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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

$$$$$$$: That’s Publishing!
At the Four Seasons restaurant in mid-town Manhattan, New York’s social and literary elite are mingling gently. There in the corner is Carl Bernstein and over there is Gloria Vanderbilt, Ivana Trump, Joan Didion, Robert Altman, Diane von Furstenberg, Gay Talese, and Bret ...

Apostles of the New Entrepreneur
Just before Christmas, Wal-mart workers arrive at their stores to find their boss grinning down at them from a video monitor. Sam Walton, utterly approachable (if only via satellite) in his trademark baseball cap, seems at first to want only to relate a few hunting anecdotes. ...

How May I Serve You?
If the business of America is business, as some blowhard once observed, then surely public relations is a close second. Indeed, while all governments spew propaganda at a prodigious rate, none can match our own in terms of conflating a genuinely reprehensible history ...

I Shall Be Released
Since soon after the stock market crash of 1929, United States securities law has required publicly-traded companies to evenly distribute to the public any news, good or bad, that may affect its stock price. Once, uniformed messengers armed with letters from companies and ...

In Dave Berman’s Tree
Have You Ever Been to Wheeling? (Have You Ever Had That Feeling?) Houses lean into the gold and brown hills. On the FM station someone sings “there on her face, a row of teeth he’ll replace.” Ten thousand souvenirs and not a single one worth having. A group of depressed ...

Free (Market) Verse
When James Merrill died ten years ago, the New York Times Magazine used the occasion to publish an obituary—not of the elegant poet himself but of the entire “poetry establishment.” Without Merrill’s inherited millions trickling down to fellow poets, the magazine ...

Milwaukee Bucks
January 24, 2013
In 1958 and 1959, in a dozen cities across the country, groups of businessmen huddled behind closed doors to hear a candy manufacturer’s panicked warning. America was in peril from communism, he disclosed, but not in the way that many supposed. The red hordes were not at the ...

William Burroughs: My Part in His Downfall
It was a savage summer for famous writers. They were either being rolled by their former wives, dissed by their former publishers, or busy getting dead in the heat of Kansas. We had seen this kind of thing before: F. Scott Fitzgerald never went to Kansas, but Zelda was the ...