The Wrongest Profession
Economists have botched the promise of widely distributed prosperity.
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
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. ...
Against Everything
The 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s—les trente glorieuses, the French call them—were indeed fat years in Western Europe and the United States. Unions were strong, unemployment was low, and a lot of jobs still came with health insurance and pensions. The jobs in question also stood ...
Maiden America
St. Cecilia crashes a purity ball, with Sarah of the Desert and Melania the Elder as her dates. They are confused by what they see. Teen and pre-teen girls in white gowns dance with older men. A couple stops and poses for a picture, the man’s hands lying awkwardly on the ...
Corruptions of Empire
Editor’s Note, December 6, 2016: This article has been updated to reflect president-elect Trump’s post-election statements and cabinet appointments. A version of this article appeared in print in The Baffler no. 33.
I live in Istanbul and follow American news ...
Virtuous Reality
American politics is now largely devoid of the language of virtue. The word occasionally surfaces in the bloviating of para-intellectuals such as David Brooks (New York Times gasbag and author of The Road to Character) and William Bennett (inveterate gambler and compiler of The ...
Rights Make Might
As the botched chances and bitter disappointments stacked up late into the fateful night of November 8, 2016, the ceiling at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan was a soaring collateral casualty. Made of steel-reinforced transparent glass and pitched 150 feet ...
Trumped and Abandoned
On a cold winter’s day just before Christmas, Mike McNulty picked me up at the Denver airport in his wheezing Aerostar van with the broken seatbelt clasp—he couldn’t afford to repair it—and we rode the hour’s drive to his new home in Fort Collins. The McNultys had ...