s health and wellness empire, launched its first In Goop Health conference last June in Culver City, California, there seemed to be more journalists and eye rollers in attendance than true believers. The day-long celebration of proper chakra ...
The Trouble With Uplift
Occasionally, on a boring flight, I’ll rewatch the Battle of James Island scene from the magnificent 1989 film, Glory. The scene depicts the first engagement of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first Northern regiment of black troops organized by the Army of the United ...
Diversity for What?
How should we approach diversity as an ideology? To begin with, we can examine the gap between its status as rhetoric and as lived reality. But today’s relentless celebration of diversity overwhelms any skeptics. To posit a decline of diversity seems obviously false. Yet ...
Bridges to Nowhere
On liberal dreams of a more imperfect union.
Game Theories
There’s a moment late in Arnt Jensen’s Inside (2016) that bears serious consideration. It comes after the popular videogame’s pre-teen protagonist undergoes a transformation. This kid started out in Inside’s predecessor, Limbo (2010), as a cartoonish figure resembling ...
Tripped Up
In How to Operate Your Brain, a 1993 “public service video,” the chromatic shadow of Timothy Leary’s face demands over an unceasing electronic beat that the viewer “think for yourself” and “question authority.” The video proceeds like this for twenty-nine minutes: ...
Demons of Disaster
When them big man go loving with small girl for money. Them big men can go loving to small girls, they can call girl when she walking along the road, and then the girl go and they go in house and lock the door. And when the big man has done his business he will give the small ...