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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Miracle on Ice
January 10, 2013
Spiritual enrichment of the non-monastic sort comes in all variety of human packages these days, from the mud-streaked weekend shamans who pass “talking sticks” to the readers who faithfully run up the best-selling statistics for The Celestine Prophecy. I quickly find ...

The Cultural Miracle
January 10, 2013
Have you heard? The “affluent society” is over! Virtually every respectable organ of public opinion has now officially acknowledged its demise: the warm old world of general prosperity is gone forever; poverty and economic insecurity have made a triumphant comeback; the ...

A Machine for Forgetting
January 10, 2013
One wall of the office lobby of the J. C. Nichols Company, the Kansas City real estate firm, is decorated with an enormous cartoon map of the famous Country Club District, the company’s greatest accomplishment and the nation’s first fully restricted, fully-planned ...

Local Color™
January 10, 2013
In the early 1980s, wracked by the ennui of yet another high-priced Manhattan veal-and-radicchio dinner, Esquire columnist John Berendt turned his eye to the South and began spending his disposable income on supersaver fares to Savannah, Georgia, instead. Captivated by the ...

Carter’s March
January 10, 2013
Atlanta is the quintessentially amnesiac American city. Confronted by unpleasant truths, its post-war (and there has only been one War down there) founding heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, would say, “I can’t think about now, I’ll think about it tomorrow”—which pretty ...

Ghosts
January 09, 2013
I’m living in Athens, Georgia, thinking about ghosts and the continuity of time. It’s hard to be in this town without feeling a kind of historical gravity pulling at your shoes. Around every corner, vestiges of the past are waiting: a civil war that erupted more than a ...

Dirty Talk
January 09, 2013
Two factors have made dirty talk one of the most distinguishing features of sex in the nineties, second only to the condom, a device with which dirty talk shares a number of similarities as a requisite prop of safe sex. Voices can also function as condoms, as aids to the ...

Screw Capital of the World
January 09, 2013
Rooting Out the Reds On the afternoon of January 2, 1920, police detectives, sheriff’s deputies, army intelligence operatives, and federal agents swept through the factories, union halls, and homes of Rockford, Illinois, to conduct the largest mass arrest in the city’s ...

Revolt of the Nice
January 07, 2013
With its lonely office towers standing sentinel on the side of I-94, Hoffman Estates, Ill., seemed like the last outpost of activity before the billboard-dotted stretch of farmland that eventually becomes Wisconsin. It was a familiar sight for anyone driving north of Chicago. ...

Quality of Whose Life?
It’s a sign of the mean times. Sandwiched between a cigarette ad that incongruously promises to make us “Alive with Pleasure” and another for MD T-U-S-C-H, a doctor—of sorts—who eradicates hemorrhoids with the painless swish of a laser scalpel, is The Sign. ...

Just Deserts
January 07, 2013
Last year a beautiful young woman was shot to death in a Toronto cheesecake palace. It was one of those restaurants which boasts one hundred different kinds of desserts, eighteen varieties of coffees, and is called “The Cake Lady,” “Calories,” or “Have Your Cake and ...