Gaby Del Valle
An Unholy Alliance
Gaby Del Valle
To exist is to suffer; to bring another person into this world to suffer alongside you is an act of inexcusable cruelty. So says David Benatar, an anti-natalist philosopher who argues that procreation is inherently immoral. His fringe ideology, debated on digital fora and in graduate school classrooms, has yet to gain much real-world traction. But as ice caps melt and global temperatures rise, a different sort of anti-natalist sentiment...
No Returns | On Family Functions and Dysfunctions
Gaby Del Valle
In December, The New Yorker asked, “How Did Polyamory Become So Popular?” in a piece that tracked the rise of the open relationship, from the obscure “province of utopian free-love communities” to its status as a mainstay of “Park Slope marriages and prestige television.” In January, New York magazine took on the same topic in a cover story, which explored the “increasingly mainstream world of ethical non-monogamy” and included “a...
The War on Ecoterror | Environmental Radicalism, Left and Right
Gaby Del Valle
On August 3, 2019, after driving through the night from his grandparents’ house in the Dallas suburbs to El Paso’s east side, Patrick Crusius took a moment to say his goodbyes. “I’m probably going to die today,” he posted on 8chan, attaching, by way of explanation, a four-page document titled “The Inconvenient Truth.” Then he pulled up to a Walmart and started shooting, killing twenty people and wounding more than...
Not-So-Magic Kingdom | Disney Takes on the Affordable Housing Crisis
Gaby Del Valle
Celebration was supposed to be the perfect town. Entirely planned by the Walt Disney Company in the early ’90s, the Central Florida development — located less than a dozen miles from Magic Kingdom — was billed as a 1950s-style suburb for the twenty-first century. Celebration would be “a place that takes you back to that time of innocence,” one early ad for the community promised, “a new American town of...
