Longform is one of my favorite websites. It’s a professional content curator which all its curated contents have one thing in common: All of them are long!
Longform’s last week suggestion was an article from Scientific American. The article is an excerpt from Michael Tennesen’s last book called: The Next Species.
Sure the book is centered around sustainability and evolution. But it was appealing to me because of the title and style of writing.
Whoever knows Vegas, is familiar with its famous slogan: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. The title of the article is a creative variation of the original slogan: What will happen in Vegas, Won’t stay in Vegas. It tempts you to take a look at the body of the article.
But what I fell in love with, was Tennesen’s magical style in painting a picture of Vegas after the drought:
Las Vegas could get there, too. If the water in the soil gets below Dust Bowl levels, the crusts would break down and the sands might pick up and fly with the wind. If the water runs out and the city goes dry, it wouldn’t take long for the golf courses, the fountains, and the swimming pools to lose their appeal. And if the desert gets hotter and dryer, the great migration and construction boom of the last fifty years could take its final bow.
Some future artist might revel in the rusted infrastructure of the famous Sin City, go looking for relics of slot machines in the nearby dump, or collect neon artifacts for some museum. Or he or she might go rummaging through old books or magazines to read tale of how Sin City finally succumbed to drought, dust storms, and sky-high electric bills, and the day the last neon light flickered out.
In the end Nature holds all the cards.
Sure the Mother Nature would have a smile on her face reading this artwork of words. This famous city once rebelled against her and grown in the heart of the desert, now called a sin city taking a final bow.
But may she also laugh aloud, as we have called her the card holder and not the table owner!
