Skip to content

Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

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 ...