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I.
The worldwide airport serving the capital of Montenegro has solely two arrival gates, and final spring they had been busier than regular. I used to be there for a similar motive many others had been: The tiny Balkan state had turn out to be the unlikely middle of a principally American social and political motion.
Particularly, I had come to watch Zuzalu, a two-month co-living experiment that had been organized—and to some extent paid for—by Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the eco-friendly cryptocurrency ethereum. It was being hosted at a brand new resort and deliberate neighborhood on the Adriatic coast, not removed from the village of Radovići. Half retreat and half convention, it was additionally a dry run for the extra everlasting relocation of tech-industry digital nomads to totally different elements of the world, the place they may begin their very own societies and design them to their liking. Some 200 folks had signed up for the complete two months. Others, like me, popped out and in. The slate of talks for the times I used to be there was titled “New Cities and Community States.” European vacationers smoked cigars on the promenade whereas Zuzalu attendees bounded round planning for excursions and train and shuttles to a personal Grimes present afterward.
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The community state is an idea first superior by Balaji Srinivasan, a bitcoin advocate who’s influential in tech circles. As he describes it in his e-book, The Community State, self-published in 2022 on the Fourth of July, a community state begins with a web-based neighborhood of like-minded folks, then strikes into the offline world by crowdfunding the acquisition of land and inhabiting it intensively sufficient that “not less than one pre-existing authorities” is moved to supply diplomatic recognition. There isn’t essentially any voting; one of the simplest ways to vote is by both staying put or “exiting” for an additional community state you want higher.
Apart from that, the mannequin is select your personal journey. Hypothetically, Srinivasan suggests community states for individuals who eat particular diets (kosher, keto), for individuals who don’t like FDA regulation, for individuals who don’t like cancel tradition, for individuals who need to dwell like Benedictine monks, for individuals who may need to restrict web use by placing public buildings in Faraday cages. It doesn’t matter what the state relies on, nevertheless it needs to be based mostly on one thing—a “ethical innovation” or a “one commandment.”
So, in Montenegro, inside a geodesic dome, presenters gave pitches for an array of proposed societies. The talks had been of the pleasant “no unhealthy concepts in brainstorming” selection—propositions with huge stakes introduced one after one other in an hour or much less. Starting as on-line communities, or as “decentralized autonomous organizations,” some could be constructed from scratch by folks with a shared trigger. Others could be start-ups in a extra conventional sense—instigated by founders and run like companies. As an illustration, Titus Gebel, a German entrepreneur, proposes the institution of “free non-public cities,” the place residents are prospects who pay just for the federal government providers they intend to make use of personally. A metropolis operator and a small governing board would make each essential resolution. “The present Western legacy techniques should not reformable,” Gebel stated throughout a presentation. “They’re probably not serving folks’s wants any longer.”
Later, I listened to a Q&A with Dryden Brown, the 20-something CEO and co-founder of Praxis, a venture-capital-funded group bent on escaping American democracy and all its flaws by constructing a brand new “everlasting metropolis,” additionally referred to as Praxis, someplace within the Mediterranean area. On the web, Brown is combative and self-aggrandizing, however in individual, he has the reflexive politeness of somebody who’s used to older adults referring to him as a “good younger man.” When he was in his early 20s, he posted a meme on Fb figuring out himself as “fiscally conservative and socially awkward.” He’d been avoiding me in New York, however once I appeared in Montenegro, he obtained me with stunning heat (“You made it!” he stated, after I sneaked into the Grimes present).
Throughout his Q&A, he caught principally to oft-repeated speaking factors. His household fought within the Revolutionary Struggle; he has wished to start out a brand new metropolis since he was 15 or 16 years previous; the essential factor to find out about Praxis is that everybody who lives there might be wonderful. “When you’re capable of get the following Elon to maneuver to town, that’s the place the returns come from,” he stated. Brown acknowledged the necessity to “appeal to and retain individuals who have that danger tolerance, which might be proficient, which have that top IQ.” He stated the “excessive IQ” half twice.
On the second day of displays, I had lunch with a biotech investor named Sebastian Brunemeier. (However he was fasting, so we solely drank water.) Brunemeier, remarkably pleasant and forthcoming, is a “longevity maximalist” who co-founded a venture-capital fund in 2021 to put money into one thing referred to as LongBio. Now, he defined, he’s supporting a longevity-specific community state that may advance a trigger he and others name “vitalism.” Demise, they argue, is an possibility, not an inevitability. “The fundamental premise is: Properly, if life is nice and well being is nice, demise and illness are unhealthy,” Brunemeier defined. Residents of this community state might be free to pursue a aim of longer, more healthy lives outdoors the attain of U.S. regulation and its byzantine restrictions on medical experimentation. (Outdoors the attain of the U.S. tax code, too.) To begin, they’re internet hosting a two-month pop-up metropolis referred to as Vitalia on an island off Honduras.
A smattering of different network-state-inspired initiatives are below means. There’s Itana, a brand new metropolis in Nigeria marketed to entrepreneurs, which entices overseas enterprise house owners with tax incentives. The island off Honduras the place the vitalism persons are headed is house to an present neighborhood referred to as Próspera, whose settlers are already providing experimental gene remedy. The enterprise capitalist Shervin Pishevar, a co-founder of Hyperloop One, is constructing what he calls a “sensible island,” within the Bahamas. Up to now it seems like a deliberate neighborhood with its personal airport, however Pishevar has promised that his ambitions are a lot bigger. “One in every of our subsequent initiatives is an island that’s larger than Manhattan,” he stated at a Srinivasan-led network-state convention in Amsterdam this previous October. He didn’t title the placement, however stated he’s negotiating a “treaty, basically,” a 99-year lease with a bunch authorities.
These initiatives are pitched with a way of grandiosity and grievance: The twisted paperwork of democratic governance is constraining humanity. Many years in the past, we went to the moon; why don’t we’ve got flying automobiles? Centuries in the past, we praised frontiersmen and pioneers; why are they vilified now? Why all this disdain for the doers and the builders? Why all this pink tape in the best way of the perfect and the brightest?
Most of those initiatives should not but actual to the purpose of treaties and cement, however they’re actual sufficient within the minds of people that wield affect in a strong, tight-knit {industry}. These persons are energetic, artistic, and generally charming. And so they have their hearts set on a future that belongs to them alone.
II.
The concept of the community state shouldn’t be a very authentic one. The USA has an extended historical past of secessionist craving, and the particular dream of libertarian settlements populated by Individuals has been within the air since not less than the Seventies, when the reactionary Nevada millionaire Michael Oliver decided that “the true treatment for this nation is for the productive folks to depart, and let the moochers tax one another.” As recounted in Raymond B. Craib’s current e-book, Journey Capitalism, Oliver first considered constructing a synthetic island within the South Pacific; his later schemes included invading some islands within the Bahamas and funding a right-wing separatist motion in Portugal.
The network-state concept additionally sounds quite a bit like the Patchwork idea proposed 15 years in the past by Curtis Yarvin, a tech-world character who’s considered the daddy of neo-reactionary thought. In 2008, on his weblog Unqualified Reservations, he wrote:
The fundamental concept of Patchwork is that, because the crappy governments we inherited from historical past are smashed, they need to get replaced by a world spiderweb of tens, even a whole lot, of 1000’s of sovereign and unbiased mini-countries, every ruled by its personal joint-stock company with out regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their authorities, they will and will transfer.
Like a lot of Yarvin’s writing, this publish was closely sarcastic and stuffed with what one would hope is hyperbole. To rid San Francisco of the poor, he advised “a bit of aerial bombing.” His tone might be why the thought languished for therefore lengthy; that, and a few of the belongings you’ll discover in his Wikipedia entry below the headings “Alt-right” and “Views on Race.” Now, nevertheless, people who find themselves bored with the messy actuality of america are returning to Yarvin’s work with recent appreciation. “He was simply so early,” William Ball, a co-founder of the venture-capital agency Meeting Capital, stated in a podcast interview.
In hindsight, the community state is clearly the dream that Silicon Valley has been constructing towards because the very starting. In a well-known 1995 essay, “The Californian Ideology,” the British teachers Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron defined that the technologists of Silicon Valley appeared ahead to a future during which “present social, political, and authorized energy buildings will wither away to get replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous people and their software program.” The authors additionally noticed, dryly, that California’s highways, universities, and intensive public infrastructure had all been constructed by complicated bureaucracies and funded by taxes.
Two years later, the tech world produced its personal model of the identical thesis, with out the analytical distance. The Sovereign Particular person, by the American investor James Dale Davidson and the British journalist Lord William Rees-Mogg, was revealed simply because the tech {industry} in California was rising to energy. It was a manifesto for the idea of “self-ownership,” and displayed utter disdain for any type of reciprocal relationship with authorities. Davidson and Rees-Mogg at instances make their case with metaphors so distracting that the affect is considerably muted. (“The state has grown used to treating its taxpayers as a farmer treats his cows, holding them in a discipline to be milked. Quickly, the cow could have wings.”) However the e-book continues to be learn in the present day—Peter Thiel wrote a brand new introduction for a 2020 reprint—as a result of it predicted the event of cryptocurrency. It additionally predicted that, as nation-states turned unwieldy, essentially the most steady mode of presidency may turn out to be the city-state—“the previous Venetian mannequin.”
On this new age, computer systems would alter each establishment, the very construction of society, and your entire world financial system. In doing so, they might imperil nationwide governments by curbing their energy to regulate residents and gather taxes. They’d additionally create a completely rich superior class, a “cognitive elite,” whose members could exist “in the identical bodily atmosphere because the extraordinary, topic citizen” however who would by no means once more regard extraordinary residents as their equals.
Finally, this elite would transfer, frictionlessly, all around the globe. As contributors in a brand new, completely on-line financial system, they may break away from the “tyranny of place” and go wherever they wished, pursuing most freedom and paying what they favored for commercialized variations of the providers beforehand supplied by the state. Objecting to any of this on ethical grounds, Davidson and Rees-Mogg insinuated, was the province of Luddites and deluded nationalists.
Silicon Valley’s fixation on “exit” was arguably most seen (and most derided) within the late aughts and early 2010s, when Patri Friedman (the grandson of the free-market theorist Milton Friedman) and Thiel had been engaged on the Seasteading Institute and hoping to construct “floating cities” on the open ocean. That mission, mocked as “Burning Man on the Excessive Seas,” was doomed by its technical issue and inherent goofiness. Once I spoke with Friedman on Zoom final summer time, he was carrying a glittery pair of kitten ears and talked animatedly about what he noticed as a second of alternative. Friedman’s funding fund, Pronomos Capital, is backed by Thiel and has cash in initiatives on 5 continents. (It has helped fund Praxis, Próspera, and Itana, amongst different network-state ventures.) Friedman has been touting the thought of “aggressive governance”—treating authorities like an {industry}, which will be disrupted by start-ups—for 20 years. “Individuals take it rather more severely now,” he stated.
The Community State was immediately well-liked amongst Silicon Valley thought leaders. It was endorsed by the investor Marc Andreessen, the Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong, and the AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, amongst others. Perhaps most essential, it was endorsed by Vitalik Buterin, who revealed a weblog publish taking problem with a few of Srinivasan’s factors however in the end championing his primary premise.
Buterin and Srinivasan make for a distinction. Srinivasan is a brash Indian American who’s all-in on bitcoin, the clunkier cryptocurrency with a notoriously bro-y, right-wing status. He fights with folks on social media and refers to journalists as “canine on a leash.” Buterin is youthful, a Russian Canadian with an elfin look. He comes off as softer and kinder, and his cryptocurrency, ethereum, is favored by initiatives all throughout the political spectrum, together with many on the far left. Individuals who may shrink back from a motion spearheaded by Srinivasan alone would really feel comforted by Buterin’s participation, and vice versa. His largest quibbles with Srinivasan’s idea, as initially written, had been that community states might simply wind up as havens for the rich and that an omnipotent founder ought to be a brief step, not a everlasting situation. “Community states, with some modifications that push for extra democratic governance and constructive relationships with the communities that encompass them, plus another means to assist everybody else? That may be a imaginative and prescient that I can get behind,” Buterin concluded.
With that extra expansive definition, the thought has some broad attraction. As you’ve heard, the pandemic accelerated the motion of varied facets of life onto the web. It’s extra frequent than ever to determine as a digital nomad or a distant employee—to take your American wage and transfer someplace with a decrease price of dwelling, to bop round wherever you need. It could even be extra frequent than ever to really feel like one thing about America is essentially incorrect—that it’s on the point of one or a number of crises that may’t or gained’t be prevented.
Most network-state advocates attempt to keep away from speaking an excessive amount of or too negatively concerning the folks and societies they’d like to depart behind. Nonetheless, it’s onerous to not hear an undertone of bitterness once they do. Srinivasan’s e-book is as a lot concerning the tradition conflict as it’s about utopia-building. He argues {that a} “blue tribe” of “left-authoritarians” at present holds many of the energy in america. For years, Srinivasan argues, this liberal cabal has been canceling, deplatforming, demonizing, and dominating. The time has come to “reopen” the frontier. It’s a story as previous as civilization: While you’re persecuted, you get out of city.
III.
Praxis first caught my consideration due to its presence in New York Metropolis’s downtown. I had wandered into one among its events out of curiosity. With roughly $19 million in venture-capital funding—from sources together with the Winklevoss twins (of Fb fame); a fund run by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his brother Jack; a few crypto funds that lately collapsed in spectacular vogue; and {industry} heavyweights akin to Paradigm and Bedrock Capital—the Praxis folks had been throwing events for years earlier than Zuzalu. Fashions and artists and musicians and different cool children had been invited and given canine tags to put on, studying Meet Me within the Everlasting Metropolis.
“The way in which you get folks on this stuff is by making it culturally attention-grabbing,” Riva Tez, a enterprise capitalist and an Ayn Rand devotee, defined in a 2022 interview about her early funding in Praxis. “How can we construct the Galt’s Gulch for the following era?” she requested, referring to the secluded libertarian society constructed by disillusioned industrialists in Atlas Shrugged. “It’s acquired to appear enjoyable. It’s acquired to appear like folks you need to go be a part of.” To this finish, Praxis has been wriggling its means into the seductive counterculture, born on the web, that has coalesced in recent times to mock what it sees because the Millennial-liberal mainstream; a counterculture that flirts with some pretty right-wing speaking factors on racial politics and gender roles, amongst different issues. Often, contributors on this scene preserve a playful degree of believable deniability, however not at all times. Throughout a gathering final summer time in its SoHo workplace, would-be future residents of Praxis break up into teams to sort out numerous massive questions, together with this one requested by an attendee: “In a perfect society, to what extent ought to ladies be working or go to school or be educated the identical as males?”
The very best advertising and marketing for a brand new metropolis is the troubled situation of those we have already got. Final yr, when distant wildfires turned the sky orange, and the information was saying that being outdoors in New York Metropolis for a day was the equal of smoking six cigarettes, Praxis hosted a weeklong collection of events all through Manhattan, together with a black-tie gala. Afterward, I wrote to Olivia Kan-Sperling, a New York art-world determine and novelist whom I’d seen at one of many events, and who had written an article for Praxis’s on-line journal. I requested whether or not we might meet to speak about Praxis. She wrote again that she didn’t know a lot, however doubted the motives of individuals—I had a sense she was together with me—who would reflexively dismiss it. “I discover it attention-grabbing that critics of the mission appear to have no downside dwelling in a metropolis the place homeless persons are allowed to die on their doorsteps, in a rustic that murders folks at house and overseas every single day.”
A central premise of Praxis—paradoxically, for a mission constructed on shoot-for-the-moon wild-wishing—is that we’ve got restricted choices if we dislike the best way issues at present stand. The issues in, say, New York are clearly the results of untold years of human failure and bureaucratic dysfunction. So what would you somewhat do if these are your solely two decisions: Attempt to accrue the political energy to drag on only one tiny thread, or begin over with absolute management?
Not lengthy after the events within the wildfire smoke, Dryden Brown posted within the Praxis Telegram chat that he could be on a aircraft for a number of hours and would reply any questions the neighborhood had. He responded to the primary a number of, explaining that Praxis could be ruled by a “zone operator” (presumably himself), that he would really like for town to make use of nuclear and perhaps geothermal vitality, and that his favourite types of transportation are strolling and driving. Then the questions acquired tougher. What sorts of industries would Praxis be supporting, and what sorts of regulatory concessions from the host nation wouldn’t it want? Who would do the farming, plumbing, and different “tough specialised labor” in Praxis? How would “our ‘totally different’ view on democracy” learn to Europeans? Brown didn’t reply these previous few questions.
He barely responded to a Mom Jones report, revealed in September, during which former Praxis workers stated that he had white-supremacist and fascist leanings, expressed in informal dialog and evident within the studying lists he had given to new hires. (“We gained’t let gossip cease us,” Brown stated in an announcement to Mom Jones on the time; he extra lately characterised the claims in that article as “false” and “unsubstantiated,” and added that Praxis had “by no means promoted” any far-right speaking factors.) In late October, Brown introduced that he had gotten a suggestion from a rustic that may give him land, infrastructure, and a “regulatory sandbox” in change for some type of fairness in his mission. He’s now providing a silver membership card he calls a Metal Visa—“your entry level to the Praxis neighborhood”—and posting mock-ups of postage stamps (which depict males in fits of armor). In 2026, he says, you’ll be capable of dwell and work, legally, in whichever thriller nation might be house to Praxis. (Brown can also be partnering with a start-up that claims it will probably assist him management the climate.)
By my depend, Galt’s Gulch had an identifiable inhabitants of about 25, together with two ladies, one an unnamed “fishwife,” thought of to be a stand-in for Rand herself. It wasn’t even a city. Within the e-book, it’s described as “a cluster of homes scattered at random.” All people who lives there has precisely the identical views about life and {industry}, and about their obligations to 1 one other, that are zero. Residents had been chosen to take care of the settlement’s ideological purity. That is, in fact, radically anti-American, within the sense that the American mission has been to permit totally different constituencies and pursuits to coexist and share energy (and accountability), nevertheless imperfectly. Galt’s Gulch residents had been required to take an oath: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I’ll by no means dwell for the sake of one other man, nor ask one other man to dwell for mine.”
That is one mannequin for one thing like Praxis. Brown has stated that the residents might be like-minded. They must apply for the suitable to turn out to be residents and to purchase property. As he as soon as defined, “When you dwell in a society with individuals who have radically totally different, actually foundational values, they’re not capable of architect a harmonious path towards a greater future, as a result of they disagree as to what a greater future is.”
IV.
Montenegro’s authorities appears to be amenable to network-state initiatives, which is why each Praxis and Vitalia have thought of it as a constructing web site. The nation launched a visa program for digital nomads in 2021 and granted Vitalik Buterin citizenship in 2022. There was speak of making additional incentives to lure in Silicon Valley defectors, presumably by making a digital foreign money backed by the nation’s central financial institution. However that is all politically fragile. The nation’s prime minister—who made an look at Zuzalu—has been topic to insinuations of corruption due to alleged coziness with the crypto {industry}. No potential host nation presents a really clean slate.
That was some extent made by Patrick Lamson-Corridor, an city planner who was at Zuzalu to provide the “straight man” presentation, as he put it, about how cities actually work. He was there just for the weekend. (“I’m, like, a traditional individual,” he stated, once I requested if he’d be staying for the complete two-month experiment.) Over breakfast one morning, Lamson-Corridor introduced up the glamorous Próspera settlement in Honduras, which was constructed as a kind of enhanced particular financial zone with every kind of jurisdictional powers. The federal government that had signed off on this deal had lately been voted out, in favor of a brand new regime that had campaigned particularly on a platform of rescinding such privileges. Now the Delaware-based company behind the mission was suing the Honduran authorities for greater than $10 billion, roughly two-thirds of the nation’s complete annual finances. “They ran forward of the need of the folks,” Lamson-Corridor noticed. Who’s to say the identical factor gained’t occur in Montenegro? Or Palau? Or Costa Rica or Nigeria or any of the opposite locations the place plans are being hatched?
He wasn’t against the final premise of latest city facilities, and stated he applauded the ambition he’d seen on show at Zuzalu. He favored a few of these network-state folks, and he favored that they wished to check new options. Nonetheless, he added, as he minimize into an elaborate meat pastry, “in apply, I believe it might be a dystopian nightmare.”
The entire level of community states is to discard messy processes, he stated. That appears expedient on its face however is definitely shortsighted. Even if you happen to handle to get your means, you’ll be able to’t management how folks will then react to what you’ve achieved. “Growth stems from consensus inside society,” he stated. You need to tolerate plodding. “You aren’t at all times going to get there the quickest, however while you get there, you’re there.” The younger folks at Zuzalu, in his opinion, had been shifting too quick to even contemplate their very own future completely—they weren’t constructing as if they may sometime have households, or may age, or may need a distinct life-style than that of gourmand meals and high-end recreation in a secluded coastal paradise. “They will’t actually think about their very own preferences may change.”
Lamson-Corridor gestured round on the resort and the a whole lot of apartment-villas behind it, which he took to be mannequin of what a variety of these network-state initiatives might seem like. “It is a Potemkin metropolis. You couldn’t have a enterprise. You couldn’t get your automotive mounted.” The locals change bedsheets and make espresso and communicate satisfactory English. What would the community state supply them? Perhaps some jobs; presumably designation as a everlasting underclass. Although many of the network-state pioneers speak concerning the worth they’ll present to native economies, they haven’t thought a lot concerning the particulars, if in any respect.
“I’m not a category warrior by any means,” Lamson-Corridor emphasised. However he was struck by the elitism of a few of the presenters at Zuzalu. Lots of them appeared to need to keep away from accountability for different folks. Greater than that, they appeared offended by the concept anybody would even ask them to bear that accountability. “Individuals with that mindset having the powers of a sovereign state, that are appreciable, actually freaks me out,” he stated.
V.
At Zuzalu, there gave the impression to be consensus amongst presenters that American cities had created huge cultural worth, however had been now outdated and horribly mismanaged. “I don’t know anyone who lives in New York Metropolis for the governance,” Colin O’Donnell, the founding father of a “van life” community mission referred to as Kift, noticed. That’s true, I believed on the time. I hate our mayor. However I now understand it wasn’t true, actually. I dwell in New York as a result of I couldn’t stand to dwell anyplace else and since I’m in awe of the puzzle: It doesn’t work properly … however how does it work in addition to it does?
Once I acquired again from Montenegro, I had a celebration to go to in Queens, however I used to be early, so I sat in Flushing Meadows Corona Park to observe the neighborhood males play soccer. This park was as soon as a salt marsh. Then it was a trash heap, 30 ft excessive in most locations. The combination of moist coal particles and avenue sweepings attracted rats, mosquitoes, and a well-known Lengthy Island alcoholic, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who in The Nice Gatsby described the mess as “a implausible farm the place ashes develop like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.” It’s due to a dysfunctional paperwork that the trash heap turned a park with 100 soccer groups taking part in in it each weekend. The polarizing metropolis planner Robert Moses commissioned the park’s 140-foot-tall Unisphere, the unofficial Statue of Liberty of Queens: an enormous metal sculpture of the Earth that folks hated when it was constructed. It was company crap—uninspired, trite, harking back to “an advert for Western Union,” as Newsday put it. In his 1978 e-book, Delirious New York, the architect Rem Koolhaas wrote that the metallic continents hung off the globe’s skeleton “like charred pork chops.” Yeah, however on a day when the sky could be very blue?
A current report discovered that half of working-age New Yorkers, virtually 3 million folks, can’t afford to dwell right here. But they do dwell right here. Town, with all its complexities and cruelties, is rife with small miracles. Like 100 soccer groups on a weekend. Or the truth that, in 1964, Michelangelo’s Pietà was exhibited on this park, and the individuals who couldn’t afford to dwell right here lined up to have a look at it and weep. On today, youngsters had been standing round and flirting earlier than the Mets recreation. The general public golf course could be open till one within the morning. The subways would run all evening. Whereas I sat there, households handed round items of barbecued rooster and birthday cake. Previous males sat on the sidelines and drank Gatorade. This park could also be underwater in my lifetime, folks say, presumably by 2050, once I might be simply 57 years previous. Somebody guarantees you an everlasting metropolis? Nothing is everlasting.
Nothing is ideal, both. No metropolis, and no life led in a single. Irrespective of how meticulously deliberate or sumptuously mocked-up, any utopian enclave will turn out to be a stage for human drama that no one can script or predict. Immediately, I considered the query that I’d been neglecting to pose to each one among these folks, which had been lingering in the back of my thoughts. I wished to ask: “Have you ever ever heard the expression ‘Wherever you go, there you might be’?”
This text seems within the March 2024 print version with the headline “Meet Me within the Everlasting Metropolis.” While you purchase a e-book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.
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