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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

No Such Cuck
A few months ago, the media class became fixated on a vulgar little portmanteau. Talking heads of every political orientation served up their piping hot takes on what Dave Weigel at the Washington Post christened “the conservative insult of the month”: cuckservative. Just as ...

Punk Crock
For a movement that famously proclaimed there was no future, punk rock has had a remarkably durable half-life. Forty years after Television’s legendary residency at CBGB, the world is awash in punk. In the last twenty months, former Village Voice rock critic and punk champion ...

A Not-So-Golden State
The Library of America is to literature what Cooperstown is to baseball—a sort of Valhalla created to immortalize this country’s finest writers. And like the storied traditions of our national pastime, the handsome black-jacketed volumes of the series summon forth a ...

The Dialectic of Love and Authority
If irony alerts had been invented before 1977, they might have saved Christopher Lasch a lot of grief. The title of his controversial book Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged misled many of his critics. Lasch was widely taken to mean that a haven is what the family ...

Marching in Place
November 02, 2015
As plans were under way in Washington early this fall for the twentieth anniversary commemoration of the Million Man March—a curious kind of political revival meeting set for the National Mall in October—one could not help but notice: there wasn’t nearly as much chatter ...

Better Management Through Belles Lettres
November 02, 2015
At six o’clock on a Wednesday evening last spring, dozens of students at Columbia Business School jostled into William C. Warren Hall to learn how the study of literature might prepare them for executive success. They were there to attend “Leadership Through Fiction,” a ...

Use It and Abuse It
October 12, 2015
Futile wars may inspire worthy books, after the fact. Unfortunately the “global war on terror” is both futile and perpetual, leaving no practical room for experience-chastened hindsight. Much like the mobbed-up system of government contracting and lobbying kickbacks, the ...

The Bully’s Pulpit
In late February and early March 1991, during the first Gulf War, U.S. forces bombed, shelled, and otherwise set fire to thousands of young Iraqi men who were trying to flee Kuwait. There were a series of such incidents—the “Highway of Death,” “Highway 8,” the ...

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 ...