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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

The Promise of Misery
September 03, 2018
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
September 03, 2018
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
September 03, 2018
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?
September 03, 2018
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 ...

Game Theories
September 03, 2018
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
September 03, 2018
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
September 03, 2018
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 ...

Trial by Fire
Update: On June 12, 2018, a month after this article was filed, Nina Droz Franco stood before judge Aida Delgado Colón to receive her sentence. In her first public statement since her arrest, she decried the her conditions, and those of her fellow prisoners.  She denounced ...

All EFF’d Up
On a cold and wet February evening in New York City a few years ago, I was in Midtown running some errands, when I came upon what appeared to be a protest outside the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. There were about six, maybe eight people penned inside a crowd control barricade, ...