No Images? Click here Dry, The Beloved Country Hello Highliners,Is this newsletter a week late? It is. But have you read this beautiful, brilliant and counterintuitive knock-out of a piece by Eve Fairbanks yet? I honestly don't know; I'm not Cambridge Analytica. So let me take this opportunity to urge you to do so.It's a reported essay about Cape Town, which is suffering through an extraordinary, once-in-300-years drought. Officials have warned of anarchy. The government has played around with the idea of towing an iceberg from Antarctica. The situation...is...dire. And yet, Eve discovered that surprising, even beautiful things are happening down there. Capetonians have reduced their water consumption by 40 percent in the last year. Being able to show a visitor day-old urine ripening in your toilet bowl is now considered a proud moment.Even more astonishingly, the drought has forced the city—which is richer and whiter than the rest of South Africa—to confront its thorniest problems: race, class, the legacy of apartheid. Ultimately, this piece is about what people are capable of when the modern conveniences we take for granted are stripped away. Will we succumb to chaos and greed, or, as Eve puts it, will we "be more willing than we expect to live a harder way"?Her exploration of the question is so good that Longform picked this story as its best of the week. So, give it a read, unless you already have, in which case, here's a video of Trump and Melania's pinky war.—Greg VeisHuffPost is now a part of Oath and a part of Verizon. On May 25th 2018 we will be introducing a new Oath Privacy Policy which will explain how your data is used and shared. Learn More.Highline combines the rigor, depth and obsessiveness of the best magazine journalism with the experimentation that becomes possible when no paper or staples are involved. And our goal is simple: We want to publish stories that stay with you.Did you like reading this email? Forward it to a friend. Or sign up! Can't get enough? Check out our Morning Email or Must Reads.©2018 HuffPost | 770 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 |