Esmat Elhalaby

Mar 28, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Dave Denison |Shamira Ibrahim |Esmat Elhalaby

In his 2002 book State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, historian Nelson Lichtenstein traced the rise and fall of “the labor question” from the Progressive era, when union members began to push for a living wage and for industrial democracy, through the 1930s, at which time the labor movement got significant boosts from the New Deal, to the precipitous decline of union power in the 1970s and 1980s.

Jan 8, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Jeff Weinstein |Libby Watson |Esmat Elhalaby

I’m a seventy-six-year-old cisgender male with silver hair who had sex with about a dozen guys last year. Guys only, all ages, a few regulars and some one-time online hookups, each offering a different kind of vibration and satisfaction. That tally includes my darling spouse, Daniel, in his early thirties, who himself sees oodles of men, all of them older, like me.

Jan 8, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Aaron Gell |Rafia Zakaria |Esmat Elhalaby

The flyer promised “Peace, Love, Unity, Respect.” It was an advertisement for the South River Music Festival, a two-day concert in March of 2023 featuring an eclectic lineup at a singular venue—the wooded site south of Atlanta where police hope to build a controversial new training facility.

Jan 8, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Austin McCoy |Esmat Elhalaby

I was eleven years old when I saw the video footage of four Los Angeles police officers kicking and pummeling Rodney King. It was March of 1991. In my parents’ living room in our home in Mansfield, Ohio, I watched as television news seemed to have the violent video on endless loop. When the officers were acquitted in April of the following year, I remember my parents expressing outrage at the verdict. I watched news coverage of the uprising that followed, transfixed.

Jan 8, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Anya Ventura |Esmat Elhalaby

On a Wednesday morning in San Diego, the CEO of the UPS Store was sitting at his desk in a baby blue polo, waiting for the customers to arrive. “I’ll be signing paychecks and stuff, and giving them to my employees,” he told me. The CEO, who is the youngest of three and would one day like to be a professional soccer player, is in the fifth grade. His mother had pressed his name in iron-on letters on one side of his shirt; on the other side was the delivery company’s brown logo.