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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Against Everything
The 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s—les trente glorieuses, the French call them—were indeed fat years in Western Europe and the United States. Unions were strong, unemployment was low, and a lot of jobs still came with health insurance and pensions. The jobs in question also stood ...

Maiden America
December 05, 2016
St. Cecilia crashes a purity ball, with Sarah of the Desert and Melania the Elder as her dates. They are confused by what they see. Teen and pre-teen girls in white gowns dance with older men. A couple stops and poses for a picture, the man’s hands lying awkwardly on the ...

Corruptions of Empire
December 05, 2016
Editor’s Note, December 6, 2016: This article has been updated to reflect president-elect Trump’s post-election statements and cabinet appointments. A version of this article appeared in print in The Baffler no. 33. I live in Istanbul and follow American news ...

Virtuous Reality
American politics is now largely devoid of the language of virtue. The word occasionally surfaces in the bloviating of para-intellectuals such as David Brooks (New York Times gasbag and author of The Road to Character) and William Bennett (inveterate gambler and compiler of The ...

Rights Make Might
December 05, 2016
As the botched chances and bitter disappointments stacked up late into the fateful night of November 8, 2016, the ceiling at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan was a soaring collateral casualty. Made of steel-reinforced transparent glass and pitched 150 feet ...

Trumped and Abandoned
December 05, 2016
On a cold winter’s day just before Christmas, Mike McNulty picked me up at the Denver airport in his wheezing Aerostar van with the broken seatbelt clasp—he couldn’t afford to repair it—and we rode the hour’s drive to his new home in Fort Collins. The McNultys had ...

The Other Buffett Rule
December 05, 2016
During Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency, Americans became even more confused than usual over the meaning of wealth. Recall the moment when Trump descended that escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 and announced his qualifications: political outsider, dealmaker, keeper of ...

Explanation for What?
Future historians may well mark the date of April 6, 2014, as a watershed moment in the media’s epic bid to redefine itself in the digital age. For this was the day that Vox.com went live, heralding the golden dawn of a new journalistic epoch. Cofounded by Washington Post ...

Baristas of the Brave New Data State
Howard Schultz, the CEO of the Starbucks Corporation, was disturbed by what he saw around him: plywood-boarded windows, dilapidated homes, the spilling guts of suburban poverty in Ferguson, Missouri. Schultz toured the city the year after protests there captured nationwide ...

Big Bother Is Watching
One of the lesser-known casualties of Newt Gingrich’s ghoulish Contract with America was the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), a small government agency charged with producing impartial reports for Congress and other officials about issues of scientific and technological ...

Off Our Butts
The powers that be say anti-smoking legislation is for our own well-being. Nothing could be further from the truth. The attack on cigarette smoking does not improve the lives of those it claims to protect, be they the “self-destructive” workers who smoke or the moralizing ...

Power Outages
December 05, 2016
Black Power, like many things associated with the 1960s, blossomed, burst, and broke apart into fragments of meaning and intent that to this day suggest wildly different things to different people. It started out as a slogan. In short order, though, it morphed into a ...