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Baffler Archives: Salvos

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Apocalypse Soon
In the developed West, the projection of firepower and technological prowess has become so forcefully identified with the idea of progress itself that it makes a straightforward sort of sense to imagineer the intellectual progenitors of the modern liberal state as a diorama full ...

Town Hall on Terror
Here’s a lightly abridged transcript of a neighborhood forum that we sponsored at the Lilypad in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 22, on the subject of the rule of law and the war on terror—or was that the rule of terror and the war on law? We invited Kade Crockford of ...

Having Their Cake and Eating Ours Too
What are billionaires for? It’s time we sussed out a plausible answer to this question, as their numbers ratchet upward across the globe, impervious to the economic setbacks suffered by mere mortals, and their “good works” ooze across the fair land. The most recent count ...

There Goes the Neighborhood
On January 14, I approached the field house in Washington Park, the 150-year-old jewel of Chicago’s archipelago of green spaces, for the second of two public meetings to discuss the University of Chicago’s bid to host Barack Obama’s presidential library. The university was ...

Now Streaming: The Plague Years
When things are very American, they are as American as apple pie. Except violence. H. Rap Brown said violence “is as American as cherry pie,” not apple pie. Brown’s maxim makes us see violence as red and gelatinous, spooned from a can. But for Brown, in 1967, American ...

Weed, Whitewashed
Not long ago, a new billboard went up on Virgil Avenue near Fountain, to stand watch over LA’s hipster preserves of Los Feliz and Silver Lake—neighborhoods to the north and east of my own, the genre-defying East Hollywood. Nine billboards of varying immensity lend an outsize ...

More Titillated Than Thou
Peering out from a wire rack in a grocery store was a religious vision of sorts: a paperback romance novel that neatly summed up classic yearning, confining cultural norms, and the hazards of defiled purity. At the center of all this familiar masscult longing and inner turmoil ...

Motown Shakedown
A few months after he graduated from Wesleyan University in 2012, Max Nussenbaum landed a job at a tech startup in Detroit. Within a year, he and some friends had bought a run-down house. By the spring of 2014, he had a startup under his belt: Castle, an app for ...

A Study in Total Depravity
Elite higher education in America has long been a Veblen good—a commodity that obeys few, if any, conventional laws of economic activity. In some cases (chiefly among the children of the serene professional elders perusing the Sunday New York Times), the higher the sticker ...

Splurge and Purge
Forever 21 stands on the south side of Union Square in New York, just around the corner from my office. I see teenagers, working women, families, and dudes shopping for clothing there at all hours of the day, buying up floral maxi dresses, faux leather and shearling jackets, and ...