The Temple of the Morons
A weird military authority requisitions the Great Salt Lake Basin.
Toxic dust, man camps, and gay bars to flourish in Mormon Country.
Democracy is canceled by the need to build giant data centers that will allow the Chinese to control our iPhones.
Standing on a northern shore of the Great Salt Lake, not a human in sight, no cellular service, at the crossroads of unmarked dirt roads, I am awed by the beauty of the landscape. Like most people raised in the region, I was a latecomer to appreciating the lake. A giant trash pond unfit for recreation; polluted by industry; filled with brine flies, an inescapable sulfur smell, and giant swarms of bizarre migratory birds. Today, it’s dying, while industry and its toadies in the Utah legislature attempt to scrape every last penny out of the land. What would Brigham Young have thought of this brand of ruthless Mammonism? I turned in my Latter-day Saints membership card while still in middle school, but I doubt that the legendary prophet who led the Mormon exodus to the Great Basin would approve of what the Utah legislature has in mind for Zion.
The desert ground where I stand is a rarely trafficked …
The North Coast Hiawatha
The backyards and alleyways crawled by in slow motion as the train pulled out of Minneapolis, westbound. Something naked, indecent about these frozen yards, the incandescent windows with women arguing inside, the dead light of three-thirty on a northern evening. Abandoned swingsets, lawnmowers under snow.
Then the light of day went out and the windows got black and the boy went looking for the bar car. He was only twenty but legal. Actually nobody cared. Certainly not this bartender with his knowing curious glance, dusting the bottles with a rag.
Got Bud, he said, Miller, Schlitz, Grain Belt, you ever try a Grain Belt?
Is it any good?
Beer’s beer to me. People say there’s a difference.
I’ll have a Grain Belt then, the boy said, and paid for his beer, then sat in the corner of the bar car trying to see anything out the window: snow, maybe, or some kind of mist, …
All the Pretty Houses
American homes are American dreams.
Houston and Dallas have lapped California, but we’re still millions short of demand.
Here comes the reset.
This June, Congress passed a housing bill by margins that are almost unheard of on Capitol Hill these days: 85 to 5 in the Senate, then 358 to 32 in the House the very next day. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law on July 11, the broadest piece of federal housing legislation in decades. Votes that lopsided don’t happen unless both parties have decided the problem has gotten out of hand.
The numbers back that up. The median price of an existing home reached $440,600 this June, up nearly fifty percent since 2020. At the height of the 2005 housing bubble, the one that ended in the financial crisis, the median home sold for $219,000. Through the 1980s and ’90s, a typical home cost a little over three times what the average household earned annually; at the peak of the bubble, it cost 4.7 times more. Today, it’s more expensive by a factor of five. Homes are less affordable now than they …
