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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Disorganized Labor
Studies of African American poverty from the Moynihan Report to the work of sociologist William Julius Wilson have asserted that “when work disappears” from Black urban communities, so does the chastity of teenage girls, the work ethic of young men, and any hope of reversing ...

Ursus Wallstreetus
January 13, 2013
Last January, I got a call from Jim Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a Wall Street newsletter on the credit markets. Jim was a bit nervous that the dockers’ strike in Liverpool had attracted sympathy strikes, demonstrations, and other actions around the ...

The More Things Change . . .
January 13, 2013
Ten years ago, advocates of a revitalized labor movement heard our concerns echoed in the subtitle of Tom Geoghegan’s book, Which Side Are You On?: How to Be For Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back. Unions that had been at the center of the labor movement were shrinking in size ...

Confronting the Capitalist International
January 13, 2013
When she was 17 years old, Ana Alvarado fled the civil war in El Salvador for Los Angeles. Before long she was working as a maid at the luxurious New Otani Hotel, part of a Japanese chain owned by the Kajima Corporation, a transnational conglomerate whose main interests are in ...

What the Frick
January 12, 2013
You couldn’t help noticing the three prep school kids lounging outside the entrance to the Frick Museum at Fifth Avenue and 71st Street. It was a white-knuckle cold day, not yet spring, and they were wearing nothing but tweed jackets, khakis, and long mufflers. I was on my way ...

The Gaudy and Damned
January 12, 2013
Back in the days when I toiled for a media conglomerate, I would find in my mailbox once a month a slim magazine called Vitality. Festooned with time-saving tips and austere food intake regimens, Vitality was a lightning-rod for scorn among the staff. I often wondered what ...

The Gaudy and Damned
January 10, 2013
Somehow the pursuit of the American Dream is always most poignant in California. When it crashes here, it seems to do so with epochal fury. “California,” Joan Didion once wrote, “is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; ...

Pelf and Powder Blue
Sitcom Ellen is at an art gallery. For a reason known only to the TV show’s writers she’s brought her philistine pals with her, and they’re now capering doltishly around, making embarrassing remarks without any respect for the art on display. Ellen makes one last, ...

Revolution in Cliché-land
There is unrest in the empire of visual cliché. For years American purveyors of “stock photography” presided over a contented realm of jolly milkmen, smiling moms, and satisfied customers. Today, though, it’s all teenage temptresses and homelessness. What’s happened in ...

The Dustbin of Theory
January 10, 2013
Every age produces its own characteristic interpretation of history, and it seems entirely appropriate that in the America of the late twentieth century, ours should be the brainchild of a rock critic. England had its Macauley, France its Michelet—now America, a nation whose ...