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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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, ...

Womb Up, America!
September 05, 2016
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
September 05, 2016
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
September 05, 2016
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 ...

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 ...