Demographics

Flyover Companies are Teaching Immigrants the Language of Success

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Cambria and Taziki’s Mediterranean Cafes are among smaller companies in Flyover Country that have joined some of our largest corporate citizens, including Walmart and Target, in recognizing a truth that is becoming increasingly important to our economy: The more that legal immigrants can be assimilated by learning English, the more valuable they will be as employees – and the more fulfilled as Americans.  read more »

Joe Biden's Class War

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Joe Biden may present himself as a ‘working-class hero’, a claim reiterated recently in the leftist American Prospect, but increasingly America’s workers are showing signs not of common cause but disquiet.  read more »

The New Face of Autocracy

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A former Facebook employee hailed by the media as a whistleblower testified this week on Capitol Hill about the social media giant's algorithm, and how it harms children and democracy.  read more »

Sustainable Suburbia

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Visionary images of resilient cities that save the US, or even the world, from climate change. Of downtowns transformed by technology into smart ecotopias. Of urban oases that sprout from scratch in the deserts of the Southwest or the Middle East or Mars.  read more »

The Great Office Refusal

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The pandemic has cut a swath through our sense of normalcy, but as has been the case throughout history, a disastrous plague also brings opportunities to reshape and even improve society. COVID-19 provides the threat of greater economic concentration, but also a unique chance to recast our geography, expand the realm of the middle class, boost social equity, and develop better ways to create sustainable communities.  read more »

The COVID Class War: The Obedient Online Educated vs. The IRL Resistance

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A new class conflict is emerging across the world. You can see its face in the mass protests over COVID-19 restrictions from Paris, Berlin and London to southern California and Melbourne.  read more »

This Might Be a Good Time for Creative Zoning

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No matter what else it may have already caused and/or will continue to cause in the coming future, one thing that we know for sure is that the COVID pandemic has done is alter how people will approach land use planning and development issues in the coming years, possibly even decades.  read more »

How the 'Empty Quarter' Became America’s Great Success Story

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In 1981, Washington Post journalist Joel Garreau attempted to understand the many subcultures of America by examining in detail the differences between different states. He came away unsatisfied, and the ultimate result of this dissatisfaction was an influential book, The Nine Nations of North America. In it, he ignored these often-arbitrary state boundaries and divided America into nine regional “nations” that he argued corresponded more with cultural, socio-economic and demographic realities.   read more »

Never Going Back

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For months, corporate hegemons, real estate brokers and their media acolytes have insisted that a return to “normalcy,” that is, to the office, was imminent.  read more »

Amid Airline Re-Set, Ensure We're Flown Into — Not Over

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Amid the ups and downs of the post-Covid airline business, one disturbing constant has settled over the ever-changing route maps: In Flyover Country, we’re still in danger of losing many of our aeronautic lifelines to one another and to the rest of the country and the world. Among other effects, countering that problem will be a big boon to private aviation.  read more »