Las Vegas as an Exemplar of the Santa-Fe-ing Phenom

The New Yorker has an excellent piece describing how, in the age of advanced communications and rapid global delivery of anything, cities can now rise anywhere people choose to congregate. It masquerades as a piece about how haute cuisine is possible in Las Vegas. (A plane lands there every three minutes. One chef talks about a fisherman in the Adriatic calling on his cell phone to show him a fish and ask him if he would like to buy it.) But really, the point of the piece is, as one chef put it, that "Las Vegas is a pilot project to see if man can live on the moon."

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