California will never stop burning.
…you round a bend near the Santa Susana Pass and the fire is suddenly before you: ruby-red ribbons of flame coiled around dark hills of sagebrush and sumac, accented by the snaking brake lights of Simi Valley traffic.
It is unnatural and natural, simultaneously.
Jungle primaries.
Ranked-choice voting.
Four dozen candidates.
Is Alaska the next frontier in American elections?
Iowa is a fairy tale.
Somewhere between the crumbling bridges, the meth clinics, the jackknifed tractor trailers, the zombie combines steered by satellite, the putrid purgatories for dinner-bound hogs — somewhere among the wannabe novelists and suicidal farmers and drooling cage fighters sponsored by bargain hotel chains, down rutted byways to giant wind turbines, alongside ditches oozing with nitrates and Busch Light — is a loose menagerie of utopia...
OzyFest 2018
Maybe the future of everything is festivals. Maybe once the robots take over and offices become obsolete and we have nothing to do, we will just meet up, a few thousand people at a time, in outdoor spaces like this one, where everything’s sponsored by German airlines and Swedish carmakers and American tech companies. We will eat Kind bars and drink Napa Valley rosé and listen to stand-up comedy and indie-electronic music and surrender our likenesses in various corporate photo booths, and we will feel not so very alone.
Read: Inside Ozy Fest, the progressive alternate reality where the brands outshine the ideas
Mandalay Bay
Mandalay Bay has 3,039 hotel rooms. The casino is 130,000 square feet; the adjoining convention space is 2 million. Five of Mandalay Bay’s upper floors are actually a Four Seasons, a caste within a caste. Just below those floors was the temporary and final home of Stephen Craig Paddock, a lover of casinos and mass murder, now linked forever to the strip’s southernmost resort, the safe haven from which death rained down.
Read: Mandalay Bay embodied everything modern Las Vegas wanted to be. Until this week.
Sanford, Fla.
Sanford is a brick-paved main street lined with antique shops. Sanford is a forlorn acreage of shuttered housing projects whose closure scattered residents across town. Sanford is a small galaxy of gated communities with names like “Plantation Lakes” and “Hatteras Sound.”
Which Sanford was Trayvon Martin visiting in February 2012? Which Sanford was George Zimmerman protecting, or protecting against?
Read: On eve of Trayvon Martin shooting trial, present of Sanford, Fla., is shadowed by past