The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Assassination Book Club I was at a book club at a pub in Cardiff, just after the Trump assassination attempt in July 2024. It wasn’t my book club, and I didn’t know I was taking part in it, but I accidentally got involved. Johnny Vedmore I hadn’t even read the book in question. I had taken a seat out the back of a local pub and was typing away as the table next to me began to fill with this group of youthful-looking readers ready to discuss a Salmond Rushdie book they’d been reading. I didn’t realise that was what they had planned, but I was soon drawn into the conversation they were having until I realised it was a book club, and I bowed out, only to return to typing. They sat talking for an hour or so, discussing the ins and outs of what appeared to be a relatively stale read, and each of the book club members gave away a little of their true natures while commenting on the book. As I typed, I overheard the conversation they were having, and after the book club was over, the ta...

  Coach Bibi Leaves A Mark Karen Kwiatkowski Average Americans are concerned about the command relationship between the US and Israel. There is a growing awareness of the US funded and armed slaughter in Gaza. In 1967, over 50 years ago, Israelis created an open air concentration camp on the Strip. It held 2.3 million people by 2023, that number today reduced to around 1.5 million, with the population of Gaza City now killed or removed. Palestinian survivors are crowded into a tiny militarized area in the south without food, water or shelter. Most of Israel hopes that a third winter and outbreaks of disease will kill them all. Bibi Netanyahu and his murderous government are also at war with seven or eight other enemies, pot-shotting and assassinating around the region, and perhaps the world – while claiming full US government support. The Trump campaign was funded by a number of Jewish Zionists who gambled that a Trump in the hand is worth two neoconservatives in the bush. We find ...

  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...