What Will Become of American Civilization?

I don’t even know what to call this. A longread to end all longreads? A book accidentally published on a single page? No matter what you want to call it, it’s George Packer doing what he does best: explain America. The exquisite art of painting the big picture by looking very closely. It’s a story about water, about polarisation, a city in search of a future identity, all as a pars pro toto. Favourite paragraph that needs to be quoted in full: «As long as these fights took place in the old, relatively sane world of corrupt politicians, rapacious corporations, overpaid lawyers, and shortsighted homeowners, solutions would usually be possible. But if, like almost everything else in American politics, water turned deeply partisan and ideological, contaminated by conspiracy theories and poisoned with memes, then preserving this drought-stricken civilization would get a lot harder, like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube while fending off a swarm of wasps that you might be hallucinating.»