Manufacturing Consent
What is the legal wrong of sexual harassment? Sexual harassment is not simply boorish, immoral sexual behavior on the job.
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
Send Anarchists, Guns, and Money
Cody Wilson is an extraordinary talker. He speaks in memes, generating sticky phrases off the cuff to capture powerful ideas.
The Screwer and the Screwed
The situation may be OK, but it’s certainly not good.
Exalted Slogans
What if we foregrounded movements, not the cult of personality and celebrity?
After the Afterlife of Theory
These names were like swear words, like drugs, like magnetized tokens in a game played by mildly sadistic immortals.
Blame the Computer
Evidence mounts that the forces of digital civilization have produced a technological dystopia run by artificially unintelligent algorithms designed in the interests of greed for maximum efficiency. And true to the tropes of many a dark sci-fi reverie, these impersonal arbiters ...
The Narco Saint
In March 1989, Mark Kilroy, a premed student at University of Texas at Austin, walked across the Mexican border with three friends for a little spring break dancing and drinking. But on the walk home from Matamoros, Kilroy was separated from the group and failed to turn up at ...
The Artificial Intelligentsia
“Sandhogs,” they called the laborers who built the tunnels leading into New York’s Penn Station at the beginning of the last century. Work distorted their humanity, sometimes literally. Resurfacing at the end of each day from their burrows beneath the Hudson and East ...
The Streaming Void
The defining cult film of the twenty-first century is neither a mirror held up to nature or a hammer used to shape reality. The Room, released in 2003, is like a ninety-nine-minute episode of The Real World as performed by the inmates of the asylum of Charenton under the ...
Zealots of the Blockchain
As “money,” Bitcoin fulfills essentially none of money’s functions; as “currency,” its massive volatility has made it all but unusable.
Right Into the Abyss
The GOP is less a political party than a cult.
Downward Spiral
A fan’s notes on the decline of the NFL.