Who Speaks for the Trees?
The untamed properties of nonhuman personhood, animal, vegetable, and corporate.
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
Womb Up, America!
Consider pistons and pumps. Sockets and plugs. Consider shafts. Cogs. Funnels. We cover the earth with stuff in the image of our genitalia. Almost every machine we produce is unashamedly coital, just one thing after another sticking out of something, or into something. And ...
The Higher Happiness
In the Feminist Hall of Fame, there are a few places for men. Near the entrance, in the Mary Wollstonecraft Room, there’s a bust of William Godwin, her husband. The author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a cast-off woman with an illegitimate child and a history of ...
Black Elk, Woke
Perhaps the prophets and systematic theologians of some future religion will adopt the phrase “American visionary” as a curse, in the same general semantic family as, say, “the world’s policeman” or “presumptive GOP nominee.” It’s certainly true that our history ...
Pity, O God, the Republican
A balmy evening in Budapest, a Saturday in June 2008. My husband and I have just finished dinner at a sleek Euro bistro (with the faux-Magyar name of Menza) and are heading along Andrássy Avenue, the city’s Champs-Élysées. The sounds of a summer night in a Central ...
True Fakes on Location
The most glorious set in movie history stood derelict for a few years where Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards meet, attracting curiosity seekers and growing steadily more unsafe. It was finally torn down in 1919 or so, depending on which source you check. A frowsy clutch of stores ...
Where the Wild Things Aren’t: National Parks
As the National Park Service celebrates its centennial this summer, the compulsory stories and listicles acknowledging the event will lazily trot out the Ken Burns–sanctioned notion that national parks are “America’s Best Idea.” Of course, it was a good idea to protect ...
Hotdogs in Zion
A day of revelations at Orlando’s Christian theme park.
The Slippery Slopes
As historic sites go, Mont Pèlerin is a far cry from Normandy, Waterloo, or the shores of Tripoli. The town that became known as the birthplace for the wide-ranging revolution in economic and social thought now called neoliberalism is a stuffy little town in the stuffy little ...
Exit Planning
A reporter asked Pope Francis to name the single biggest evil in the world. Secularism? No. Abortion? Not even. Here’s what he said: “Youth unemployment—and the abandonment of the elderly.” OK, that’s two evils. But aren’t they really one thing? Unable to get a ...
Our Friends who Live Across the Sea
A bronze, life-size male figure carrying a suitcase mounts a massive set of stairs to a jetliner that does not exist. He is slightly hunched, frozen mid-step. Whatever the statue was initially intended to signify, today it is a metaphor for the six thousand people who now ...
Confession Booth
Last fall, I taught my very first college class—an essay-writing course for freshmen. I was excited, but wary of first-time-teacher pitfalls, and so I asked my professor friends for as much advice as possible. After extensive feedback, I attempted to design my syllabus in such ...