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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Literature and Democracy
One of the most enduring stereotypes stuck in the heads of citizens of Western democracies is the idea that people in the former Communist systems were mere numbers deprived of individual freedom. Now that the Communist countries have been shattered like cheap cups, it is time ...

The Bubble That Tony Built
January 23, 2013
If you visit London and follow the Thames a few miles east of the city center, you will see a giant bubble as worthless and discredited as the bubble puffed up not long ago in the investment banks upstream. Britain’s Millennium Dome is now as good a reminder of the facile ...

Pop Goes the Weasel
January 23, 2013
There’s a blurb from the New York Times on the cover of the paperback edition of James Patterson’s Violets Are Blue, proclaiming Patterson to be “one of America’s most influential authors.” Like many such testimonials, the blurb is both edited and ...

Facts on the Ground
January 23, 2013
On the morning of January 7, Morton Walker went, as he often does, to the Chicago Bee Branch Public Library at 36th and State Street, across from the Stateway Gardens public housing development. He and a friend, Mike Fuller, were walking on State Street when an unmarked police ...

In Memoriam: HLM
Henry Louis Mencken was the greatest American journalist of the last century and possibly the best writer of American English ever. He was also an asshole, and it is for the latter quality that we are doomed to remember him, if we remember him at all. Ask an educated layperson ...

Cordon Sanitaire
Rock and the Backlash The Los Angeles Coliseum, October 9, 1981, nearly a year after Ronald Reagan’s election. The Rolling Stones are touring behind the dull Tattoo You album. Their performances are memorable mainly for the way Mick Jagger, wearing football pants, is hoisted ...

My Love is a Free Free Market
January 18, 2013
Russell Roberts is that rare bird of the dismal science, the public economist. While his colleagues glory in mathematical obscurantism, shrouding even the most patent of observations in indecipherable formulae, Roberts sings hosanna in low-church tones to the democratic ...

Cop Shoot Cop
January 18, 2013
Somewhere in the jangled consciousness of many American law enforcement officials last September 11 must have been the sudden, literary realization of the sheer waste and folly of our twenty-year war on drugs. Curiously, though, the most persuasive exposition of this theme ...

Charles the Excellent
January 18, 2013
It was late into the second dinner service; smartly dressed plates of venison and salmon and heirloom cabbage still marched out the kitchen’s swinging doors with brio. But the world-famous chef had pulled me away. He led me to a dimly lit nook and, summoning up two glasses ...

Build It and They Will Pay
In 1997, the Basque city of Bilbao ceased simply to be a depressed industrial town with a terrorism problem and became synonymous with a miraculous new building, architect Frank Gehry’s Spanish outpost of the Guggenheim Museum. This glittering edifice, clad in titanium ...

Universal 571
January 18, 2013
There are not many opportunities for product placement in World War II movies, Coke bottles excepted. Universal Pictures found a way around this obstacle by casting Jon Bon Jovi in its big-budget summer 2000 submarine adventure U-571 at the same time that Island Records (a ...

What About Me?
Anyone who’s spent time at a university knows what a deeply schizophrenic institution it is. Stridently oppositional and dedicated to cutting-edge research, American universities are also slow moving, riddled with annoying rules, conservatories of the past. Berkeley may have ...