The pews are emptying virtually everywhere in the higher-income world. The Catholic Church is divided and enmeshed in scandal, unable to prevent even historically cleric-dominated Ireland from liberalizing abortion. read more »
Silicon Valley
As the Old Faiths Collapse, the Greens, Social Justice Warriors, and Techno-Futurists Aim to Fill the Void
- Login to post comments
To Make the Internet Great Again, Trump Must Smash Facebook and Its Tech Oligarch Friends
Even as many Americans look with horror on the authoritarian blusterer in the White House, we are slowly succumbing to a more pernicious, less obvious and far more lasting tech oligarchy gaining ever more control over our economy, culture and politics.
“We are certainly looking at” bringing antitrust cases against Amazon, Facebook and Google,” Trump said in an interview just before the election, adding that he’s had “so many people” warning him about their overwhelming power. read more »
Autonomous Cars Are Our Real Future
Long a hotbed of new technologies, California insists on seeing its transit future in the rear mirror. Rather than use innovative approaches to getting people around and to work, our state insists on spending billions on early 20th century technology such as streetcars and light rail that have diminishing relevance to our actual lives. read more »
- Login to post comments
The Mines
There’s a literary trope in which an ambitious young man goes to work in the mines for a few years to earn an income with which to go back home. In the US it’s bundled into narratives of the Wild West (where incomes were very high until well into the 20th century), but it also exists elsewhere. For example, in The House of the Spirits, the deuterotagonist (who owns an unprofitable hacienda) works in the mines for a few years to earn enough money to ask to marry a society woman. read more »
- Login to post comments
San Francisco Is Eating New York
A lot has been written about how the internet undermined and destroyed media. What we are seeing today may be the more important story, however, which is the tech industry is explicitly buying out the media, particular culture making elite media institutions. read more »
- Login to post comments
“Middle America” in America’s Urban Century
In the late 1990s and the early Aughts, when the last Gen Xers and the first Millennials were launching into their adult lives, “Urban America” was a very different place. On many fronts, the choices young ambitious graduates had were fast becoming limitless, save on one key front: the cities where they could reasonably want to live. read more »
- Login to post comments
America Is Moving Toward An Oligarchical Socialism
Where do we go after Trump? This question becomes more pertinent as the soap opera administration seeks its own dramatic demise. Yet before they can seize power from the president and his now subservient party, the Democrats need to agree on what will replace Trumpism. read more »
- Login to post comments
The Unbearable Sameness of Cities
The person who sent me Orianna Schwindt’s New York magazine piece on the “unbearable sameness of cities” asked if I had written it under a pen name. Indeed, she hits so many of my themes about American cities: read more »
Food Porn
What’s this now? A few acres of suburban gardens? Yes. And no. It’s the mini farm adjacent to The French Laundry in California’s Napa Valley. Local. Organic. Seasonal. It’s the full expression of a particular trend in foodie culture. It’s strange to see so ordinary a thing – veggies growing in a suburban plot – elevated to near monastic tidiness. It’s illegal to grow food on the front lawn in many places these days, either by municipal regulation or private home owners association bylaws. Even where it is legal, most people simply don’t do it. Food is cheap. Gardening is a lot of work. Why bother? read more »
- Login to post comments
‘Chinafornia’ And Global Trade In Age Of Trump
One of the last regions settled en masse by Europeans, California’s trajectory long has been linked to its partners across the Pacific. Yet these ties could be deeply impacted by President Trump’s immigration and trade policies, as well as resulting blowback by the authoritarian regime in Beijing. read more »
- Login to post comments