The Baffler Media Bias for Past 90 Days

The Talking Cure

health

Lately I keep reading new novels whose protagonists are engaged ruthlessly, sometimes sadomasochistically, in the act of self-criticism. Usually these characters are falling short of their ambitions—they don’t know how to live!—and it doesn’t feel good. Often they are writers or artists of some order, or at least they want to be. They know so much about their symptoms, and the social stratagems of their milieu, and climate change, yet enumerating each anxiety only leads to more of the same circular suffering. Andrew Martin’s Early Work, Kate Zambreno’s Drifts, Halle Butler’s The New Me, and Jenny Offill’s Weather come to mind. Reading such work has made me more aware of the ways in which novels themselves are massive records of wallowing. They require drudgery, time, solitude and take the form of what obsesses the writer most, life materials they can’t bear to hold at any greater distance. They are little shelters for neuroses.
The Baffler     Mar 03, 2021

Con Men in Tights

education

In 2018, former New York Times columnist Frank Rich took to New York magazine with a declaration gauche as it was grand. Lamenting the state of America in the wake of the Great Recession, Rich proclaimed that “in 2008, America stopped believing in the American Dream.” For those who have long been disabused of such a thing, it’s easy to see how Rich––a dependable barometer of establishment liberal discourse––reveals in this essay less about the American people than he does about himself. That is, on top of being white and well-educated, Rich is a product of the postwar economic boom, when middle- and upper-class prosperity gave way to a rising tide of American exceptionalism. But for many millennials and Gen Zers, 2008 arrived before they could hardly conceive of what it meant to be an American, thus marking the year not as the end of a dream but the beginning of a nightmare.
The Baffler     Mar 02, 2021

Stepping Twice in the Same River

environment, weather and energy

First published in 1991, Juan José Saer’s El río sin orillas (“The Boundless River”) is a book-length meditation on the Río de la Plata, the region in Argentina where he grew up, and which served as a prime setting and subject for much of his fiction. Saer was not entirely comfortable with writing nonfiction; in the book’s introduction, he complains that works in the genre “tend to present themselves as the vehicle of the most unequivocal reality and the most scrupulous truth.” Yet El río sin orillas remains one of his best and most revealing works. His sardonic intelligence strays freely from the ostensible subject, paddling up a number of surprising intellectual tributaries.
The Baffler     Mar 01, 2021

The Exorcist’s Apprentice

During the fall of 1499, I apprenticed for a priest in town. My brothers had paged for knights and noblemen, gigs with real cachet, but my parents had this idea of sending me into the order once I turned eighteen and so set me up with this guy in an attempt, I suppose, to entice me into the profession through mere exposure, so steadfast was their enthusiasm for the priesthood. They had also caught me completely blitzed after guzzling mead with some dropouts from the Franciscan abbey just before Michaelmas, and I think probably wished to avoid reoccurrences of such debauchery.
The Baffler     Feb 26, 2021

The French Inquisition

I have never felt welcome in France. From the sneer on the face of the immigration officer stamping my passport, to the in-your-face staring of black-clad middle-aged women on the metro, to the standoffish workers in Parisian bakeries—it all adds up to a collective face-palm. They’re forced to let me into the country because of my magical American passport, but that doesn’t mean they have to be nice about it.
The Baffler     Feb 26, 2021

The Life and Death of the Dream Job

The legal age to start working in Ohio is fourteen, but my two best friends and I found ways to get jobs before that anyway. We knew the term “under the table” from our parents, who were working-class both in that they were not bosses, and also in that they kept us surviving paycheck to paycheck and sometimes defaulted on utility bills. (Though we never named it, we were best friends partially because of this common family denominator, much different from our wealthier peers at school.) We found odd tasks to do for a few bucks—laying mulch for a small-town landscaping business, washing dishes at rich people’s parties, the occasional babysitting gig. Finally, the summer after freshman year of high school, when we were allowed to have jobs that paid us “over the table,” we each made our way into the service industry: two of us at Wendy’s on the cash register, the other learning how to pull shots at Starbucks.
The Baffler     Feb 25, 2021

Everything Dies

On a rainy night in early 1980, Donald Trump walked down the Atlantic City boardwalk to check out a vacant lot. He was alone—he’d left his then-wife, Ivana, gambling at Bally’s. “I love that plot,” he said. By the end of the year, he’d leased what would become the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino from an FBI informant and two mob-affiliated Philly scrap metal dealers, described to Trump biographer Wayne Barrett by “associates” as “the short, dumpy guy with the open shirt and lots of gold . . . and the tall, dumpy guy with the open shirt and lots of gold.” The cork was popped; the gun was fired! The Trump Plaza would soon be born, but it needed a parking garage. Casino owners did everything in their power to make sure tourists only saw the boardwalk—the carefully bleached teeth of the city—rather than the obvious poverty a block away, so Trump bought a dilapidated brick nightclub standing behind the Plaza site from Frank Narducci Jr. and Salvatore Testa. At the time, Narducci and Testa were running a hit squad called the Young Executioners. Testa was also the twenty-six-year-old son of Philip Testa, “the Chicken Man” of Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City,” who was killed by a nail bomb in Philly around the same time Trump stood in the rain looking at the site of his future casino.
The Baffler     Feb 24, 2021

All Roads Lead to Beijing

Chi-nah, the easiest and most economical Trump impersonation, hitting each syllable hard, flopping a hand forwards, a moment’s pause. The most topical too, maybe. All we do as a country is lose, he told us, right as the golden escalator ride kicked off his 2016 campaign. They’re killing us, the People’s Republic. Trump’s presidential pitch? “I beat China all the time.”
The Baffler     Feb 24, 2021

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

Americans just don’t fuck like they used to. Some studies blame our on-the-go lifestyle, while others finger the financial precarity and student loan debt forcing more millennials to move back in with their parents. Some researchers suggests it’s simply “dropping testosterone levels” caused by a variety of health issues and the general aging of our population. I have my own suspicions about why, despite the ubiquity of sex-on-demand dating apps and the rise of do-it-yourself porn, people are getting it on less than ever—but those lie in the Immortal Science, not in measuring T-levels.
The Baffler     Feb 23, 2021

American Gothic

I do not believe in ghosts, but I do believe in hauntings. Why should the dead hang around? They’ve got other things to do. But that spaces hold onto something seems self-evident—some events can leave scars and stretch marks on them, as it were, in the way that walking through a doorway can cause you to forget what you came for, and walking back to where you started can remind you. A good haunted house story knows how to suggest the difference between haunting and spectral visitation, how to say that haunted houses, like haunted people, become so through an accumulation of events, usually bad ones, in a single place.
The Baffler     Feb 22, 2021

A Fête Worse Than Death

social issue

I am twenty-three and stuck living in my parents house in the middle of nowhere. I know I’m lucky not to have to pay rent during this but oh my god, I am losing it. I have no friends or lovers around here. Before Covid my life was glam, exciting, and full of hot people and now my phone is dry and dating apps are pointless. I can’t shake the feeling that I am wasting one of few precious years where I’m gorgeous and young and unattached. I have managed a few visits to friends in cities but it’s too risky lately because the numbers in my area have spiked. I feel like a nineteenth-century depressed housewife being forced into the rest cure. How can I revive my comatose social life before I go full yellow wallpaper mode? More importantly how do I do that without texting my ex or risking my or other people’s health?
The Baffler     Feb 19, 2021

Death in the Mango Orchard

My mother’s favorite television channel in Pakistan features only soap operas. The stories star mainly women, and mostly suffering women wronged variously by husbands, fathers, scheming mothers, and sisters-in-law.
The Baffler     Feb 19, 2021

Surrealism’s Beating Heart

About halfway into Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novella The Crying of Lot 49, unhappy housewife and accidental private eye Oedipa Maas begins seeing horns. She spends a sleepless night stumbling through San Francisco in the feverish grip of some mad combination of revelation and nightmare, horns everywhere, drawn on the sidewalk in chalk, gracing a man’s jacket in the form of a lapel pin, traced with a finger in the fog of a nighttime bus window, tattooed on a man’s hand. The more horns she sees, the more she becomes convinced of the existence of a vast conspiracy related to the postal system, and the more aggressively she questions her sanity.
The Baffler     Feb 18, 2021

A Bleak Future for Water

economy and finances

In our moment of rabid for sale-ism, it would be easy to react to the announcement that even the future of water in California is for sale with a glib of course it is. As of December 7, the availability of water in the state can be bet on or against by way of what’s called a futures contract, which allows investors to make a claim on the future price of water. These are tied to the Nasdaq Veles California Water Index, which measures the volume-weighted average price of water, meaning that investors, farmers (read: agribusiness owners), and climate change onlookers can profit off of growing water scarcity. As droughts worsen, investors will be able reap the benefits of the realities of climate change.
The Baffler     Feb 18, 2021

Live, Laugh, Log Off

art and culture

The closest thing I have to an inviolable principle is that it is a sacrilege to read a good book on a screen. Setting aside paper’s many sentimental attractions (gluey smell, physical heft, ample space for scribbling), to which I will admit I am susceptible, to read on what is so hideously called an “e-reader” is to concede that literature is continuous with the internet, that non-place where people go to look up one word, only to resurface lifetimes later, dazed and dead-eyed, twenty minutes into a video of someone popping pimples with a special implement. The internet scoops out the mind and mashes it into wet pulp, which is to say that it is the opposite of a novel, at least when the novel is working.
The Baffler     Feb 17, 2021

Women’s Work

labour

Around the time the world was about to shut down in early March 2020, a much-anticipated meeting of the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women died a premature death. The CSW64/Beijing+25 was going to mark the passage of twenty-five years since a conference that had taken place in Beijing. It was meant to take stock, to see how far the world’s women had progressed in the quarter century. But while the session was not held in its entirety, given the continued constraints of a global pandemic, the UN’s affiliate entity UN Women has continued to put out reports and training manuals and other similar products that we have come to expect of the organization, which defines itself as the “global champion for gender equality.”
The Baffler     Feb 12, 2021

Burning Down the Bordertown

Twenty-nine-year-old Zachary Bearheels, a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, needed to see his mother. He left his aunt’s house on the Rosebud Reservation, where he’d been staying, and boarded a Greyhound bus in Murdo, South Dakota, on June 3, 2017, bound for his mom’s home in Oklahoma City. He never reached her. The bus pulled into Omaha, Nebraska, late on a Saturday night. Bearheels, like most passengers, got off the bus to look for food or maybe a clean bathroom. While he was gone, another passenger complained to the driver that Bearheels was strange, his behavior erratic. The driver refused to let him back on the bus when he returned.
The Baffler     Feb 11, 2021

José Muñoz, Then and There

For years after he died, some of his friends would bond over current events and interpersonal intrigue by asking ourselves the question: “What would José say?” We always laughed when we asked it, and that laughter held many layers. Aside from the obvious allusion to a certain evangelical bumper sticker—with which our queer gang had variously vexed familial entanglements—there was always a lingering, bittersweet recognition of how much harder the muddle of life was now, without our resident wit, José Esteban Muñoz, the pioneering queer theorist who died in 2013. When we asked the question of the day’s travesty—“What would José say?”—we never quite knew. There were sometimes half-baked attempts to invent a Muñozian quip. But what we really enjoyed was dreaming of a world in which his funny remark could have cut to the heart of the matter. You could call our queer conviviality a coven of gossip, and everything you said about us would be right except your sneer.
The Baffler     Feb 10, 2021