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 …
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 …
Cool Hand Luke
Kids dream of being rock stars. Grown-ups dream of being session men.
From first-call guitarist to leader of the biggest and most often-criticized rock band on the planet.
Growing up in Studio City in the 1960s was no joke.
How hard is it to imagine yourself as Mick Jagger, strutting at the lip of the stage dressed like Captain America, in a top-hat and tails? Or maybe your dream is to be Bob Dylan, circa D.A. Pennebacker’s Don’t Look Back, hiding behind black shades and contemptuous of everyone except Joan Baez? Or Robert Plant, the blonde king of Valhalla, with his shirt unbuttoned down to his navel, making all the girls cream their panties? Or John Lennon, strung out on heroin while fronting the Plastic Ono Band in some crappy public park in Toronto while delivering some of the most merciless lyrics that any rock star dared to put on paper, tearing apart his own stardom to reveal the wounded child within in front of a crowd of other stoned children who believed him to be a living God?
Right on. Who hasn’t imagined not just witnessing any these performers in person, but of merging with their essence, …
