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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

I’ve Seen the Future, and It’s a Sony
September 23, 2012
I figure it’s my duty. In earlier times, in other places, I would have consulted the tribal elders, heard the debates at the amphitheater, or gone to the town meeting. But as a good citizen of the overdeveloped world living in the dawn of the age of corporate feudalism, I ...

The Killer App
September 23, 2012
The Gateway to the Consumer Earlier this year, some sixty slathering publishing would-bes jammed the upstairs of a brew pub in San Francisco’s SOMA district to hear the fifth in a series of “soirées” sponsored by the San Francisco writer’s guild. The soirée ...

Dark Age
September 23, 2012
I. Wealth Against Commonwealth Revisited In the United States, where political “change” means further enriching the already wealthy, and where political “dialogue” is an elaborate charade that excludes dangerous and difficult topics from public consideration, one must ...

The Nostalgia Gap
September 22, 2012
There is something unsettling about the pattern of 1970s nostalgia which has afflicted “twentysomething” thinking over the last several years, something beyond the immediate banality of an entire generation reveling in the luminescent wash of The Brady Bunch and the ...

Back in Black on the Beaten Path
September 22, 2012
So you’ve just completed the inevitable arc from derision to interest to all-out consumer craving over bell-bottoms, and now a new, or rather, a renewed trend has reared up along the ever-jagged cutting edge. And worse, this latest expression of the herd—oops, ...