Academy Fight Song
Is higher education still a ticket to affluence?
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
Blood Drive
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 ...
Let Them Eat Dogma
Not so long ago, the lead theorists of America’s conservative revolution hymned it as a thing of unparalleled vitality and intellectual rigor. The Republicans ruled the policy world as “the party of ideas,” President George W. Bush famously pronounced, and all sorts of his ...
Poetry Slam
Some months ago, Facebook was all atwitter with outraged book lovers. A list of some of the finest works of literature had been posted, along with the following glove slap reportedly handed down from an esteemed British newspaper: “Apparently, The Guardian reckons most people ...
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
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
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 literature that came out of the Great Recession.
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 ...