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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Father Worship
September 05, 2016
Two years before he was shot in the chest, and two centuries before he became an unlikely pop icon, Alexander Hamilton wondered how religion might be used to win elections. Suggesting that politics could not rely “merely on the reason of men,” the nation’s ...

Improv-da
September 05, 2016
Palantir Technologies, the multi-billion-dollar Palo Alto–based data-analysis software company founded in 2004 with CIA seed money, gives its new employees a reading list. One assignment is Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which feeds ...

Thin Blue Spin
Not long after Micah Johnson mortally gunned down five Dallas-area police officers and wounded nine others in July, the social media mavens at the Dallas Police Department tweeted out a picture of a man they identified as a suspect in the shooting rampage. They also asked their ...

Material Issue
September 05, 2016
Since the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, we have seen the resurgence of a Victorian economic ethos, tight-fisted and pusillanimous. Whether tricked out in the technocratic jargon of neoliberalism or the truculent bromides of the Tea Party, this outlook depends at ...

Displaced Deities
Modernism, Jackson Lears asserts, enthroned human consciousness and “drained the vitality from the rest of creation.” The elements of the natural world—rocks, trees, rivers, and nonhuman animals—came to be seen as inert, passive mechanisms, acting only in response to ...

The Schmaltz in Our Stars
September 05, 2016
The Hayden Planetarium in the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History offers Space Shows every half hour in its 429-seat Space Theater. Sealed under the mammary swell of its 67-foot screen, the viewer is invited to enjoy “a hyperrealistic view ...

Village Atheists, Village Idiots
September 05, 2016
Something has gone badly wrong with our atheists. All these self-styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter ...

Divine Indigestion
“America is not at any crossroads,” Perry Anderson writes in American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, his 2015 guide to the rise and scholarly maintenance of the American imperium. Anderson is challenging Francis Fukuyama in particular, the end-of-history theorist who, ...

Madam Prescient
September 05, 2016
It was not, at one time, considered so remarkable that a candidate for the United States presidency talked to the dead. That the candidate was a former prostitute and an advocate for free love was more worrying. What’s more, her vice-presidential pick was a former slave; that ...

Small Worlds
September 05, 2016
When will America get its shit together? No, I don’t mean by this the sort of rhetorical plea that readers expect as a matter of course in journals of opinion—be it the calls for banking regulation and climate action in The Nation or Mother Jones, or the periodic fever ...

The Shock of the Crazed
September 05, 2016
Art brut “auteurs” are not artists, I’m told. The champions of art brut—variously translated as “raw,” “rough,” or “outsider” art—stress that the work of individual, untutored practitioners trumps all the usual conventions of artistic legacy-building, ...