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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

The Endlessly Examined Life
My mental health file whirs to life in 1969 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’d recently left Opus Dei, the Catholic religious order to which I’d committed my young soul, and a major depression had followed. The records printed below are out of the mouths of my many caretakers; ...

Terror Cells
At around the turn of the millennium, some disturbing findings surfaced in the biomedical literature. Macrophages—immune cells whose function is to attack and kill microbes and other threats to the body—do not gather at tumor sites to destroy cancer cells, as had been ...

Able-Bodied Until It Kills Us
Trigger warning: People who feel it’s their right to never lift a finger may experience pain or discomfort. My first white-collar job was “coordinator” at my college’s chapter of the Public Interest Research Group—yes, PIRG, mother ship of pie-eyed campus activists. It ...

Degrees of Danger
November 07, 2014
Update, March 17, 2015: Several critics of human rights abuse among UAE’s migrant workforce have been barred from entry or deported. It’s a growing list, and I joined it when I was stopped from boarding a flight to Abu Dhabi on March 14. The airline representative told me ...

The Christ Nexus and Professor David Brat
October 28, 2014
The Tea Party’s marquee 2014 success story—the dramatic unseating of House majority leader Eric Cantor by an obscure downstate Virginia economics professor named David Brat—provided maximum symbolic value during its summer tour through the mediasphere. The pundits had ...

The Crowdsourcing Scam
In 1968 a Norwegian science fiction writer named Tor Åge Bringsværd published a peculiar short story called “Codemus.” The story has achieved the kind of retrospectively prophetic quality that makes sci-fi such a useful imaginative map for navigating our relationship with ...

The Dads of Tech
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde famously said, but let Clay Shirky mansplain. It “always struck me as a strange observation—even the metaphor isn’t true,” the tech consultant and bestselling author said at the New Yorker ...

The Acquisitive Self, Minus the Self
Los Angeles isn’t exactly the place that comes to mind when you think of decorous restraint in the display of wealth, even in the dregs of the Great Recession. Here in my hometown, possibly more than in any other outpost of faux-meritocratic privilege in our republic of ...

Veiled Pensioners of the Mystic Sofa
The George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia, is a towering structure, a replica of the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria, Egypt—or, at least, a replica of what people used to think the ancient lighthouse looked like. It features a colossal statue of ...

World Processor
Consider the plight of the office drone: more gadgeted-out than ever, but still facing the same struggle for essential benefits, wages, and dignity that workers have for generations. Utopian reveries spill forth almost daily from the oracles of progress, forecasting a ...

Noise from Nowhere
On Saturday, January 4, 2014, Melissa Harris-Perry, host of the eponymous MSNBC show, began her broadcast with a sober announcement: Oh, dear. What happened? Well, a week earlier Harris-Perry had invited a group of comedians onto her show, in an attempt to “look back in ...