LEVER WEEKLY: Disney, The Real Estate Developer

When the Walt Disney Company built a development in Celebration, Florida, in the 1990s, it was advertised as “a place that takes you back to that time of innocence.” But if that vision was ever even possible, it would ultimately completely unravel.

“Celebration was supposed to be a corrective to one of the prevailing anxieties on the eve of the new millennium: that people were more alienated, less connected, less happy,” wrote Gaby Del Valle in a new piece for The Drift that we highlight below. “But Celebration was, at its core, a conventional real estate development masquerading as a utopia. And the minute Disney realized it could get a better return on its investment by selling Celebration for parts, it did.”

Read all about it in this week’s Lever Weekly, exclusively for supporting subscribers.

Also In Today’s Lever Weekly:

• The U.S. is the only country in the world begging oil CEOs to drill more — but it doesn’t have to be.

• A new report on the 800,000 people performing labor in prisons.

• Revelations about Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor reveal that the court has been taking cues from Fox News for decades.

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