After the Afterlife of Theory
These names were like swear words, like drugs, like magnetized tokens in a game played by mildly sadistic immortals.
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
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.
Three Days in Detroit
Some Hollywood types are offering a bus tour of the city I live in and I leap at the opportunity. My presence, however, seems to raise questions about whether a writer for the national press can possibly live in Detroit. This does not bode well for the excursion, which is ...
The Shark and the Hound
In the Old Testament, the Lord promised death unto the loan shark.
The Opinionator
Imagine that you are David Brooks, the Bobo King of the New York Times op-ed page.
All Politics is Local
A schlubby man with a vaguely foreign accent, sitting on a crudely crafted set, appears nine times a week on 173 television stations across the nation, parroting Trump administration talking points and defending the president.
In one commentary, he fended off criticism of ...