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Baffler Archives: Salvos

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Vocabulary Lessons
Before, my Spanish wasn’t so bad; but it wasn’t so good, either. I could go a month in Honduras without speaking English and more or less communicate anything I wanted, if dubiously, although every once in a while I’d land in a pit where I didn’t know the words ...

A Nod to Ned Ludd
But to return to the Luddites. The danger is of the most imminent kind. I would hang about a score in the country, and send off ship loads to Botany Bay; and if there were no other means of checking the treasonable practices which are carried on in the Sunday newspapers, I would ...

On Wittgenstein’s Steps
Pigeons are crazy about public sculptures. For pigeons there’s no greater happiness than perching down on the head of a sculpture and taking a dump. Sculptures are for people to consecrate and pigeons to desecrate. The truth is that, for some reason, people are crazy about ...

Sartre for Sartre’s Sake
We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975 (New York Review Books, $24.95, edited by Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven) Jean-Paul Sartre’s chief political fidelity was not pledged to Communism, or Marxism, or even the amorphous ...

Smile, Buster!
The Ultimate Buster Keaton Collection Kino, Blu-ray box set, fourteen discs, $299.95 Early in 1917 Buster Keaton left the vaudeville act he’d been performing with his parents since he was a toddler. Joseph Keaton would toss his acrobatic young son over furniture, into ...

To Galt’s Gulch They Go
There was a time when Atlas would frown and the world of nations would tremble. He was as mighty as Zeus and as petulant as a teenager. His wrath was irresistible, and he was easily provoked. Badmouth him and he might just drop his burden and walk away. Elect someone he didn’t ...

Passions of the Meritocracy
April 11, 2014
Well, my goal tonight was twofold: first, to explain the changes we made in our Army in 2006; and, second, to give a speech that I’d like to think Irving Kristol might have enjoyed. —Gen. David Petraeus, May 6, 2010, speech to the American Enterprise Institute It was an ...

The State of Stretching
Amid all the regimens available in America’s soul-cure marketplace, the unlikely maneuver of folding yourself into a pretzel and standing on your head for five minutes is more popular than ever. Some twenty million people practice yoga in more than twenty-five thousand studios ...

Marketpiece Theater
In one way or another, last year’s frenzied election spectacle offered an array of occasions for our coverage-battered electorate to return to one basic question: “Where on Earth did they get that idea?” It didn’t matter, really, if what occasioned the weary refrain was ...

The Meme Hustler
While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our ...

Fifty Shades of Late Capitalism
While we are still recovering from the trauma that finance capital has inflicted on our public world, a late-capitalist fairy tale manages the pain in the more private and intimate reaches of the sexual daydream. In one version of the story, a wide-eyed mermaid cleverly ...