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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

Making COIN
December 05, 2016
Eight years ago, as Washington was making the transition from the nightmare years of George W. Bush to the endless possibilities of Barack Obama, national security elites were transfixed by a military doctrine called counterinsurgency. The modern counterinsurgency faith stirred ...

Thin Skins and Missing Parents
December 05, 2016
“Will the left survive the millennials?” novelist Lionel Shriver recently asked readers of the New York Times opinion page. She posed the question in the midst of a kerfuffle set off by her keynote address at the Brisbane Writers Festival in September. Shriver devoted her ...

Called to Purchase
It was time for Mayor Stephen Reed to have a Come to Jesus moment. Well, another Come to Jesus moment, anyway. Staffers were tripping all over the second floor of Harrisburg’s city government building again one afternoon in the early 2000s; shipping bins had sprouted up like ...

Fables of Our Fathers
December 05, 2016
America’s World War II ancestor worship is one craze whose onset can be dated with precision. On January 11, 1993—that is, right before that draft-dodging, narcissistic boomer Bill Clinton’s first inaugural—Newsweek’s cover featured a vintage photo-graph of a World War ...

Fifty Years of Disquietude
December 05, 2016
The road from the capital to Acapulco was riddled with deadly switchbacks. Navigating the sharp turns left him just enough residual focus to daydream about his novel. Gabriel García Márquez was driving his family to its first vacation after long stretches of poverty. Ad work ...

Skopje, City On the Make
September 05, 2016
Citizens of Skopje have nicknamed Macedonia’s capital the “déjà vu city.” Visitors can instantly understand why. Everywhere former prime minister Nikola Gruevski—“Mr. Cut and Paste,” as his compatriots dubbed him—traveled on state visits, he would admire a ...