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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Who’s the Shop Steward on Your Kickstarter?
The Baffler’s own Kickstarter campaign took place last spring, attracted 308 backers and $20,761. We raised our funding goal. For details, check out the graphic at the bottom of this essay. —The editors At least twice a week I get an email asking for support for a new ...

The Lying Game
March 03, 2014
On September 9, 2009, Congressman Joe Wilson, who had represented South Carolina’s Second District since 2001, shouted “YOU LIE!” at President Barack Obama while he was delivering a speech before a joint session of Congress to boost support for his then-foundering health ...

Face Value
Cable news ratings peak during an election season, and networks add as much political content as possible to capitalize on the nation’s always fleeting interest in the process. The demand for pundits increases along with that interest. I know because I’m one of them. In the ...

Dead End on Shakin’ Street
February 14, 2014
My hometown is vibrant. Its status as such is certified, official, stamped on both sides. There was a time, though, when it wasn’t, when my friends and I would laugh at Kansas City’s blandness: its harmless theater productions, its pretentious suburbs, its private country ...

Cash-and-Carry Aesthetics
February 13, 2014
For years now the art world has been unpredictable, fragmented, disorienting, like a hair-raising rollercoaster ride. The economic situation in the galleries and the auction houses reaches dizzying heights followed by equally bewildering depths. And new artists and art markets ...

The Joke’s on You
February 12, 2014
Among the hacks who staff our factories of conventional wisdom, evidence abounds that we are living in a golden age of political comedy. The New York Times nominates Jon Stewart, beloved host of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, as the “most trusted man in America.” His ...

Sit-Cons
On television, money imbues characters with honor or shame, dignity or recklessness, charity or malevolence. While the black hat vs. white hat moral absolutism that once dominated the small screen has slowly dissolved into an ethically ambiguous world of pure-intentioned, ...

Oh, the Pathos!
This spring, professional storyteller Mike Daisey was revealed to have fabricated key events in a segment for the public radio show This American Life. The broadcast, an adaptation of his one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, recounted his journey to the Foxconn ...

Accountants for Taste
February 09, 2014
In the fall of 2006, Philadelphia faced what looked like a cultural crisis. The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins’s dramatic 1875 painting of Philadelphia surgeon Samuel Gross operating on a man’s thigh before an audience of colleagues and students, went up for sale; local medical ...

Dilemmas of the Rentier Class
February 08, 2014
Washington, D.C., teems with many brands of delusion, but for true connoisseurs of the flight from consensual reality, there’s a special joy that comes with reading the Washington Post’s sober commentariat weigh in on the state of the national economy. For these wise yet ...

The Threshold of Joy
Margaret Fuller was thirty-three and suffering from migraines when she wrote “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women,” a manifesto on behalf of sexual equality, and saw it published in The Dial, the journal founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson whose editorship she ...