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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

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 ...