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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

The People, No
To say so is of course a kind of apostasy from the true faith of a journalist in this country, but I am not a great admirer of H.L. Mencken, and will lay no wreath on his grave when his centenary is observed in September. Here and there his wit is coruscating, but usually it ...

The Mix-Tape and the Auteur
If the legends are to be believed, those film directors lucky enough to be crowned auteurs hold every element of the success of their movies in their profoundly artistic minds. And now, in our media-addled age of the indie-auteur, artistic creation is not only a function of a ...

King’s Row
August 02, 2013
People tell me the housing bubble has burst, but you wouldn’t know it in my neighborhood. I live in Washington in Mt. Pleasant, about two miles up from the White House. Known for its hippies and their group houses in the Sixties, Mt. Pleasant is dominated by yuppies and ...

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Michael R. Bloomberg
August 02, 2013
If you were a New Yorker, you probably went to sleep on the night of September 10, 2001, thinking that the most important thing you would do the next day would be to head to your local polling place and cast your vote in a mayoral primary. Your task was to choose the Democrat ...

Motor City Elegy
My father came to Detroit when he was 12 because his parents couldn’t feed him. It was the middle of the Depression, but there were jobs in Detroit—more than in rural Quebec, anyway—so he lived with an uncle who had one. When the war came he was drafted and made an ...

Journals of the Crisis Year
The above paragraph is excerpted from one of the most widely read texts to emerge from the financial crisis: the October 2008 farewell letter of a hedge fund manager named Andrew Lahde. The letter opens, “Dear Investor,” and closes with the words “goodbye and good ...

The Un-usable Past
When Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history back in 1989, he did so with mixed feelings. The good news, he thought, was the ideological triumph of free markets and of the political arrangement most suited to them. Even communists were talking about the importance of being ...

Indispensable Men
August 01, 2013
A year on from its brush with Armageddon, the financial services industry has resumed its reckless, self-serving ways. It isn’t hard to see why this has aroused simmering rage in normally complacent, pro-capitalist Main Street America. The budget commitments to salvaging the ...

The O-Word
The collapse of the world economy has rehabilitated a taboo phrase long banished to the fringes of political discourse in America: oligarchy. For generations the O-word has been used only by firebrands of the left or conspiratorial populists on the far right. So it came as a ...

Serfing the Net
We are living in an age of unprecedented creativity, they tell us. But there was a dark time not long ago, the story goes, when authors exercised dictatorial control over passive readers, movie studios foisted films on captive audiences, listeners were held hostage in their ...

What Does the Internet Look Like?
Last summer, Popular Science broke important ground in Internet visualization theory—an ongoing effort to describe what happens behind our computer screens, or, more accurately, beyond them, inside Ethernet cables and satellites flying around in the upper atmosphere. What does ...