Skip to content

Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

McSploitation
January 15, 2013
Huddled in Chicago’s neon-scarred River North tourist district, Fadò Irish Pub desperately strains to pass for one of those quaint public houses common to postcards from the Old Sod. Its brightly painted façade, Celtic-lettered signage, and gimcrack-cluttered windows ...

A Funny Kind of Boosterism
First it was Chilean Alberto Fuguet, the author of Mala Onda (1991), a tale of adolescent satiety successful enough to travel northward to its alternative-spiritual birthplace and go into publication in the United States as Bad Vibes (1997). Then came Peruvian TV host Jaime ...

Rat Choice and Other Tastes
Perhaps the most annoying conceit of neoclassical economics is that it alone, among the social sciences, comprehends human behavior, and does so in a way that makes perfect sense to the man in the street. Sociologists and anthropologists may come up with more or less ...

New Consensus for Old
January 15, 2013
The prominent sociologist Herbert Gans had been writing about popular culture and its audiences for some twenty years when he published his 1974 book Popular Culture and High Culture, a 159-page summary of his thinking on the subject. The volume is now twenty-five years old, ...

The Guns of Santiago
January 14, 2013
8:30 a.m. Tuesday, September 11, 1973 The rising Santiago sun and the blossoming jacaranda made the Chilean morning glorious. As I stood in the yard of my friend Melvin’s suburban countryish house those twenty-five years ago, as I sucked the fragrant misty air into my lungs, ...

Remainder Table: Poe in Vietnam
I. Back when I lived in California, I used to travel to Orange County to shop for secondhand books. I followed the same routine each time I went. First, I would drive to the Book Baron at Ball and Magnolia Boulevard in Anaheim, home to about a million volumes. Then I would ...

Cordon Sanitaire
Remember roots-rock? The Long Ryders, Green On Red, and of course Jason and the Nashville Scorchers? Neither does anybody else. But if Tortoise can make Spirogyra hip to a new generation of people with disposable income, you know it’s only a matter of time before every ...

Color Me Middle
January 14, 2013
If there’s one thing that’s certain about us Americans, runs the national myth, it’s that we’re a democratic bunch. We’re almost universally middle class. Oh, sure, there are some smelly vagabonds wandering the streets of our big cities, a few illiterate hillbillies ...

Doing Good, Looking Marvelous
January 14, 2013
In case you haven’t heard, Big Govemment has been safely consigned to the dustbin of history and “the Era of Big Citizenship,” as President Clinton announced just on the heels of gutting our social safety net, has dawned. Yes, unlike other nations peopled with ...

Chapters of Eleven
An hour before closing time, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange hardly seems like a dignified institution at the epicenter of American finance: It’s more like a sports bar. Throngs of grownup frat-boy traders stare at numbers flashing on a gigantic screen. Moments of calm ...

Blood and Pancakes
January 14, 2013
We are speaking of the over-the-counter Illuminati, my friends; the purveyors of smokers and spaghetti dinners and all things in between. Recite their names three times quickly—Rotary! Kiwanis! Lions Club!—and you risk invoking a suburban bugaboo. Eek! Look there! Do you ...

The Gaudy and Damned
Just off Highway 126 in Ventura County, California lies the town of Piru. Tucked among the orange groves and foothills of the Santa Clara valley, it is a strikingly well-preserved small town, the kind of place urban theorists dream about and on which towns like Disney’s ...