The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Are We Hungry Yet? Karen Kwiatkowski Bulldozing hundreds of established olive trees  last week, and  thousands since 1967 , and  unleashing feral pigs  to destroy Palestinian fields and gardens are parts of Israel’s war on agriculture and the environment. These tactics are important to Israel’s national security project. A country has a right to defend itself, after all. Targeting food and the ability to grow and produce food to defeat an enemy, as well as for domestic population control, is historically typical state methodology. North American bison were all but eliminated in order to drive native Americans off their lands and hunting grounds. We watch historical dramas like Downton Abbey and marvel at how food defines and separates class, liberty and power. Americans, as tenants of empires on the cusp of collapse will do, obsess over food, and their health. Simultaneously the people who will build the new republics that will inherit this continent are study...

  Your call is important to us... The effectual truth of AI Matthew B. Crawford Over the last several years, I realized I was driving around town a lot to take care of little tasks that, in principle, could be done on the telephone, or on the web portal of some business or government entity. The frustrations of entering into that Kafkaesque world of chatbots that are “here to help,” or phone menus that seem imported from some generic template, are such that it is worth taking an hour to drive to the CVS pharmacy, or the DMV, or the UPS store, or some medical practice, and collar a human being. Usually they are able to solve my problem in short order. And increasingly, it seems, they are able to do so because they have some secret trap door that allows them to bypass the public-facing systems that I have to interact with. In the year of our Lord 2025, getting things done often requires finding, not the recent hire who just reads through the prompts on his screen and is trapped in th...