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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

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 ...