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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

The Billionaires’ Fantasia
Expect pop culture to define your politics, and you’ll probably get the politics you deserve. Hip-hop music may give you an outlet to vent joy and rage, but it’s not going to improve poor or outdated public schools. Fifty Shades of Grey may magnify your bedroom repertoire, ...

Hoard d’Oeuvres
When you’ve got the big house, and you’re driving a Jaguar, what differentiates you from every asshole dentist in the Valley? Art was a way for Eli to distinguish himself. —Shelley De Angelus, Eli Broad’s former curator Art collecting is the most esteemed form of ...

Play, Dammit!
The vigorous exhortation to “play” now haunts every corner of our culture. Typically issued as an imperative along with words like breathe and meditate and dance and celebrate, the word play, in its catchall generic form, has a curious way of repelling the senses, conjuring ...

Rage Against the Machines
After Adam Lanza gunned down twenty children, six staff members, and himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School in late 2012, authorities began the kind of forensic investigation reserved for airplane crashes and sites of murderous terrorism. The details of Lanza’s life become ...

Neoliberalism, the Revolution in Reverse
By any reasonable measure, the neoliberal dream lies in tatters. In 2008 poorly regulated financial markets yielded a world-historic financial collapse. One generation, weaned on reveries of home ownership as the coveted badge of economic independence and old-fashioned American ...

Deal Me Out
The New York Times, as everybody knows, is the premier source of authoritative journalism in the world’s most powerful formal democracy. Among the paper’s storied achievements are its courageous, pathbreaking coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the release of ...

Feminism for Them?
To those casually acquainted with the bad-boy bohemianism of Floyd Dell, the literary radical and “prose laureate of Greenwich Village” may seem an example of the idealist who is better at theory than at practice—like Thomas Jefferson on slavery. Or, in feminist terms, he ...

Tom Clancy, Military Man
Word of Tom Clancy’s passing in October reached me at a local gym. Peddling away on an elliptical trainer, I welcomed the distraction of this “breaking news” story as it swept across a bank of video monitors suspended above the cardio machines. On cable networks and local ...

Decently Downward
Books Discussed John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra (New York: Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2013; first published 1934). John O’Hara, BUtterfield 8 (New York: Penguin Classics, 2013; first published 1935). John O’Hara, Ten North Frederick (New York: Penguin Classics, ...

How Sweet Is It?
Isuppose you’re not entirely responsible for your obituary notices. When Albert Hirschman died in December 2012, the time-servers leaped in to claim his legacy, from Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker to Cass Sunstein in the New York Review of Books to the ...