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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

A Thousand Points of Trite
So. You’ve dreamed up “a kinder, gender nation,” “a thousand points of light,” and “a shining City on a Hill”; written a wry memoir of your days as a Reagan/Bush speechwriter, with just enough skewering of the easy targets (Nancy, Don Regan) and ironic detachment ...

How Poetry Survives
Imagine that all the nationally circulated magazines and all the trade presses and all the university presses in the United States stopped publishing or reviewing poetry. New poetry in the United States would hardly feel the blow. But not because contemporary poetry is marginal ...

The Selling of Katie Roiphe
It was the beginning of the nineties and the New York Times needed a woman. Not just any woman, though. It needed a smart and sassy one. Someone who could buttress the paper’s sagging image. Someone who could catapult the Times to the forefront of the sexual politics debate. ...

L’affaire Holt
The shameful story spelled out in the following pages began innocently enough—armed with little else but a slightly clever premise for a catalogue of our books, we at Exact Change set off to make as big a splash as we could at the annual American Bookseller’s Association ...