Death Trips
Dying alone is seen as a character flaw—an imperfection growing somewhere deep inside of you.
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
Inauguration of the Trumpian Beauty Contest
Purification does little good for political history. For a long while, we in the West have awarded the sash proclaiming World’s First Democracy to ancient Athens. But as imperial power loosens its insistent white fist—in fits and starts—our understanding also opens. Maybe ...
The Revolution Will Not Be Curated
“The era of the curator has begun,” declared the prominent art critic Michael Brenson in 1998. The figures who assembled artworks into galleries, he reasoned, were now “as essential” to exhibits as the artists themselves. Curators were a species of universal genius who ...
Psephology in Free Fall
Sometimes you have to wince. The 2016 election was full of awful, cringing moments: “Pokémon Go to the polls.” The mere existence of Jeb Bush. The strange, silent, static confusion as a whole clutch of Republican hopefuls seemed incapable of walking onstage for their ...
The Hamilton Hustle
As Donald Trump settles into the White House, elites in the political class are beginning to recognize that democracy is not necessarily a permanent state of political organization. “Donald Trump’s candidacy is the first time American politics has left me truly afraid,” ...
Outsmarted
The empty presumptions that inform the cult of smartness across yon political spectrum.
The Wrongest Profession
Economists have botched the promise of widely distributed prosperity.
From Russia, with Panic
The Russians hacked America.
After Donald Trump’s surprise victory in November, these four words reverberated across the nation. Democratic Party insiders, liberal pundits, economists, members of Congress, spies, Hollywood celebrities, and neocons of every stripe and ...
The God in the Machine
Today, most areas of the United Kingdom that aren’t London could be described as either rural or post-industrial. Cornwall, one of the most isolated and idiosyncratic areas of England, is largely both. Situated at the southwestern tip of Great Britain, Cornwall is one of the ...
On Native Grounds
I came to Oceti Sakowin in early November, on the eve of the first snow. Like everyone in my winter cohort, I was forced to take the scenic route. Morton County was in a state of emergency, and police and National Guard roadblocks added an hour to the drive between Bismarck and ...
Trials and Errors
Forensics has turned Victorian detective stories into modern nonfiction, with lab-coated analysts flexing their Holmesian ability to zero in on tiny clues. The smallest detail—a stray crime-scene particle, a trace of biological evidence—can reliably nail the most serious of ...
The Emperor’s New Corsets
Here’s a grimly edifying set-piece for twenty-first-century feminists to ponder: when my grandmother was a teenager at Greenwich Academy, a girls’ prep school in Connecticut, she and her fellow students were required to pose nude for photographs taken by the P.E. teacher. ...