Last year, I found myself at a milk-themed basement dance party. At the time, perhaps, I should have turned around on the dance floor: I could have found an AI-generated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. behind me, swaying while sipping a glass of the white stuff. The exclusive invite for the party featured a black-and-white portrait of a gaunt child in wartime hugging bottles of milk.
In 2009, Wall Street had just imploded, and the Mojave Desert town of Victorville, California-sunblasted, shoddily constructed, and abruptly abandoned-was one of the housing bubble's most spectacular wipeouts. But amid the boarded-up McMansions and tumbleweed-traversed deserted culs-de-sac, the journalist Yasha Levine stumbled upon an entirely different story. Seeking water, a drought-stricken Victorville bulk-purchased enough to supply as many as 30,000 families for a year. The arrangement gave Levine pause: Since when did a public resource like water come with a deed? That question unspooled into the reporting behind his new documentary, Pistachio Wars.