The Baffler
@thebaffler.com
š¤ 25552
š„ 101
š 2472
Political and cultural criticism. Since 1988. Online and in print.
https://thebaffler.com/
pinned post!
Who will protect the Earth from the pillage and spillage of mankind? Our new issue, āBloom and Gloom,ā surveys the mess weāve made of our planet, and describes the terrain on which we stage the battle for its ecological future.
thebaffler.com/issues/no-82
about 1 month ago
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āSirÄtā sends itself into the unknownāand then further and further, until the destination has been lost, and there is no return.
@robrubsam.bsky.social
writes on three new entries in the canon of spiritual cinema.
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Wild Facts | Robert Rubsam
Spiritual cinema is fundamentally an aspiration: it must reach out toward something it cannot ultimately depict.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/wild-facts-rubsam
about 8 hours ago
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āThe breathless panic that AI is an existential threat to human labor functions as a constant commercial weāre all forced to live inside of, until we can no longer recognize the difference between marketing and reality.ā
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Bullshit Bots | Sohini Desai
Is AI really coming for entry-level jobs first, and the rest of the workforce next? Tech CEOs certainly want you to think so.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/bullshit-bots-desai
about 12 hours ago
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āSpiritual cinema is fundamentally an aspiration: it must reach out toward something it cannot ultimately depict.ā
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Wild Facts | Robert Rubsam
Spiritual cinema is fundamentally an aspiration: it must reach out toward something it cannot ultimately depict.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/wild-facts-rubsam
1 day ago
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In a quiet office in the forgotten corner of a news network, a divorcee drowns in images: press conferences and car chases, misjudgments and missed opportunities.
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Replay | Leila Register
I donāt know what Iād been thinking. I donāt know how I missed that.
https://thebaffler.com/fiction/replay-register
1 day ago
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Itās Valentineās Day, and what better way to celebrate than by subscribing to sources of left-wing political and cultural criticism? Get a year of The Baffler and a year of
@dissentmag.bsky.social
for just $60.
ezsubscription.com/bfl/subscrib...
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1 day ago
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The tech industry promises a future where an autonomous assistant handles all your little to-dos: finding an outfit for a wedding, buying concert tickets, planning trips. To accomplish this, theyāll need access to your dataāall of it.
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Bullshit Bots | Sohini Desai
Is AI really coming for entry-level jobs first, and the rest of the workforce next? Tech CEOs certainly want you to think so.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/bullshit-bots-desai
1 day ago
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When surgeons operate on a dead body, it is often in the name of organ transplant, research, or medical training. But Israel uses the bodies of dead Palestinian prisoners to further its political project and dehumanize the living.
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Iām Not Done With You | Mary Turfah
You cannot harm a corpse, though you can use it to harm others.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/im-not-done-with-you-turfah
1 day ago
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The skin is the largest organ in the body, and Israel has the largest skin bank in the world. Mary Turfah describes the countryās ill treatment of Palestinian corpses.
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Iām Not Done With You | Mary Turfah
You cannot harm a corpse, though you can use it to harm others.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/im-not-done-with-you-turfah
2 days ago
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With āThe Testament of Ann Lee,ā Mona Fastvold shows the viewer how mystical ecstasy feels. The film centers on the founder and history of Shakerismābut more importantly, it expresses their existential mode.
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Wild Facts | Robert Rubsam
Spiritual cinema is fundamentally an aspiration: it must reach out toward something it cannot ultimately depict.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/wild-facts-rubsam
2 days ago
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āYou have to buy a day of childhood at Disney World, and this is not remotely right. But on the other hand, where else can you go, in America today, to buy such a thing?ā
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The Magic Kingdom | Sarah Marshall
Capitalism, like all abusive relationships, creates a sense of learned helplessness in its victims. We are complicit in what it makes of us.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-magic-kingdom-marshall?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=archival
2 days ago
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Our much-beloved Valentineās Day deal returns. Get a year of The Baffler and a year of @DissentMag for just $60. Thatās a $25 discount!
ezsubscription.com/bfl/subscrib...
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2 days ago
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As the tech industry struggles to justify its investments in AI, firms are now pitching āagentic AIā as one route to profit. As Sohini Desai explains, these bots are meant to juice consumer spendingāand help bosses put the squeeze on their workers.
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Bullshit Bots | Sohini Desai
Is AI really coming for entry-level jobs first, and the rest of the workforce next? Tech CEOs certainly want you to think so.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/bullshit-bots-desai
2 days ago
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Every day in the Navy Yard, he sifts through hours of news footage looking for a single usable stillāand burrows further and further into his past. Read āReplayā on our site now.
thebaffler.com/fiction/repl...
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Replay | Leila Register
I donāt know what Iād been thinking. I donāt know how I missed that.
https://thebaffler.com/fiction/replay-register
3 days ago
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Over the course of nearly a century, the United States government corralled Native children in federally run boarding schools. The goal was assimilation and absorption into industrial capitalismāall the easier to take their tribal lands.
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Serious Reservations | Kristen Martin
The Trump administrationās erasure of Indigenous history serves a larger projectāyet another plunder of land.
https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/serious-reservations-martin
3 days ago
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āAgentic commerce invites us to hand over our data to the same regime of automation that will justify and accelerate the global march toward labor becoming more contingent and precarious.ā
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Bullshit Bots | Sohini Desai
Is AI really coming for entry-level jobs first, and the rest of the workforce next? Tech CEOs certainly want you to think so.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/bullshit-bots-desai
3 days ago
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āDespite its digital dominance, PETA alone has changed little for nonhuman beings.ā
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Army of the Kind | Lindsay OāConnor Stern
If PETA looked yesterday like a radical organization with a weakness for the burlesque, its techniques only reflect contemporary America.
https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/army-of-the-kind-oconnor-stern
3 days ago
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To understand the most pernicious fantasies of late capitalism, one need look no further than the physical and intellectual properties of Disney. From the Archives: Sarah Marshall considers life on the margins of the House of Mouse:
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The Magic Kingdom | Sarah Marshall
Capitalism, like all abusive relationships, creates a sense of learned helplessness in its victims. We are complicit in what it makes of us.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-magic-kingdom-marshall?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=archival
3 days ago
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āIsrael has systematically disinterred thousands of bodies in cemeteries across Gaza. Israel keeps some of these bodies in morgues, others in unnamed, numbered graves inside military zones called ācemeteries of numbers.ā
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Iām Not Done With You | Mary Turfah
You cannot harm a corpse, though you can use it to harm others.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/im-not-done-with-you-turfah
3 days ago
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reposted by
The Baffler
Robert Rubsam
5 days ago
Over at
@thebaffler.com
, some thoughts on spiritual cinema, medieval mystics, Shaker chairs, dance music, and what it might mean for modern art to yearn for the divine.
thebaffler.com/latest/wild-...
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Wild Facts | Robert Rubsam
Spiritual cinema is fundamentally an aspiration: it must reach out toward something it cannot ultimately depict.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/wild-facts-rubsam
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Modernity draws a bright line between the possible and impossible, the rational and irrational. Yet spiritual cinema reaches out toward the ineffable, offering audiences a glimpse of a world beyond our circumstances.
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Wild Facts | Robert Rubsam
Spiritual cinema is fundamentally an aspiration: it must reach out toward something it cannot ultimately depict.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/wild-facts-rubsam
3 days ago
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reposted by
The Baffler
Faquin
5 days ago
"à Gaza, Israël a déclaré avoir emporté des camions remplis de cadavres palestiniens afin de leur faire subir des tests ADN, pour s'assurer qu'aucun d'entre eux n'était israélien. Puis il les a conservés. Personne ne sait combien de corps ont été emportés depuis 2023."
thebaffler.com/latest/im-no...
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Iām Not Done With You | Mary Turfah
You cannot harm a corpse, though you can use it to harm others.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/im-not-done-with-you-turfah
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AI can draft your work emails (awkwardly), answer your customer queries (badly), and make something that sounds like music. But its abilities are finiteāand as Sohini Desai explains, we should be skeptical of the promises CEOs are making.
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Bullshit Bots | Sohini Desai
Is AI really coming for entry-level jobs first, and the rest of the workforce next? Tech CEOs certainly want you to think so.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/bullshit-bots-desai
4 days ago
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The Baffler and Dissent are coupling upā£ļøGet a year of both magazines for just $60.
ezsubscription.com/bfl/subscrib...
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4 days ago
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PETA wants to extend human rights to include all living, breathing, feeling things. But as recent history demonstrates, itās not as if simply being human guarantees dignity and protection.
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Army of the Kind | Lindsay OāConnor Stern
If PETA looked yesterday like a radical organization with a weakness for the burlesque, its techniques only reflect contemporary America.
https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/army-of-the-kind-oconnor-stern
4 days ago
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At the periphery of the parking lot, wild plants persist, poking their way through asphalt cracks and fences erected to keep nature out.
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Parking Lot Paradiso | Andrew Conboy with Bobby Doherty
A field guide to what grows in the asphalt by the mini-mall.
https://thebaffler.com/odds-and-ends/parking-lot-paradiso-conboy-doherty
4 days ago
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āI want this: an art of expectation and aspiration, an art that levitates and revelates, that shakes and speaks in unknown tonguesāa miraculous art that pushes beyond itself.ā
thebaffler.com/latest/wild-...
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Wild Facts | Robert Rubsam
Spiritual cinema is fundamentally an aspiration: it must reach out toward something it cannot ultimately depict.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/wild-facts-rubsam
4 days ago
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reposted by
The Baffler
Nathan Kalman-Lamb
4 days ago
"Palestinian witnesses have reported that some prisoners were alive at the time they were taken for organ extraction. In one batch of bodies, the organs removed were those commonly transplanted: heart, liver, lungs... Here, the surgeon acts asāisāa soldier." I'm honestly speechless.
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āFor as long as the ride lasted, I had believed that it was not physically possible for me, or anyone, to die at Disney World. I believed that mortality, injury, worked differently in here.ā
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The Magic Kingdom | Sarah Marshall
Capitalism, like all abusive relationships, creates a sense of learned helplessness in its victims. We are complicit in what it makes of us.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-magic-kingdom-marshall?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=archival
4 days ago
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This Valentineās Day, treat yourself with a subscription to The Baffler and
@dissentmag.bsky.social
for just $60. Itās nicer than chocolates, cheaper than a prix fixe, and unlike roses, it lasts all year.
ezsubscription.com/bfl/subscrib...
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4 days ago
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Shakespeare is a common tongue that unites us in grief, rapture, frivolity, fear, and longingālittle wonder, then, that his works and the world that bore them, are reimagined again and again on page and screen.
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Shakespeare in the Bardo | Tana Wojczuk
Shakespeare is no longer just a playwright, he is an industry.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/shakespeare-in-the-bardo-tana-wojczuk
4 days ago
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āIsraelās approach to the Palestinian body emerges from a cross between the utilitarian logic of how death becomes lifeāhere not between individual bodies but through them, for the nationāand the retrofitted justification to kill, in lifeās name.ā
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Iām Not Done With You | Mary Turfah
You cannot harm a corpse, though you can use it to harm others.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/im-not-done-with-you-turfah
4 days ago
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reposted by
The Baffler
Caroline von Golum
5 days ago
A real nice bit of reviewage from Rob Rubsam in
@thebaffler.com
, placing "Revelations" within a larger trend of the sublime and spiritual in contemporary cinema!! And can you believe they used a still from our movie for the header!! Read on!
thebaffler.com/latest/wild-...
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Wild Facts | Robert Rubsam
Spiritual cinema is fundamentally an aspiration: it must reach out toward something it cannot ultimately depict.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/wild-facts-rubsam
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āāSix Speakā was more than a sociological analysis or a cri de coeur; it offered a record of a neighborhood whose days could be numbered.ā
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A Place to Call Home | Jackson Davidow
The early photos of Barbara P. Norfleet and Susan Meiselas are more just than documents of neighborly attachment and empowerment.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/a-place-to-call-home-davidow
5 days ago
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Ours is a culture of persistent literalism, a society which routinely mistakes surfaces for depths.
@robrubsam.bsky.social
writes on three films that reach toward something deeper: āThe Testament of Ann Lee,ā āRevelations of Divine Love,ā and āSirÄt.ā
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Wild Facts | Robert Rubsam
Spiritual cinema is fundamentally an aspiration: it must reach out toward something it cannot ultimately depict.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/wild-facts-rubsam
5 days ago
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āHis plays collapse time and distance and remind us to linger in the in-between spaces. We make and remake Shakespeare, as in the cycle of samsara, he is not dead but is becoming one with the universe.ā
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Shakespeare in the Bardo | Tana Wojczuk
Shakespeare is no longer just a playwright, he is an industry.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/shakespeare-in-the-bardo-tana-wojczuk
5 days ago
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In October of 2025, Israel returned four hundred dead bodies to Gaza. But it denied entry to basic forensic materials that families would need to identify their loved onesāmore proof of how Israel uses the dead to attack the living.
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Iām Not Done With You | Mary Turfah
You cannot harm a corpse, though you can use it to harm others.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/im-not-done-with-you-turfah
5 days ago
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Our annual Valentineās Day deal is back. For a limited time, get a year of The Baffler and a year of
@dissentmag.bsky.social
for just $60.
ezsubscription.com/bfl/subscrib...
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5 days ago
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āThe moves through 2025 were directed at clean energy and environmental justice: in August, Trumpās EPA announced the termination of $7 billion in grants that were meant to help low-income households install solar panels on their homes.ā
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Green Raw Deals | Dave Denison, Rhiana Gunn-Wright & Maria Lopez-NuƱez
The Biden years ended with the U.S. environmental movement in a fractured and demoralized state. Where do we go from here?
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/green-raw-deals-denison-gunn-wright-lopez-nunez
5 days ago
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The āHappiest Place on Earthā can be hell for those who work there. From the Archives: Sarah Marshall peeks behind the curtain of the Magic Kingdom.
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The Magic Kingdom | Sarah Marshall
Capitalism, like all abusive relationships, creates a sense of learned helplessness in its victims. We are complicit in what it makes of us.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-magic-kingdom-marshall?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=archival
5 days ago
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reposted by
The Baffler
Felicity Callard
5 days ago
āIf the sovereignās power over a person through their body ceases once a body is buried, Israelis have found a workaround: they pull the body out of the earth. __Come here, Iām not done with you__.ā The rhythm of Mary Turfahās sentences are as devastating as what she writes about
add a skeleton here at some point
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In the 1960s, urban planners wanted to plow a highway through Cambridge, Massachusetts. Barbara P. Norfleet sprung into action, camera in hand. Jackson Davidow writes on the resulting photography project that documented six houses at risk of demolition.
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A Place to Call Home | Jackson Davidow
The early photos of Barbara P. Norfleet and Susan Meiselas are more just than documents of neighborly attachment and empowerment.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/a-place-to-call-home-davidow
5 days ago
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In Gaza, Israel takes truckloads of Palestinian bodies for DNA testing, to make sure they are not Israeli. They seldom return them. Mary Turfah examines what they are doing with the dead, how it structures Israeli power, and why they get away with it.
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Iām Not Done With You | Mary Turfah
You cannot harm a corpse, though you can use it to harm others.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/im-not-done-with-you-turfah
6 days ago
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āShakespeare is no longer just a playwright; he is an industry. Beginning with the waning golden age of the theater in the late nineteenth century, Shakespeare became the property of academics, transformed from entertainment into high culture.ā
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Shakespeare in the Bardo | Tana Wojczuk
Shakespeare is no longer just a playwright, he is an industry.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/shakespeare-in-the-bardo-tana-wojczuk
6 days ago
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From the Archives: Sarah Marshall describes the cruel fantasy that Disney sells to childrenāand just about everyone else.
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The Magic Kingdom | Sarah Marshall
Capitalism, like all abusive relationships, creates a sense of learned helplessness in its victims. We are complicit in what it makes of us.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-magic-kingdom-marshall?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=archival
6 days ago
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āThe projectās bedrock was the irresistible, oh-so-sixties notion that conversation was the stuff of social transformation.ā
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A Place to Call Home | Jackson Davidow
The early photos of Barbara P. Norfleet and Susan Meiselas are more just than documents of neighborly attachment and empowerment.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/a-place-to-call-home-davidow
6 days ago
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āIt took more than two years for thousands of diplomats to arduously negotiate the UN Conferenceās agenda. It took mere days for much of it to be cast aside.ā
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Earth, Bound | Scott W. Stern
The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 marked the birth of international environmental law. It was moribund from the start.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/earth-bound-w-stern
6 days ago
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reposted by
The Baffler
New York Review Books
6 days ago
"In Chaudhuri's novels, every paragraph reads like the first; he writes fiction that gives these self-contained fragments 'primacy over the superstructure of narrative.' They exist for their own sake; they can be read and revisited independently." On Amit Chaudhuri at
@thebaffler.com
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Everything Is at Stake | Apoorva Tadepalli
In everything he publishes, Amit Chaudhuri pursues a āpoetics of unfinishedness.ā
https://thebaffler.com/latest/everything-is-at-stake-tadepalli
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Justice40, Bidenās government-wide environmental justice policy, failed to serve the marginalized communities it was meant to protect. So, too, did the IRA. And some of the blame for that rests on the shoulders of environmentalists.
thebaffler.com/salvos/green...
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Green Raw Deals | Dave Denison, Rhiana Gunn-Wright & Maria Lopez-NuƱez
The Biden years ended with the U.S. environmental movement in a fractured and demoralized state. Where do we go from here?
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/green-raw-deals-denison-gunn-wright-lopez-nunez
6 days ago
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Tana Wojczuk reviews āHamnet,ā a female-centered story of death, birth, and creative rebirth and considers the purpose of setting such a narrative in a Shakespearean world.
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Shakespeare in the Bardo | Tana Wojczuk
Shakespeare is no longer just a playwright, he is an industry.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/shakespeare-in-the-bardo-tana-wojczuk
6 days ago
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Disney has found itself a new CEO: Josh DāAmaro, the former chair of the companyās hugely successful parks division. Back in 2019, Sarah Marshall paid a visit to the āHappiest Place on Earth.ā
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The Magic Kingdom | Sarah Marshall
Capitalism, like all abusive relationships, creates a sense of learned helplessness in its victims. We are complicit in what it makes of us.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-magic-kingdom-marshall?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=archival
6 days ago
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