The Front Porch
Nothing in this newspaper is written by AI. That’s a promise that we make to our readers, and that we view as central to our mission, which is to provide a home for the American voice in all its plain-spoken humanity, contradiction, ambition, and promise. While American writing comes in many styles and forms, it has a particular snap to it, an earthy yawp that vibrates unpredictably between the common speech of the streetcorner and the frontier and the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Our language is an expression of who we are as a people — the people who invented the Delta Blues and Bugs Bunny.
You can’t fake being an American. Not really, even though there are many different types of Americans who come from many different places and who speak in rhythms and dialects that were once nearly separate languages, even though our regional accents have been flattened if not eliminated …
Stop Spying on Me, You Creeps
Barack Obama’s outsourcing of the surveillance state
A new model for managing the mental activities of the public
Putting a rationalist gloss on progressive fantasies of control advances the technocratic will-to-power
The supreme irony of technocratic politics is that it requires a charismatic figurehead to reach its full potential. Daniel Bell picked up on this in his study of post-industrial society when he remarked that “no matter how technical social processes may be, the crucial turning points in a society occur in a political form.” A culture of deference to machines does not eliminate human control over politics. Instead, it concentrates power in the hands of ever fewer people, pushing politics back toward an obscure kind of absolutism. “It is not the technocrat who ultimately holds power,” Bell concluded, “but the politician.” Barack Obama was that politician.
Yet Obama appeared pragmatic to a fault, almost Spock-like in his unflappable rationality. The furthest thing from a leader interested in overhauling the basic conventions of America’s constitutional democracy. Perhaps that explains why …
The Golden Pineapple
The holy grail of the pineapple growers and how it destroyed Maui
A modern-day tale of the Garden of Eden
Man’s expulsion is followed by wildfires
There are many American dreams, of which the Golden Pineapple is one. As its name suggests, the Golden Pineapple — known upon its market debut as the Del Monte Gold — was distinguished by its Technicolor golden hue, as well as by its sweetness, the product of an ideal brix-to-acid ratio, and an unusually long shelf life that allowed it to be sold as fresh fruit even in the continental United States, where a pineapple, especially one grown in Maui, might take two or more weeks to reach a supermarket shelf.
The Golden Pineapple was created by a methodical, decades-long breeding program sponsored by Hawaii’s three leading pineapple growers to create the perfect fruit. In the records of the Pineapple Research Institute (PRI), the Golden Pineapple was known as “the 73-114” — the identifying number which represented the year and the number of the pot in which it was grown. This end-product …
