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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

We Keep You Alive
A surprising number of people start their working life at McDonald’s. Paul Ryan claimed flipping burgers was central to his understanding of the American Dream. Pharrell Williams was fired three times from the chain. James Franco penned a mildly off-putting love memoir to the ...

Misery Makers
Late last year, Goldman Sachs held its annual Builders+Innovators Summit in Santa Barbara, California. It’s the kind of event where elite members of society gather to congratulate themselves for being rich and powerful, while listening to speakers like Hillary Clinton lament ...

The Loser King
It’s easy to imagine much of recent political history being recorded in tell-all memoirs with titles like Maybe I Did It, What’s Your Problem? or Yeah I Did It, What’s Your Point? Three years into the Trump era, you can be sure that if the president or one of his henchmen ...

Led Astray
There is a disjuncture at the heart of the American Jewish politics. Most American Jews know very little about the institutions that claim to represent them, and the leaders of these institutions share few of the political and religious commitments held by most American Jews. ...

An Open Letter to Leon Cooperman
Leon Cooperman Omega Family Office, Inc. 810 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10019   Dear Mr. Cooperman, It is with a great sense of agitation that I write this. But I am going to try to be reasonable with you here. You present yourself as a reasonable man, an astute observer ...

I’m Not Feeling Good at All
The young woman works in an office. Her job is tedious: data entry, or coordinating the logistics for meaningless products, or proofreading niche trade publications with improbable names. She has no friends or resents the one she has. Her boyfriend is distant. Perhaps he’s not ...

The Trolls of Academe
On the occasion of the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies, which convened last May on the campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Richard Utz, president of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism and chair of the School of Literature, ...

They Made a Movie Out of It
January 06, 2020
In early 2018, I was spending a warm West Hollywood Sunday evening on the balcony of a young director of film development, drinking a beer and hoping for an early night[1]. I had planned to sleep on his couch, but when I suggested we turn in, he said, “Nah, just take my bed, ...

Smoke from Underground
January 06, 2020
Until the 1980s, it was possible to ignore the fact that Centralia was on fire. By then, the mines in this Pennsylvania coal town had been burning underground for nearly twenty years, but there was no roaring blaze, no Biblical conflagration. What you saw was mostly steam ...

Montana’s Money Pit
In southwest Montana in the mid-1870s, a seam of silver was found in a wide basin in the mountains near the Continental Divide. By 1879, a growing miners’ camp was incorporated as the city of Butte. To Butte’s northeast, there was a hill containing some of the world’s ...

Afternoon of the Pawnbrokers
The bankers, inconsolable in the face of their lawbreaking, wept in slow-moving subway cars; I witnessed this phenomenon myself one day in late 2008 as I commuted to an Upper East Side townhouse, where my employer, an oil man who had lost considerably in the crash, fired me. ...