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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

Fire Sale
January 07, 2013
From: Robert Fiore To: Richard Riordan Re: Opportunity Knocking Well, your honor, I can imagine your chagrin. Los Angeles having a team stolen by St. Louis—why, it’s like Belgium invading Germany. It’s a serious blow to our prestige, even if the Rams did hare off to Orange ...

Lotteryville, USA
What would you do if you won a million dollars? Forget the revolution; this is your ticket to the Kingdom of Freedom. No matter how many hours you log in at a fast-food restaurant or behind a secretary’s desk, it’s unlikely you’ll ever save enough to buy a house or take a ...

Sweet Portable Lifestyle
January 07, 2013
In Our City You Can Rollerblade Near Water I like my dinners ethnic, my coffee latté, my gossip salacious, and my conversation wired. Not a lot to ask, you might think, but difficult to know where to find in an unfamiliar city—if one doesn’t know where to look. Fortunately, ...

Forty-Two Pickup
January 07, 2013
The headline on the full-page newspaper ad reads, “Times Square: The greatest retail opportunity in New York at the Crossroads of the World.” The ads text gushes over the “80,000 square feet of prime retail space now available on New York’s most exciting four ...

Three Scenes from a Bull Market
January 04, 2013
Every Friday evening, a rumpled thirtyish young man in a badly-fitting suit jacket dispenses stock picks on CNNfn. He’s a columnist for Worth magazine, and publisher of a successful financial-advice newsletter. No surprises there—except to veterans of the Chicago rock ...