Robert Baird
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THE NIMBUS, my debut novel—and one of The New Yorker's "best books of the year so far"—is out now. Find blurbs, reviews, and more at my website.
Articles by Robert Baird
Annie Dillard’s Subject Was the Whole World
Literary lives, like the lives of plants, follow many trajectories. Some bloom early. Some blossom late. Some grow in view of everyone, sending out shoots where all and sundry can watch them experiment. Others bide their time underground, husbanding resources and awaiting their season until they are good, ready, and ripe. Annie Dillard, who died last week, at eighty-one, did not literally emerge from nowhere.
'Sorrowful Mysteries,' by Stephen Harrigan Original
Nor were such apparitions unusual for anxious young Catholics, as Harrigan attests from experience. He grew up Catholic in 1950s Texas, and he remembers convincing himself that a railroad spike he found on the playground must have been one of the nails that crucified Jesus.
‘The Left Edge of the Possible’
At the end of the eighties, the left wing of the Democratic Party was in bad shape. Democrats had lost five of the six previous presidential elections. Four of those, including the three most recent, had been landslide defeats, with Republicans winning more than four hundred votes in the Electoral College. The 1984 election was a complete wipeout—Walter Mondale lost in forty-nine states—but 1988 had been possibly even more painful.
Inside the Democrats’ Battle to Build Back Better
On a humid Tuesday evening in late September, Pramila Jayapal, a congresswoman from Seattle, was finishing an appearance on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” via Skype from her Washington, D.C., apartment, when she received a call from an unknown number. She sent it to voice mail.
The Invention of Whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea
In 2008, a satirical blog called Stuff White People Like became a brief but boisterous sensation. The conceit was straightforward, coupling a list, eventually 136 items long, of stuff that white people liked to do or own, with faux-ethnographic descriptions that explained each item’s purported racial appeal.
Benevolent Haze
By Robert P. Baird January 21, 2021 It was an old dream.
Can Trump Really Speed Approval of Covid Treatments?
Emergency-use authorizations, a formerly obscure corner of regulatory law, have become a centerpiece of the government’s response to the pandemic. President Donald Trump and F.D.A. Commissioner Stephen Hahn announced an emergency use authorization for a plasma treatment for Covid-19 at the White House in August. Oct.
The Recurring Trauma of California’s Wildfires
When Laurie Noble was growing up, in Fort Bragg, California, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, her family’s home doubled as a government weather station. The house was equipped with rain and wind-speed gauges, thermometers, a barometer, and a recording barograph, and the family belonged to a network of part-time observers paid by the federal Weather Bureau, the forerunner of the National Weather Service, to fill in gaps between its professionally staffed stations.
How Utah’s Tech Industry Tried to Disrupt Coronavirus Testing
Test Iowa was, in fact, the second statewide testing initiative launched by a group of Utah tech companies that included Nomi, Domo, and Qualtrics, an “experience management” firm. The project had originated, six weeks earlier, in their home state, as a philanthropic effort to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, it had transformed into a multistate commercial enterprise.
How Much Coronavirus Testing Does the U.S. Need to Reopen?
On a Saturday morning in mid-April, Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, and his wife, Yumi, watched the landing of Korean Air Flight 9093 at Baltimore’s Thurgood Marshall Airport, more commonly known as B.W.I. The pale-blue Boeing 777 would be the first Korean Air passenger plane to fly directly from Seoul to Baltimore, but that minor distinction was not why Hogan had come to greet it.
How Doctors on the Front Lines Are Confronting the Uncertainties of COVID-19
For Hooman Kamel, an intensivist at a Manhattan hospital, the weekend just before he started seeing COVID-19 patients in his I.C.U. was the darkest time. Kamel is a witty, blunt-talking doctor who grew up in San Jose and came to medicine by way of Harvard, Columbia, and U.C.S.F. In his ordinary professional life, he is a research physician, and spends most of his time studying the causes and treatment of strokes.
Why Widespread Coronavirus Testing Isn’t Coming Anytime Soon
This past Thursday, Donald Trump visited the National Response Coordination Center for a teleconference with the nation’s governors about how to handle the COVID-19 pandemic.
What Went Wrong with Coronavirus Testing in the U.S.
On February 5th, sixteen days after a Seattle resident who had visited relatives in Wuhan, China, was diagnosed as having the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, began sending diagnostic tests to a network of about a hundred state, city, and county public-health laboratories.
What It Means to Contain and Mitigate the Coronavirus
On Sunday, after a frightening spike in the number of people infected and killed by COVID-19, the coronavirus disease that the World Health Organization on Wednesday declared a global pandemic, the Italian government enacted a mandatory lockdown in Lombardy and fourteen other northern provinces, including the cities of Milan and Venice, and the tiny nation of San Marino.
The Prosecution of President Donald Trump
Near the end of the first full day of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, a Democratic staffer working on the House impeachment team received a message from a sibling. “It’s going really well,” the text said. “Do you think there’s a chance?” A week earlier, seven House Democrats—known as floor managers, in impeachment argot—had marched across the long axis of the Capitol, past statues of Brigham Young and Barry Goldwater, and delivered two articles of impeachment to the floor of the Senate.
The Art of the Democratic Deal
How Nancy Pelosi and her party navigated a historic week in the House of Representatives. Illustration by The New Yorker; Source Photograph by Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call / Getty; Source Photograph by Win McNamee / Getty How Nancy Pelosi and her party navigated a historic week in the House of Representatives. By Robert P.
“I’ve Never Seen Evidence So Clear”: Inside the House Effort to Draft Articles of Impeachment
The House Judiciary Committee will soon begin working, in consultation with Nancy Pelosi, to determine whether to bring articles of impeachment to the floor, and what those articles ought to be. Photograph by Drew Angerer / Getty In February, 1974, just as the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry into Watergate was getting under way, John Doar, the inquiry’s lead counsel, asked two young staffers to prepare a report.
Attacked at the Impeachment Inquiry, Alexander Vindman Testifies to the Power of Truth
Speaking in a firm voice, Vindman explained that he reported the July 25th phone call “out of a sense of duty,” because it was “improper for the President of the United States to demand a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen and political opponent.” The attacks on Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council official who testified before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday morning, began well before he sat down at the witness table.
The Public Stage of the House Impeachment Inquiry
Behind the efforts to gather evidence, or else defend the President, is a partisan struggle to steal the show. Marie Yovanovitch, the former Ambassador to Ukraine, testified to the House Intelligence Committee on the second day of public impeachment hearings.
The Circus Comes to the House Impeachment Inquiry
Around two o’clock in the afternoon last Tuesday, Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican, appeared at the entrance to the anteroom outside the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, where the House’s Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight committees have been jointly conducting depositions for the impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump.
Qatar Is Air-Conditioning the Outdoors Because of Climate Change
One common-sense practice for enjoying air conditioning is to keep windows and doors closed, ensuring that the cold doesn't escape outside. In Qatar, however, where temperatures now regularly exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit during the blazing summer months, they're trying something different.
Can Kevin Young Make Poetry Matter Again?
On August 25, 1835, residents of New York City woke to the sound of newsboys howling about an astonishing discovery. According to The New York Sun, a British astronomer had discovered life on the moon. Using a giant telescope outfitted with an ingenious “hydro-oxygen” mechanism, the newspaper said, Sir John Herschel had “affirmatively settled” the question of whether the moon was inhabited. The Sun narrated its account of Herschel’s discoveries over six days.
Michael Friedman's Unwritten Columns
Courtesy of New York City Center. In their post this Monday about the death of the composer and librettist Michael Friedman, Lorin and Sadie Stein mentioned their surprise that Michael had published just a single piece on the Daily.
Robert Baird · Showers of Hats: ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ · LRB 29 March 2017
George Saunders has long had a thing for ghosts, especially ghosts who haven’t figured out that they’re dead. The title story of his first collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), concerned a down-on-its-luck theme park with a Blacksmith Shoppe, a ninety-foot section of the Erie Canal, and a holographic projection of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States. It also featured a family of dead homesteaders who carry on reading and doing their laundry as though it were still 1865.
Robert Baird reviews ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ by George Saunders · LRB 30 March 2017
George Saunders has long had a thing for ghosts, especially ghosts who haven’t figured out that they’re dead. The title story of his first collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), concerned a down-on-its-luck theme park with a Blacksmith Shoppe, a ninety-foot section of the Erie Canal, and a holographic projection of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States. It also featured a family of dead homesteaders who carry on reading and doing their laundry as though it were still 1865.
Elliot Ackerman Discusses 'Dark at the Crossing'
To judge from the available evidence, Elliot Ackerman isn't big on wasting time. At 36, he's already done five tours in the Marines, served as a White House Fellow, and worked as a reporter covering the Syrian Civil War. Recently he returned to Iraq, where he fought more than a decade ago, to report a feature that will be published in Esquire this spring. As if that weren't enough, Ackerman is also a critically acclaimed novelist.
“There Has Never Been a Better-Looking Male Writer”
On the Shelf A Big Glooby Blob of Sad Blufush, and Other News July 22, 2016 | by Robert P. Baird Kerouac photographed by John Cohen, 1959. Image via The Spectator.Remember that time Henry James met Winston Churchill? The encounter took place in December, 1914, when Churchill was forty years old and James, his elder by three decades, was still a year from the stroke that would have him signing letters as Napoleon to arrange for “the decoration of certain apartments and palaces ...
In Victorian Novels, “Withholding Sex Is a Perverse Way of Having It”
On the Shelf Tension Minus the Genitals, and Other News July 21, 2016 | by Robert P. Baird From the cover of Exquisite Masochism.If there exists, as Susan Sontag once insisted, a “terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things,” nobody seems to have warned John Gruen. Born in France, in 1926, Gruen (né Jonas Grunberg) fled Hitler and then Mussolini before landing in New York in 1939, where he learned English by watching movies.
Art for Art, Blast Furnaces for Truth, and Other News
On the Shelf Art for Art, Blast Furnaces for Truth, and Other News June 23, 2016 | by Robert P. Baird A wonderful thing.“Art! Huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’.” That’s one view, anyway, one that gained currency in Europe in the nineteenth century. But where does the defense of l’art pour l’art stand today?
The Beginnings of Briggflatts
On the Shelf Briggflatts, Bibliophagy, and Other News June 22, 2016 | by Robert P. Baird "You'll eat your words," God told Ezekiel, and lo, Biblical literalism was born. (Source gallica.bnf.fr)If your daily commute this past year was anything like mine, then your daily commute was nothing like Basil Bunting's in 1965. That was the year Bunting composed Briggflats, his magnum opus, while riding the train to and from from his day job as a newspaper subeditor.
Remembering Jenny Diski (1947-2016)
Jenny Diski died yesterday. You might have discovered that fact if you happened to visit the London Review of Books, where Diski published essays, reviews, and blog posts for nearly twenty-five years. Or maybe, like me, you learned it on Twitter, where, hours before the obituaries arrived, old tweets of Diski’s, some of them years out of date, started swirling back into circulation.
Emerald Sea, by Robert P. Baird
i. key west U.S. Route 1, the nation’s longest north-south highway, casts out of Fort Kent, Maine, and spools down the eastern seaboard, threading Boston, New York, and Fort Lauderdale until it drifts across Manatee Creek near Homestead and bobs south into the Florida Keys, which carry it so far west that it snags on a longitude line shared with Cleveland. The 2,369-mile route ends on Whitehead Street in Key West.
After the Death of David Foster Wallace
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