Skip to content

Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not
The congregation swooned as she bounded on stage, the prophet sealskin sleek in her black skinny ankle pants and black ballet flats, a lavalier microphone clipped to the V-neck of her black button-down sweater. “All right!! Let’s go!!” she exclaimed, throwing out her arms ...

All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go
In a jobs economy that has become something of a grim joke, nothing seems quite so bleak as the digital job seeker’s all-but-obligatory LinkedIn account. In the decade since the site launched publicly with a mission “to connect the world’s professionals to make them more ...

Street Legal
Published August 2, 2013. In the aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, and the paired 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, here’s what didn’t happen: whole cities ...

Good Enough for Government Work
When Sen. Jim DeMint, the upper chamber’s godfather of Tea Party nihilism, abruptly announced his retirement from his lawmaking career and his plans to take over as president of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, the consensus in Washington was that this was a ...

They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen
Try to conjure up the dullest, most vapid intellectual experience you can possibly imagine. A Matthew Perry film festival. A boxed set of Kenny G’s entire discography. Al Gore “in conversation” with Wolf Blitzer. Now imagine something worse. Far, far worse. Once you’ve ...

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 ...