Longreads That Caught Our Eye This Week

Your weekly roundup of longreads that caught our eye this wee. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray [View this email in your browser] We love to read. Here are a few longreads from around the web that caught the attention of our editors this week. Why The Left And Right Shouldn’t Segregate Themselves In Different Parts Of Town By Gracy Olmstead | The Federalist Yes, our society is severely polarized and fractured. But we shouldn't give up on political discourse and embrace tribalism. --------------------------------------------------------------- Why not live in a city where people agree with you? Research group Livability asked this question earlier this week, when they released their 2016 rankings of “The Best Cities for Liberals, Conservatives, and Moderates.” As Livability Author Matt Carmichael writes, “Studies have shown our social feeds are often like living in a like-minded bubble. We get our so-called ‘news’ from partisan sources.” But this political fracturing isn’t just happening online—the researchers at Livability have found that people “gerrymander themselves,” choosing towns and cities that complement their ideological preferences. “If you really want a political change, you’re better off moving than voting,” writes Carmichael. [Read More] The Farm-To-Table Movement and Rural Gentrification Matt Hartman | City Lab As the food trend spreads, its impact and limitations on actual, real-life farms and farming communities becomes more visible. --------------------------------------------------------------- The farm-to-table movement isn’t really about final dishes. “We aren’t just shoving tasty stuff into our faces,” Heather Havrilesky argued at the Baffler.”We’re embracing and supporting some down-to-earth farmer we might count as a kind of a neighbor.” Farm-to-table rhetoric imagines fixing the food economy and ecosystem of food production in order to invest in local communities. But for all that talk about farms, the movement retains a distinctly urban focus. “Farms tend to be where farm-to-table restaurants aren’t,” Laura Reiley explained, paraphrasing a shepherd in her acclaimed “Farm to Fable” series for the Tampa Bay Times. The farmers we imagine aren't likely to be our neighbors, Havrilesky wrote, unless we’re willing “to live in a place with only a Pizza Hut and an Australian-themed steakhouse within 20 square miles.” [Read More] What Tocqueville Would Say About Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie James Poulos | Foreign Policy Americans don’t just enjoy stories about the rise and fall of celebrities — they need them. --------------------------------------------------------------- In a world reeling from big, unnerving news, what has stopped the United States in its tracks? Angela Merkel’s migrant misgivings? Trouble brewing in the South China Sea? Claims of chemical warfare waged by Islamic State die-hards? No, not even the latest Donald Trump indignity or awkward Hillary Clinton video has managed to fully capture Americans’ anxious imaginations. But the breakup of Hollywood golden couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie? Now that’s news. [Read More] Do Elephants Have Souls? Caitrin Nicol Keiper |The New Atlantis The birth of an elephant is a spectacular occasion. Grandmothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins crowd around the new arrival and its dazed mother, trumpeting and stamping and waving their trunks to welcome the floppy baby who has so recently arrived from out of the void, bursting through the border of existence to take its place in an unbroken line stretching back to the dawn of life. After almost two years in the womb and a few minutes to stretch its legs, the calf can begin to stumble around. But its trunk, an evolutionarily unique inheritance of up to 150,000 muscles with the dexterity to pick up a pin and the strength to uproot a tree, will be a mystery to it at first, with little apparent use except to sometimes suck upon like human babies do their thumbs. [Read More] After the Republic Angelo M. Codevilla | Claremont Review of Books Over the past half century, the Reagan years notwithstanding, our ruling class’s changing preferences and habits have transformed public and private life in America. As John Marini shows in his essay, “Donald Trump and the American Crisis,” this has resulted in citizens morphing into either this class’s “stakeholders” or its subjects. And, as Publius Decius Mus argues, “America and the West” now are so firmly “on a trajectory toward something very bad” that it is no longer reasonable to hope that “all human outcomes are still possible,” by which he means restoration of the public and private practices that made the American republic. In fact, the 2016 election is sealing the United States’s transition from that republic to some kind of empire. Electing either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump cannot change that trajectory. Because each candidate represents constituencies hostile to republicanism, each in its own way, these individuals are not what this election is about. This election is about whether the Democratic Party, the ruling class’s enforcer, will impose its tastes more strongly and arbitrarily than ever, or whether constituencies opposed to that rule will get some ill-defined chance to strike back. Regardless of the election’s outcome, the republic established by America’s Founders is probably gone. But since the Democratic Party’s constituencies differ radically from their opponents’, and since the character of imperial governance depends inherently on the emperor, the election’s result will make a big difference in our lives. [Read More] My journey from Tehran to Rome Sohrab Ahmari | Catholic Herald As a Muslim-born Iranian, I first doubted God, then flirted with Nietzsche and Marxism. But the whisper of conscience kept suggesting that I go to Mass --------------------------------------------------------------- On July 26, I announced my decision to join the Catholic Church. Hours earlier, a pair of jihadists had attacked a church in France and murdered a priest, Fr Jacques Hamel, while he was celebrating Mass. Two months before that, I had begun studying one-on-one with a priest in London, reading Catholic books and immersing myself in the catechumen’s life. But I had no intention of going public with my conversion, not until after being received into the Church. When news of the killing first broke, I knew next to nothing about Fr Hamel. Photos online showed an octogenarian priest with wispy white hair and a look of quiet, ordinary holiness. [Read More] Copyright © 2015 The Federalist, All rights reserved. You are receiving this e-mail because you opted in to receive e-mail updates from TheFederalist.com. 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