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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Call Me Popcorn
Popcorn Report by Faith Popcorn, Doubleday, 226 pages America is a consumer culture, and when we change what we buy—and how we buy it—we’ll change who we are. Someday (soon) children will be able to communicate through their Nintendos to other children all over the planet. ...

Everything I Don’t Need
I used to dislike the Wedding Present; they were the sort of band that inspired not just admiration but FANDOM in others. Fandom’s like pot-smoking: a group of people sit in a room, intensely absorbed in a holy, marvelous object that displays nothing but repetition and a ...

Firing the Cannon
You know, Ben Franklin was the one who really started it. His relentlessly folksy “Almanacks” and his calculating “Autobiography” made him the ready midwife in the birthing of the venerable American practice of cynically manipulating the terms of public discussion to ...

Hannabarbildungsroman
I When public television aired Ken Burns’s ninety-part series on the Civil War, eggheads tripped over each other to proclaim this soft-spoken young writer as the American Homer, the architect of a Yankee national epic. The series was more than just good television; it was the ...

The PowerPoint Potboiler
Scan the kiosks of any airport bookseller and you’re sure to see the management manifesto du jour jammed against the latest techno (or psycho, political, or crime) thriller. The pulp purveyors know the tastes of the business class well: if they’re not looking for the killer ...

Shrill and Shriller
January 01, 2003
As a publishing trend, the New Economy didn’t survive the stock market collapse. But the politics of the bubble are more popular with book-buyers today than ever. Some changes have occurred, of course: the bestselling books of the nineties swaggered with optimism. They ...

Down and Out in the Red Zone
December 26, 2002
“Maybe no Super Bowl will ever be as important as No. XXXVI,” thundered an editorial in New Orleans magazine last February, “because this one is about national confidence.” And so it was. Super Bowl XXXVI was to be played only five months after the ...