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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Party of None
February 06, 2014
Barack Obama’s personal journey begins, and it is instantly made meaningless. Sometime in the first half of 1966, Obama’s stepfather was mysteriously forced to return to Indonesia from grad school in Hawaii. Lolo Soetoro went home to a long episode of political violence, the ...

Adam Wheeler Went to Harvard
February 05, 2014
On December 23, 2011, the dons of Harvard University finally got to see Adam Wheeler sentenced to a year in prison. Wheeler, a twenty-five-year-old whom they admitted in 2007 on the strength of an academic record he’d fabricated out of thin air, had been caught again—and ...

Billionaire Ball
February 04, 2014
Austin, Texas, where I live, brands itself as “The Live Music Capital of the World.” And at times, you can look on the heavy concentration of local musicians and the buzz of the lines streaming out of downtown clubs and believe that the city’s economy is based on a ...

Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images
An ad-agency savant is known for composing inspired campaigns on the fly. After work hours, bouts of heavy drinking alternate with bedding extramarital partners who are left begging for more. Then this world-by-the-gonads member of the creative class heads home and puts the ...

Too Smart to Fail
January 11, 2014
The “sound” banker, alas! is not one who sees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows so that no one can really blame him.            –John Maynard Keynes In the twelve ...

I Was a Teenage Gramlich
January 10, 2014
I can’t say I ever intended from a young age to spend my eighteenth year mastering Washington Consensus–era monetary policy to recite in stuttering, rote cliché before a panel of mildly curious economic policymakers who filled out the payroll at Alan Greenspan’s Randian ...

Ronald Reagan’s Imaginary Bridges
When Ronald Reagan entered politics in the sixties, most observers judged him a joke. When Reagan announced he was running for the Republican nomination for California governor in 1966, the Washington Star described the “air of furtive jubilation down at Lassie for Governor ...

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
January 08, 2014
A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those ...

Future Schlock
January 07, 2014
If there is one beacon in the landscape of American industrial decline, it’s the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Or so it seems to the science and business reporters who regularly troop through its doors for their “Ten Breakthroughs That Will Change ...

Revolt of the Gadgets
It’s a sweltering midsummer afternoon in Ismailiya, a city of 700,000 people that lies on the west bank of the Suez Canal halfway between Port Said to the north and the city of Suez in the south. Two hundred striking workers, some dressed in company coveralls, rally at a ...

Water World
January 05, 2014
Here’s a little-noted quirk of our literary history, unlikely to turn up on the Trivial Pursuit board: the first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Ernest Poole, devoted much of his writing career to cheering on the demise of capitalism. Poole won the prize for ...

The Animal Cure
Encounters with lions, mountain goats, grizzly bears, dolphins, and whales are not least among the exotic experiences offered by the tourism industry. The attractions are obvious: a chance to be outdoors in stunning scenery, to see creatures you may have known only as ...