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Baffler Archives: Salvos

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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 ...

Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic
Shepherd, show me how to go O’er the hillside steep, How to gather, how to sow,— How to feed Thy sheep. –Mary Baker Eddy Not long before The Atlantic’s parent company announced its swing into a profit-making business model despite operating in the most moribund ...

We Told You So
Like many Americans, I was doing everything I could to help elect Barack Obama. It wasn’t all that much—but as an economist in Texas, I had some authority on the thinking of former Senator Phil Gramm, John McCain’s chief economic adviser. I’d made the front page of the ...

Zen and the Art of Self-Satisfaction
September 03, 2013
Julia Cameron, the principal author of The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (with Mark Bryan, Putnam, 223 pages, $13.95 paperback), claims “to tap into the higher power that connects human creativity with the creative energies of the ...

Putting Creativity to Work
Ah, creativity. We’ve always known it was desirable stuff, good for kids and poets and so on, but in the last few years creativity has entered that exalted realm of sacred social concepts. Today it ranks with “competitiveness” and “excellence” as one of the ineffable ...

Atlas Finally Shrugged
The late Sixties and early Seventies were a tough time for the owners of American industry. The postwar recovery had peaked. Europe and Japan had rebuilt their industries and transformed themselves from hungry markets for American goods and capital into aggressive economic ...

Once More, with Actors
I am an American, Midwestern-born, and I have gone at American things. I have skinnydipped and snowmobiled, bowled with others and bowled alone. I know the lyrics to “It’s a Small World” by heart; I brighten at the sound of bat hitting ball; I have been known to frequent ...

Requiem for a Bureaucrat
August 20, 2013
On January 11, 1937, two weeks into the epic sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan, a young socialist named Victor Reuther arrived in a rickety sound car at GM’s Fisher Body Plant No. 2. GM had just turned off the plant’s heat—it was 16 degrees ...

Blood Drive
August 04, 2013
One of the first rules of book reviewing is that unless murder is involved, you can’t slam any book written by a guy who’s under indictment and just trying to make a few last bucks for his family before he goes to spend the next 36 months painting road signs. And that goes ...

Lost on Nelson Algren Avenue
Any good necrography should begin at the grave. Fifteen years ago I spent a summer in Sag Harbor, tending bar and snarking at specimens of the Nineties boom who crowded the American Hotel each night. The first rule of gentrification is the gauzing of the past, and so in ...