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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Pity, O God, the Republican
A balmy evening in Budapest, a Saturday in June 2008. My husband and I have just finished dinner at a sleek Euro bistro (with the faux-Magyar name of Menza) and are heading along Andrássy Avenue, the city’s Champs-Élysées. The sounds of a summer night in a Central ...

True Fakes on Location
The most glorious set in movie history stood derelict for a few years where Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards meet, attracting curiosity seekers and growing steadily more unsafe. It was finally torn down in 1919 or so, depending on which source you check. A frowsy clutch of stores ...

The Slippery Slopes
As historic sites go, Mont Pèlerin is a far cry from Normandy, Waterloo, or the shores of Tripoli. The town that became known as the birthplace for the wide-ranging revolution in economic and social thought now called neoliberalism is a stuffy little town in the stuffy little ...

Exit Planning
A reporter asked Pope Francis to name the single biggest evil in the world. Secularism? No. Abortion? Not even. Here’s what he said: “Youth unemployment—and the abandonment of the elderly.” OK, that’s two evils. But aren’t they really one thing? Unable to get a ...

Our Friends who Live Across the Sea
A bronze, life-size male figure carrying a suitcase mounts a massive set of stairs to a jetliner that does not exist. He is slightly hunched, frozen mid-step. Whatever the statue was initially intended to signify, today it is a metaphor for the six thousand people who now ...

Confession Booth
Last fall, I taught my very first college class—an essay-writing course for freshmen. I was excited, but wary of first-time-teacher pitfalls, and so I asked my professor friends for as much advice as possible. After extensive feedback, I attempted to design my syllabus in such ...

The Naked City
It was 1994, I was sixteen years old, and I was taking two trains each day to get to the remnants of a neighborhood Bostonians of a certain age still called “the Combat Zone”—the onetime red-light district, the site of my first job. At 29 Temple Place, the cheery managers ...

Birdies of America
How about ducks? They still exist! Have a look. One nice thing about ducks is that it’s the females that are called “ducks”; the males are “drakes.” In duck land the female is, for once, Simone de Beauvoir’s Absolute, the representative of the species, while the male ...

Delusion at the Gastropub
It takes a lot of high-capitalist pixie dust to turn the basics of subsistence into coveted luxuries. The brazen marketing of designer water at $5 per bottle, flown in from Fiji or the Alps—or better yet, filled from a local municipal tap—may have been the first red flag, ...

Knock Yourselves Out
From 2012 to 2015, one of our most reliable national punch lines was Bruce Jenner. Husband, then ex-husband, of Kardashian reality-show matriarch Kris Jenner, Bruce Jenner had not yet come out as a trans woman, meaning our only real hint of the change ahead came from distant ...