The Post-Partisan Emporium

  American Pravda: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in San Bernardino  RON UNZ Being a college town, Palo Alto once offered a multitude of excellent new and used bookstores, perhaps as many as a dozen or so. But the rise of Amazon produced a great extinction in that business sector, and I think only two now survive, probably still more than for most towns of comparable size. Amazon and its rivals have obviously become hugely beneficial book-buying resources that I frequently use, but they fail to offer the benefit of randomly browsing shelves and occasionally stumbling across something serendipitous. So I regularly stop by the monthly used book sale put on by Friends of the Palo Alto Library, whose offerings are also very attractively priced, with good quality paperbacks often going for as little as a quarter. While browsing that sale a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a hardcover copy of  Newsroom Confidential , a short 2022 insider account of mainstream journalism by...

  Maybe We're Closer to "You'll Own Nothing" Than We Realize Maybe we should rephrase the slogan to "you'll appear to own things you don't actually control and be happy." The World Economic Forum's catchphrase  you'll own nothing and be happy  was widely mocked  as an eyebrow-raising vision of a "sharing economy" future without the implicit agency granted by full ownership. Renting stuff that one needed only for one-time use has long been a market, and car-sharing makes sense for urban dwellers who only need a vehicle on occasion. But to  own nothing  still implies powerlessness and poverty, not happiness , which continues to be associated with owning income streams and nice things, i.e. wealth. Given our dependence on software / digital rights and the  phantom wealth  of credit-asset bubbles,"how much do we actually own?" is a fair question.  Consider the recent  New York Times  article  Why Tech Companies Are Not Your Fr...