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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Predator Drone
What Americans call “track suits” and “tank tops” the British call “shell suits” and “string vests.” These terms are important to keep in mind in the case of Jimmy Savile, because his typical outfit consisted of a garish shell suit over a matching string vest. ...

The United Sades of America
Not long after I took refuge from the academy to work in the policy centers of Washington, I visited one of D.C.’s landmark bookstores, Politics and Prose—a literary venue known, as its name suggests, for furnishing customers with the conceit that they’re browsing and ...

You Didn’t Build America
March 17, 2014
It’s not clear that the History Channel “does” history any longer. Its recent, widely watched dramatization of the Bible proved yet again that the search for ratings has driven the channel to diversify far beyond its initial brand. Anxious to shed the “Hitler Channel” ...

To the Precinct Station
There is a scene I always recall when I try to remember the exhilarating effect that Occupy Wall Street had on me when it was first getting going. I was on a subway train in Washington, D.C., reading an article about the protests in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. It was three years ...

Can’t Stop Believing
I. Politicians are by definition dishonest. All politicians lie. But many observers of American politics agree that over the last few years, there has been something of a qualitative change in the magnitude of political dishonesty. In certain party precincts, at least, there ...

Come On, Feel the Buzz
Last June, Joe Williams, a reporter for the political newspaper and web news site Politico, said on Martin Bashir’s MSNBC talk show that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney appeared comfortable only around white people. Conservative websites trawled through ...

High Church Hustle
Crisis is the stock-in-trade of the news-gathering business. Even in its present conglomerated state, American journalism lives or dies for scoops. In this competitive climate, you should be able to count on any news organization to report a world-shaking calamity in its ...

Oh, the Irony!
In the long-ago time of the nineties, tech markets boomed and day traders roamed the far horizon. Neoliberal trade policies flattened the globe; centrist Third Way statesmen rolled up budget surpluses and doled out tax cuts. The pop-cultural soundtrack to this cheerful abundance ...

The Missionary Position
Most critics have regarded Ridley Scott’s Prometheus in much the same way that Arthur Miller probably thought of Marilyn Monroe—gorgeous, but intellectually way out of her depth. No one denies the film’s visual glory, which begins the moment a giant chalk-white alien ...

Cities of Night
In 2009, the American economist Paul Romer took to the prestigious forum of the TED Talks (that would be “technology, entertainment, design,” for you unfortunate creative-class have-nots) to explain how to solve world poverty. Where old-economy governments once sowed ...

Anything for the Libor Boys
On a Tuesday evening last July, I was walking south across the Thames over the Millennium Bridge. The entrance to the Tate Modern was blocked off with police tape, and a blue tarp was spread across the ground. Under it was the corpse of someone who’d jumped from the members’ ...

Call of the Wild
After so many decades spent languishing in the shadows of depopulation and deindustrialization, Detroit is finally ready for its close-up. It’s become one of the most filmed places on earth, a tableau, in the words of a Time magazine photo essay, of “beautiful, horrible ...