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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

Sacking Berlin
It’s easy to talk about lost Golden Ages in Berlin. Everyone has their own romanticized era: louche Weimar Berlin before the Nazis, Iggy and Bowie’s seventies Berlin before the Wall fell, or maybe the squatter’s Berlin of the good old nineties. So when people start ...

Twentieth Century Lite
Oh, that cyber-revolution! It’s turning out to be the long-awaited deliverer of American business from all the dreadful forces, riotous impulses, and malign social movements that have prevented its happy hegemony all these years. The “Third Wave,” philosopher-king Newt ...

Who Needs History When You Can Have Leaders
Success and how to achieve it. Try to imagine the vast amount of time and human energy wasted pondering this topic, the money people have spent on books, tapes and seminars that teach “success” like some sort of 12-step program. Of course, the form of success is hardly ...

Soft City: Chicago
More than any other part of the American metropolis, it is the mall and the shopping district that appear to offer power and freedom today. At the end of a day of work, stepping out of an office into a busy district, or at the beginning of some aimless Saturday having just hit ...

The Advertised Life
Lessons in Life Last spring, I wandered through “Lessons in Life,” a photography exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. As I gazed at the photographs, an unstated unifying theme of the show began to emerge: each work was either a comment on consumer culture or looked a ...