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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

Father Worship
September 05, 2016
Two years before he was shot in the chest, and two centuries before he became an unlikely pop icon, Alexander Hamilton wondered how religion might be used to win elections. Suggesting that politics could not rely “merely on the reason of men,” the nation’s ...

Improv-da
September 05, 2016
Palantir Technologies, the multi-billion-dollar Palo Alto–based data-analysis software company founded in 2004 with CIA seed money, gives its new employees a reading list. One assignment is Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which feeds ...

Thin Blue Spin
Not long after Micah Johnson mortally gunned down five Dallas-area police officers and wounded nine others in July, the social media mavens at the Dallas Police Department tweeted out a picture of a man they identified as a suspect in the shooting rampage. They also asked their ...

Material Issue
September 05, 2016
Since the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, we have seen the resurgence of a Victorian economic ethos, tight-fisted and pusillanimous. Whether tricked out in the technocratic jargon of neoliberalism or the truculent bromides of the Tea Party, this outlook depends at ...

Displaced Deities
Modernism, Jackson Lears asserts, enthroned human consciousness and “drained the vitality from the rest of creation.” The elements of the natural world—rocks, trees, rivers, and nonhuman animals—came to be seen as inert, passive mechanisms, acting only in response to ...