The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Marfa mirage A “trust fund science experiment” in the desert looks glamorous on Instagram — but what happens when collapse comes? How will the artists, actors, and hipsters manage when hard times come? Marfa, Texas has always been a little surreal, but after the Collapse Life team spent the summer here watching the rhythms of this town, surreal feels like only half the story. Once a dusty ranching and railroad town, it was transformed in the 1970s when a minimalist artist named Donald Judd decamped here, turning empty warehouses into art installations and drawing a global creative class to the middle of nowhere. Now, the town is dotted with the kinds of businesses you’d expect to see in a New England college town and not a desert outpost: a pet store, a gourmet grocer, a candy shop, art galleries, a couple of restaurants, and some obligatory souvenir stores. Most of these businesses are open no more than three days a week. One gallery even proudly declares its schedule as: “H...

  We're all Epsteins now Our national dishonor is the result of our everyday choices. Kalihi Valley Druid Not everyone is so fortunate. With all the black-pillers gloating about at the moment it's difficult to admit that I had begun entertain elevated hopes for the Trump administration, but for the sake of honesty this isn't the first time Lucy pulled the football on me. The current chain of scandals surrounding the cover up of the Epstein client list brings back some serious Deja Vu from the years when I held my nose and voted for Obama, only to experience serious buyers remorse once he named Tim Geithner as the Secretary of the Treasury. Anyone who had been paying attention back then knew what was coming next: a massive cull of the middle/working classes while the Wall Street criminals ran around with wheelbarrows scooping up all the free helicopter money. This resulted in a flare-up of anti-bankster sentiment from the movement known as Occupy Wall Street, but that was hi...

  The Class of 2026 AI is doing to the universities what Gutenberg did to the monasteries John Carter Caspar David Friedrich,  Monastery Graveyard in the Snow By the late middle ages monasteries were spectacularly wealthy. They were immune from taxation, and possessed vast land holdings thanks to generous donations made over the centuries by nobles looking to assure themselves a comfortable place in the afterlife. Many of them performed economic functions, such as brewing beer or providing financial services; some performed charitable functions, distributing alms to the poor or operating hospitals; some performed spiritual functions, such as hosting holy relics or maintaining elaborate ritual vigils to intercede with God on behalf of the people. But their primary utility, from the perspective of the wider society, was as repositories, preservers, and disseminators of knowledge. Their  scriptoria  ensured that books were copied from one generation to the next, prevent...