This is great:

[I]t was at this inflection point — when everyone seemed to be emphatically saying yes to technology — that I began to seriously investigate why a certain community preferred to say no.

I first began studying the Amish in 2012 as a doctoral researcher of media studies at Indiana University, located within a few hours of settlements in Elkhart, LaGrange, and Daviess counties….

….the more time I spent in these communities — three years total — the more I realized that my original frame on their world was too myopic: It wasn’t the metaphorical fish I was interested in; it was the water. Which is to say that I became less intrigued by Amish restrictions on technology than by the social world they sought to preserve and protect with those restrictions. In the end, I came to realize that the Amish are, in fact, technology-agnostic. They do not care much about what a new technology is or how it works; they care about what its adoption would mean for the surrounding community.

As I understand it, the Amish objection to technology isn’t dogmatic, in the way that, say, the Catholic Church’s objection to contraception is. It’s more, as this article notes, a means to an end, while the specifics of the technology allowed, or not allowed, or accommodated to some extent, are flexible, at least theoretically.

For example, this kludgey contraption that allows an old-school phone to connect to the cellular network:

The black-box phone, by contrast [to the smartphone], was a happy medium that posed threats to community members’ social and spiritual health. Its design reflects that: The phone is an intentionally bulked-up contraption that enables mobile communications from a vehicle but is highly inconvenient to carry. It only allows public, audible conversations — no texting or internet access. It is also shared among the crew members. Ministers in the settlement hoped that adopting these devices would make individual cell phone ownership among their constituents unnecessary.

The approach here is really about intentionality. This reminds me of the old approach we had to computers, when they were expensive and bulky: typically they sat, if not in a proper home office, in a shared room on a first floor. Using the computer was not private, and it was a thing you had to ask for. (Of course, you could sneak downstairs, or be very quick when you heard someone approaching, or figure out how to wipe search history or even get around parental controls.) But nonetheless.

As computers became smaller and cheaper, that “family computer” model mostly disappeared. In fact, looking back, we are likely to perceive the family computer as an artifact of size (big), expense (high) and novelty (this is new, it’s not for the kids to mess with like a toy), not an actual approach at all.

The Amish difference is choosing how to interact with technology, instead of passively allowing cost and abundance to determine those things. That is fascinating, really: it is an insistence that the mere affordability of a technology does not mean the technology should be adopted or used following the path of least resistance.

“Everybody can have a personal pocket computer because they’re cheap now!”, in other words, is an ideological or philosophical idea, not a purely economic or descriptive one. The Amish approach is ideological or philosophical too, but we are accustomed to thinking of our view as a bare observation of fact, and only of theirs as an idea.

Read the whole thing.

A Slice of New York Pizza History, Serious Eats, Ed Levine, October 25, 2023

As we traveled all across town to hit pizza spots, and as we discussed our findings, I realized just how much of NYC slice lore is apocryphal. I came to this realization in no small part because of Scott, whose idea of a good time is digging up old NYC Department of Finance tax photos featuring pizzerias. As Scott has said, he, and people like me and Adam, in our slice zealotry, have inadvertently peddled some of this apocrypha as if it were true.

So we decided to write up a brief history of the NYC slice before we put out our list of the slice shops that define the current slice era. Some of what you find written below may contradict things we’ve said in the past, collectively and individually, but we’ve done our best to give a general picture of how the New York City pizza slice evolved over the years, using the best of our current knowledge on the subject—all without introducing more confusion. Let’s go!

This is a nice piece, my favorite kind of thing: a deep dive on something ultimately inconsequential, but that illustrates bigger trends about society. For example, this, which suggests that in the United States pizza preceded the actual pizza oven!

At the beginning of the 20th century, pizza in New York was cooked in massive coal-fired masonry ovens originally built to bake bread. Lombardi’s, which claims 1905 as its founding date, making it allegedly “the first pizzeria in America,” used this type of oven at its first location at 531/2 Spring Street, and still uses one in its present-day spot down the street.

And also this, suggesting from the description that the earliest New York City pizzas were not “New York style” but basically the Neapolitan style pizzas from Naples:

Whole pies were the norm at the time because coal-oven pizza, cooked at high temperatures and for a relatively short time, is best eaten quickly, since it tends to get tough and chewy after it’s cooled down. This was pre-slice-culture pizza, designed to be eaten hot out of the oven.

This or something like it is found today in those 90-second personal pizza restaurants, but they’re now the “style,” whereas the rough NYC style pizza is basically what we’d now call just pizza, at least in the part of the country I’m from.

And then this, which suggests that a lot of historical information has barely been retained at all, and that very likely much of it has not been, meaning that “history” increasingly diverges from the past:

The slice movement really got its jump-start with an Italian immigrant named Frank Mastro, a consummate salesman who ran a restaurant-supply business on the Bowery. After buying a used coal oven, he installed a gas line in it and began playing around with baking pizza. By 1934, Mastro had invented* the first of the gas-fired pizza ovens that we now see in countless slice shops today, and had convinced the Blodgett oven company to manufacture them for him. Mastro even set up a model pizzeria on the Bowery to sell Italian-Americans on the concept of opening their own shops.

*That we know of Mastro at all is largely thanks to the work of Norma Knepp and Walter Tore, longtime readers and community members. Norma and Walter met Mastro’s daughter, Madeline Mastro Ferrentino, and recorded her telling of the tale, which later helped shape the article about Mastro in PMQ magazine.

This oven was the slice-culture catalyst, because it produced pies that were fundamentally different from coal-oven pizza.

Read the whole thing. It’s great.

Adaptive Reuses of Classic A Frame IHOP Restaurant Buildings, Repurposed and redeveloped commercial real estate, , May 19, 2024

Some former A-Frame IHOPs have even re-emerged as trendy restaurants.

Like a Culver City, California IHOP that was remade into the aptly named A Frame —a Hawaiian themed restaurant — for nearly a decade and later became Best Bet, described by its founders as a California-meets-Italy pizzeria.

There’s a wild one at the end too, and a lot of nice photos in here. I think this process, by which a brand’s old brand-centric buildings enter the public domain of the built environment, is so cool. It’s one of the ways our humdrum surroundings contain history.

The successor to 4K UHD Blu-ray is already here, Pocket-lint, John Kanellakos, July 7, 2026

Researchers have been experimenting with next-generation optical media tech for some time now, and the reality is that there’s a lot of upward mobility theoretically present when it comes to total deliverable storage space at a per-disc level. Modern material science allows for the vertical stacking of layered data to a far greater degree than in the past, facilitating what could soon prove to be a major boon for optical media as a whole.

That’s where Folio Photonic’s Folio Disc comes into play. This little-known startup has made it its mission to craft a truly impressive optical disc successor product, and it has its eyes set on conquering the enterprise data storage market for starters. A single Folio Disc is theoretically capable of storing up to a whopping 1TB of data, which is equivalent to 1,000 GB or roughly ten triple-layer 4K UHD Blu-ray discs.

This thing is apparently not quite there, but that’s an incredible number for an optical disc. And this would suggest that the death of optical media has been exaggerated. It’s a funny thing that this is coming from some startup called Folio Photonic and not from, I don’t know, Sony.

Related Reading:

New and Old #236

New and Old #237

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In this piece I’m doing two things: thinking about how to resolve some of the apparent tension between families and family-friendly places to live, on the one hand; and urbanism (as an idea/movement) and cities (as places) on the other. In some way, these things are often seen as being at odds.

I’m also thinking about the approach of ecumenical dialogues, and how they are designed to force participants to see both their opponents’ views and their own views in a different light: shorn of the typical language, implied assumptions or premises, etc.

First I want to give you an example. This is not from a dialogue per se, but it’s an ecumenical document, attempting to harmonize or find convergence between the Eucharistic doctrines of Catholicism and Methodism. There are a lot of fine points of theology here, of course, and for this piece none of that matters.

What I find interesting about this kind of endeavor is way in which, by coming at a question from a different angle, you can bypass a lot of the stock phrases and preconceived ideas people on both sides hold, and, if not find actual agreement, find ways in which the received ways of talking about things obscure a certain amount of agreement which really is there. This is not ecumenism as indifferentism, or glossing over real differences. It’s an exercise in challenging those we disagree with, and also ourselves, to figure out what they really think about a thing.

One interesting example of this approach from the Catholic-Methodist document is the idea of the Eucharist as a “propitiatory sacrifice,” a Catholic concept that Protestants typically reject. The author writes of this doctrinal disagreement:

Catholic reference to the Mass (Word and Table) as a propitiatory sacrifice looses much of its offense in light of the fact that the eucharist (BEM), or Word and Table (UMC), entails confession, repentance, and pardon. What could Methodists imagine occurs at Word and Table other than that the Lord—through his promise at the Supper—reconciles a community of believers estranged to him by sin through repentance (itself at least an intellectual work) and grants communion with him? And what could this communion be? Followers of Wesley can say that the propitiatory sacrifice is the eternal intercession of our High Priest in which he grants sacramental communion with him through his real presence in the bread and wine, a communion which is a participation in the propitiation of the cross….

Again, I’m not interested in the doctrinal dispute per se, but in the way this approaches it differently, by asking what the term really at bottom means and what the objection really is.

The author is basically asking the Methodist side something like, Is the confession/pardon in the Methodist service just a symbolic ritual you kept around because you inherited it from the Anglicans (who inherited it from the Catholics)? Or do you actually believe that pardon occurs at the service as the words of the liturgy suggests it does? And if it does occur at the service, what exactly is that but the fruits of a sacrifice which actually forgives sins? Is this really as far off from the Catholics’ “propitiatory sacrifice” as you are accustomed to thinking it is?

It breaks the circular logic of the in-group/out-group—“We don’t believe that because those other people believe it and we’re not like them”—not by saying “You should like them” but by finding that actually, you are much more like them than either you or they realize.

Now you can obviously take this a bit too far, and it begins to seem like clever debating rather than actual analysis. I’m sure that a learned Methodist could explain why the Catholic idea of “propitiatory sacrifice” is distinct from whatever Methodists believe occurs in their service. And likewise a more theologically schooled Catholic than me could explain exactly why the Catholic view is distinct from the Protestant view.

But the point is that this exercise can change not just your perception of the “other,” but of yourself, because we are not accustomed to interrogating our own views, or asking ourselves what precisely we mean by a certain term, or disentangling all of the premises and assumptions in our heads which may or may not be sensible.

So I want to offer some of the arguments about kids/families/cities/urbanism in a way that might help people more in one camp or the other to think through these things and how there may not be much distance between them.

The most basic split here is over the related ideas that 1) cities are difficult or non-ideal places to raise children, and that 2) urbanists do not understand or prioritize the particular needs of parents/families.

Now as some of the following observations would suggest, there is overlap between “family people” and “city people,” but there is nonetheless a definite division. While having children is not a political or ideological signifier, making it a part of one’s identity or politics is typically right-coded. Urban living, and certainly advocacy for it, is typically left-coded.

American politics “un-bundles” these two issues in ways that can make it difficult to synthesize them, because of the distrust between left and right, and the mutual suspicion that each cause is a Trojan horse for a more radical cause: “pro-family” as pronatalism, seen as returning women to the home and kitchen; urbanism aligned against the suburban American way of life.

So “having kids” and “living in cities” are often seen as distinct if not unrelated causes or areas of interest. The purpose of this exercise is to cut through the assumptions and premises at play and try to identify and evaluate the essential core desires, motivations, and beliefs of those in each camp.

Some of the objections against cities from parents/pro-family commentators/etc., include:

• Parents often need to go places quickly or on a moment’s notice—a hospital visit after an accident or injury, early pickup after an incident at daycare or school, etc.—and only automobile travel, even with the uncertainty of traffic jams, is flexible and fast enough for these situations. Public transit, with fixed routes, long headways, possible delays, and often no 24-hour service, cannot be relied on for these occasions.

• Cities are, or are perceived to be, too chaotic and dangerous for families with young children.

• The on-average smaller size of city dwellings puts negative pressure on birth rates/number of children, and in any cases forces growing families to leave the city.

• Cities lean culturally liberal and, more importantly, are largely geared towards the preferences of young people. City life is an extension of college and quasi-adulthood, and is a phase of life from which you “graduate.”

• The issue of public school quality is another major factor, though it is less of a land use or cities versus suburbia issue per se, and is beyond the scope of this piece.

On the other hand, pro-family considerations in favor of urban life include:

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I found this post on a local Facebook group about it:

The commenters mostly think it was never a gas station, though these recollections are often incomplete or mistaken. It does look like a gas station. But most of them remember it being a general store or small grocery store, with milk, bread, candy, ice cream, and other such things for sale. It apparently used to back directly onto a dairy farm.

Take a look at the front, too. Someone points out this two-way step to the front door is unusual for a house. But it does resemble the entrance to a diner or restaurant. Maybe this was used because the front was a store?

Now a general store in a house is cool, and this kind of thing, which modern zoning largely stamped out, should be allowed. But that’s not really remarkable or anything. What’s most interesting to me about this is where it’s located. It’s not on a residential street of the town of Flemington; it’s a fair bit outside of the town and its grid.

It’s at the red marker towards the left here:

This makes it something like a corner store for the people living in the “country” part of the area, which in the decades when this store was operating would probably have been mostly farms. But based on the comments, it also sounds like some of the people living nearby were probably suburbanites of a sort as well.

“We walked there all the time. It was only 2 doors down,” one commenter notes. “In early summer of 1964, my friend’s father piled us all in his Studebaker Hawk to search for cigarettes one Sunday morning. Here’s where we ended up,” says another. One more: “Spent many summer days hanging out with my cousins at their summer cottage close by and then stopping by for sodas there on the way home. Classic kid memories for those days.”

This is pretty striking. Almost all of the talk about “walkability” or “mixed use” has to do with urban areas or small towns, or at least fairly densely populated areas. Yet many decades ago, a sparsely populated area outside a town of about 3,000 people had, basically, a corner store.

You see these sorts of stores, or the remains of them, in a lot of outlying areas, near or beyond the exurban fringe. There are a lot of gas stations with some kind of old building and store, often long predating the current pumps and canopy. Sometimes you’ll also pass an empty one. Usually, they’re two stories, either homes with first-floor businesses or very basic commercial buildings, more “urban” than the ones we’re likely to see in today’s suburbs.

This flexibility—both of what a building could be used for, and how easy it was for people to use them that way—is striking, and is something we have lost. For the most part, modern suburban neighborhoods and even a lot of urban neighborhoods have no commercial uses at all, except illicit ones or grandfathered ones. The strict separation of uses is one of the most damaging aspects of modern zoning.

And, counterintuitively, rural and small-town areas may have retained the old approach to unselfconsciously mixing residential and low-impact commercial uses longer than cities did, because zoning was often adopted on a delay in these areas further from the big population centers.

That’s why this interests me. Partly because of what it meant, specifically, for the people who lived near it (there are so many fond memories in those Facebook comments.) But also because of what it tells us generally about the subtly different world we used to live in.

Related Reading:

Rural Multifamily

Living in the Motel

Have You Ever Lived in a Strip Mall?

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Ironically, Sony’s decision comes at a time when physical media is seeing a bit of a renaissance. “DVDs and CDs are becoming cool again, thanks mostly to Gen Z,” the Washington Post wrote in December 2025. Vinyl sales have been increasing year over year since 2007; even cassette tapes are becoming cool again! Prices for “retro games”—which, according to GameStop, now include systems as recent as the Wii, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360—show no sign of declining, and playing physical games on original hardware remains the gold standard for experiencing older games.

But there are mixed signals, and alongside this physical media revival is the long-term decline of physical media as the primary means of distributing content. Perhaps video games even held out longer, remaining associated with discs or even cartridges long after downloads, files, and subscriptions came to feel completely normal for computer software and music.

Sony argues that consumers already prefer digital: “This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs. This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.”

The writer of the Substack publication Obsolete Sony—not one to look askance at yesterday’s technology—agrees that the abandonment of physical media was a sensible decision, based on economics and logistics:

Console games spent years trying to live in two worlds at once. On one side, they still belonged to the old retail world: boxed releases, used copies, store shelves, and clearance bins. On the other side, the games themselves had already become digital products: installed, authenticated, patched, and tied to accounts….

PlayStation discs were never supported by PlayStation alone. They belonged to a much larger optical-media ecosystem built around replication plants, packaging, shipping, and retail logistics. That infrastructure made discs cheap, common, and worth improving. As it shrank, physical PlayStation games were surviving after the system around them had already thinned out.

He argues that the top video games today have much longer lifecycles and are not profitable without years of sales; this is harder to sustain when they’re physical products on a shelf competing with innumerable other products. But alongside these industrial-logistical concerns is, of course, control and profit:

For Sony, the old retail business has a flaw built into it. A used disc can be sold again and again without the developer, publisher, or platform holder earning anything from those later sales. That was easier to accept when budgets were lower and games were more launch-driven. It becomes harder to defend internally when the industry wants less risk on projects that can cost as much as films.

The argument here, and Sony’s own logic, is more or less that video gaming, or at least modern console gaming, was never about physical media. It was always a software ecosystem that was mediated through physical media merely because of technological limitations.

As technology has evolved, and the physical disc (or cartridge) is no longer necessary for the delivery of the software, it became vestigial and then obsolete. Discless/digital-only gaming is simply the end point of the evolution of physical media itself, or at least of its purpose. Even more succinctly, the media was always incidental to the game: a mere delivery mechanism for it.

This is an incorrect understanding of physical media. In Sony’s imagination, the disc (or lack thereof) is like the delivery truck that brings your package. You don’t care what sort of truck it is, or whether your package spends time in the air or at sea, or which warehouse it ships from; the only thing of relevance to the consumer is that the package arrives.

Sony wants consumers to think—and is claiming, dubiously, that they already think—that the format a video game comes in is as irrelevant to the game itself or to the gaming experience as the manufacturer of the delivery vehicle is to your Amazon package.

This is, in a word, absurd. First of all, the content is never fully separable from the format. For example, the coin-op nature of the arcade machine, and its form factor, influenced what an arcade game was, and what the experience of playing it was. The necessity of swapping discs and cartridges, and the ownership and mobility inherent in a piece of physical media, determined what the home gaming experience was.

Format is not important only in video gaming. What we call the “album” in large part owes itself to the LP, which meant that a single disk could contain an unbroken series of songs. The LP made a listening experience like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, which has no standard quiet breaks between tracks possible. Sure, you could emulate that with streaming. But streaming and the ease of listening to individual songs in any order has changed the idea of the album itself. Put it this way: streaming as the dominant format would not have birthed Sgt. Pepper. The art form and the format were interrelated in subtle ways.

Format/media matters less in software—do you really care if Microsoft Word, or Windows, is installed by a disc that you later stuff in a drawer for 20 years, or by an online download?—because software is mostly utilitarian. But video games are really not software. They are something like quasi-disembodied electronic toys or amusements. Removing the physical media from home video gaming is fundamentally changing what home video gaming is.

Consoles have always been a distinct segment in the broader video game/computer entertainment market. “PC games” early on were a different kind of game than console games, which more often nodded to or simply converted arcade games, which were dominated by the Japanese software developers. PC games often had a cerebral touch, or made curious but not necessarily game-enhancing uses of the computer’s greater processing power; arcade gaming was pure distilled action. Consoles developed their own genre of action-oriented but longer-form games, like platformers. The home video game console was always weaker than an arcade machine or a computer, in terms of processing power. But from the start, it was not an inferior computer but an inferior arcade machine.

A PlayStation console without a disc drive is, however, an inferior computer. Which is really to say, there is almost no argument for the continued existence of the PlayStation itself as a piece of hardware. If the only important element of video gaming is the software and account ecosystem, then isn’t it not just the disc but the console itself that is incidental, if not obsolete?

This is not lost on video gamers and industry observers. “Consoles continue their trend of just becoming worse PCs,” PC Gamer published in early July:

[W]hat are Xbox and PlayStation at this point other than PCs, but worse? Sony’s dual announcements—that it will cease producing physical discs in 2028 and also shut down the older PlayStation 3 and Vita online stores next year—seem to have been published simultaneously with a ripping-the-band-aid-off PR mentality….The takeaway of those two announcements landing simultaneously, though, is highlighting that you can only buy games on the PlayStation how and where Sony says you can.

And importantly, that article also notes that physical games had become a notable distinctive of console gaming:

[T]he games industry has been trending towards digital-only releases for years; to the spreadsheet-brained it was just a matter of time until the cost of manufacturing and shipping of physical discs no longer made sense. The PC even led the charge on that front, meaning consoles clinging to the option of buying physical releases was one of their last true differentiators.

But beyond the immediate gaming experience, the end of discs raises larger issues around ownership, lending, trading, and secondhand sales, and preservation issues. So long as a game lives on a server, or can only be accessed through an account, it is not really yours. Digital games downloaded to console hard drives can be lost if your account is banned, or if the console dies and you have no hard drive backup.

With a physical copy, you can “re-download” a game any time, on a new console. And most importantly, you can lend it, sell it, trade it, or build a long-term collection. The buying/selling/trading/collecting element of video gaming, and the stores that support it, have always been a part of what video gaming is. (There are also discless Xboxes, and the next Xbox generation may be entirely discless.)

The Nintendo Switch 2 is now the only mainstream console which remains a true video game console in the classical sense. The Switch consoles do not even have web browsers or apps, an artificial limitation which retains the concept of the home console as exclusively or primarily a gaming machine. In some ways the Switch consoles are anachronistic. But they retain the sense that the console is a console and that the video game is a video game. That is indeed the primary distinctive that home video game consoles still have, and the static savings of cutting disc manufacturing and distribution may turn out to be illusory if it helps lead to a dynamic decline of the home console market itself.

Nothing ever stays the same, in technology and in life. Perhaps the video game console market, dominated by a big three for more than two decades now, is ripe for disruption; perhaps the sense that no other company could muscle into such a tight, complicated market is just complacence. Or perhaps, like the arcade before it, the home console will simply recede into the past and become the stuff of nostalgia.

Video games themselves, of course, are not going anywhere. But that old gaming experience—from the old days of plugging in RCA jacks and blowing out cartridges, to the newer days of turning everything on and listening to the disc tray sliding open, to the little rituals of bringing games to your friend’s house or swapping them at school—all of that was not incidental. It was, in many ways, the thing itself. And it will be missed.

Related Reading:

Home Consoles Changed What Video Games Were

Blast From The Past

Playing and Listening

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[T]he “immaculate conception theory” of neighborhood development….is common all around the country, in communities of many ages—from colonial Boston to postwar Minneapolis—and sets powerful background assumptions about what affordable, friendly neighborhoods can and should look like that inform many of our debates about housing. These assumptions mostly revolve around the idea that older housing was built the right way: ethically, modestly, with an eye to community rather than profit. These older values, in turn, highlight the faults of modern buildings: gaudy and wasteful, disruptive to existing communities, and motivated only by money.

Those old bungalow neighborhoods, for example, were just lovely homes arranged in a perfect low-key urban form, right?

[M]any of the arbiters of taste at the Seattle Magazines of the bungalow era believed those new bungalow neighborhoods “ruined” the character of the places they were built, just as new apartment buildings are maligned today. They even had a snappy put-down for it: “bungalow disease.” “Tradition has broken down,” wrote the British planner Thomas Sharp, describing a proliferation of bungalows on both sides of the Atlantic, and “taste is utterly debased…. The old trees and hedgerows…have given place to concrete posts and avenues of telegraph poles, to hoardings and enamel advertising signs.” Closer to Berger’s home, Architectural Record reviewed Seattle’s building boom in 1912 and, in an otherwise positive article, pronounced the quality of its new homes “disappointing.”

This is one of the reasons housing/urbanism is challenging to a lot of regular people; it requires them (us) to accept that our perceptions are subjective, our narratives are just our own way of making sense of randomness, and nostalgia is basically useless if not almost a kind of vice. It feels a little like a demand to accept chaos and the absence of meaning. At least, there’s a part of me that feels this way and which I have to occasionally argue against with myself.

On the other hand, it’s obviously true that new things are controversial, but once they’ve been hallowed by time and rendered familiar, they just become background facts of life. This is why I think some kind of continuity in the built environment is a good thing, despite thinking we should allow places to grow and mature.

The Rise of Grocery Tourism, , , July 2, 2026

Five days in New York and not a single trolley. I still consider this one of the great failures of my professional life.

Japan was different because come hell or highwater, I was finding a supermarket, and I did. Japan has KitKats in flavors that sound like haiku composed during a fever. There are soft drinks made of melon and sandwiches so neat they seem to have been assembled by watchmakers.

I once stood in a Japanese aisle looking at 15 varieties of bottled tea and felt the kind of reverence other people reserve for stained glass. This is the point of grocery tourism. It’s anthropology with a basket.

I also find supermarkets to be one of the most interesting things to visit in foreign countries, or even in different parts of the United States. (For example, in Montana a supermarket likely sells bison or elk meat of some sort, which is rarer out here on the East Coast.)

I suppose I understand this implicitly, but I’ve seen it put this way, and it’s rather insightful:

Grocery stores offer the rarest thing in modern travel, the uncurated ordinary. The supermarket is the one place travel cannot fully manicure itself. Hotels can lie. Brochures can lie. Restaurants, especially the ones with menus printed on thick paper, can lie beautifully. But supermarkets are hopeless at lying. They’re too busy. They’re too full of nappies and mince.

Museums tell you what a country wants to remember. Restaurants tell you what it wants photographed. Supermarkets tell you what it eats at 6:14 PM when everyone is tired and dinner has become a hostage negotiation. They tell you whether a nation believes in breakfast or whether its citizens require 12 flavors of mayonnaise or 87 yogurts. They disclose the private life of a destination complete with its anxieties and emergency snacks. They reveal the daily economic choices of consumers.

Read the whole thing.

How Britain went cold on ice cream vans, The Spectator, Zak Asgard, July 21, 2026

The Spectator is a mix of tabloidy conservative commentary, a little New York Post-like, and bits of back-of-the-book stuff like this. I love these little nostalgic essays on things that seem to be fading away. There’s reactionary sentiment here, or “the world is going to hell because [thing I liked as a kid] is not popular anymore.” It’s just a little melancholy but matter-of-fact meditation on delightful things from the past that had their day.

Everything changed on St Patrick’s Day, 1956, when Irish brothers William and James Conway took their pimped-out truck around the streets of West Philadelphia to sell a Hulk-green ice cream for the occasion. After a successful launch, the brothers decided to make the truck their full-time business. They called it ‘Mister Softee’.

Apparently this preceded the ice cream truck in England, which was directly inspired by Mister Softee. But:

the glory days were short-lived. By the mid-1980s, the impervious glacier of the ice cream van industry was beginning to melt (I apologise for the shoehorned pun). The rise of domestic freezers, supermarket supremacy and noise restrictions all facilitated the ice cream van’s decline.

That’s interesting, that supermarkets cut into the ice cream truck business. But it sounds right, because home freezers were not universal in the 1950s and the supermarket industry was growing rapidly, and the stores were getting bigger, with more products.

So much happened in just a few decades.

Why the revival series just isn’t working for me, r/KitchenNightmares, Reddit

I thought this was an insightful comment:

One of the things about the original run of Kitchen Nightmares that makes it feel as timeless as it does is that you can FEEL the recession hanging over every episode like a dark cloud. The late 2000s to early 2010s were a prime time for people to opportunistically “buy a restaurant on a whim” or open a restaurant with no experience because that was more or less the economic climate back then, and it was one of the leading causes of so many places being shut down. In a lot of those classic episodes, you can absolutely see the financial strain it’s putting on the owners and people who work there. The fact that a lot of them didn’t say open after the show is (albeit unintentionally) another reason a lot of them are as poignant as they are; in a lot of episodes it’s clear that a lot of the owners used the show as an excuse to get a free remodel, and later they’d pay for it the hard way. Really, the original run is a perfect storm: recession, overcrowded market, lack of experience from the people who own the restaurants, lack of respect for the people who work there, and Ramsay using his experience in the industry to help places that, for all intents and purposes probably should have just shut down stay open- it’s a perfect storm of aspects that makes for intriguing reality television.

Someone else notes that the Great Recession may not have been a time when lots of ordinary people were buying restaurants, and the show premiered in September 2007, meaning that the first episodes were probably filmed and produced before the recession hit. But I completely get what he means that the shadow of the recession loomed over those shows.

Despite the American version of Kitchen Nightmares playing up interpersonal drama between Ramsay and the restaurant people, or the restaurant staffs’ intra-staff disputes, I did always think those episodes actually taught something important. They showed the kind of despair people can themselves into, just by making mistakes; how a decision can just keep reverberating, such that cutting corners and serving frozen slop can be a little ripple that leads to the collapse of your finances or your marriage. You can blow up your life without ever having done anything wrong. There was always a loneliness and a sense of being trapped, and under the reality-TV drama those episodes were warnings and tragedies.

The new ones are fun—Gordon Ramsay is never not funny doing his incredulous “Wow” or dejected “F*ck me” or screaming “How old is this?”, but that undercurrent of the fragility of human endeavor is absent.

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Twilley notes that the quest to make lager, which needs cool temperatures, year-round was one of the initial reasons artificial cooling was developed. She writes a lot about the evolving cultural and technical ideas about refrigeration. Refrigeration was seen as making food less fresh, at first. Some of this was more or less superstition, but it was also because food that was getting old could appear fresher than it was, and because the absence of a proper “cold chain” from harvest to consumption meant that food often began to go bad at some point in the chain.

In terms of how the technology was understood, the first uses of artificial cooling were to produce ice, with the insight that artificial cold could directly replace ice coming a bit later. There were many ideas about how artificial cold would work, including one that used pipes going into homes, with cold imagined like a metered public utility service. History imposes a narrative, because we can see how the story ends and each step on the way fits into the eventual known conclusion, but none of that was obvious or preordained at the time.

These bits of trivia about past attitudes often make little sense today, which is kind of humbling; what certainties do we hold now that will come to seem impossibly silly or ignorant? It’s a reminder that we don’t know as much as we think we do.

However, as the book went on, I found its analysis and politics a bit tendentious, and I want to discuss that here, especially because there’s a land use aspect to this that I think the author could have probed more than she did.

First, though, I’ll say that the most interesting analytical bit in the book is Twilley’s argument that refrigeration alters the scale of food-related commerce. Because cooling warehouses are expensive, supermarkets buy huge volumes from large reliable consistent suppliers, etc., there’s an “embiggening” effect of making the food supply refrigerated. This advantages large farms, large wholesalers and warehouses, and large supermarkets. This both pushes smaller producers out of the market, leading to economic concentration, and blandifies and streamlines what is getting produced.

This is a really interesting point, and it rings true to me. I think “scale” is a really important and subtle aspect of a lot things related to housing, land use, commerce, and transportation. Car orientation and suburbanization had this same “embiggening” effect on the scale at which business was done (larger and fewer stores, larger and more centralized distribution and supply networks) and real estate development (larger lots, larger development firms). The mass refrigeration of the food supply would appear to be one factor in this overall process by which smallness, variety, and localism were largely stamped out of American life in the 20th century.

At one point Twilley quotes someone, in a bit on Paris and the greater reliance on frequent food shopping, about how great cities and small refrigerators went together. It may have been this fellow she quoted, a designer who argues that “Small Fridges Make Good Cities.” The idea being that less space to store food, frequent shopping, more and smaller and more proximate grocery stores, etc., are all part of an urban way of life. By contrast, the suburban model turns consumers into something like food warehousers themselves.

This is an interesting point, and a different way of thinking about the scale issue. I’m not sure many Americans, however, would find “You should own a smaller fridge so we make our communities more like cities” is a winning argument.

All of that is pretty neutral, but I said I found the book tendentious. My basic issue with it is twofold. One, its “on the one hand, on the other hand” approach of technical neutrality combined with problematizing and implying but then walking back the apparent point.1 I’m going to write a whole book about how refrigeration is not the boon we think it is, not the answer to food waste we think it is, not the answer to nutrition we think it is, and an environmental disaster to boot, but I’m not against refrigeration, I just think we should tweak how we use it and not rely on it for everything. I guess one sentence doesn’t make a compelling book.

Secondly,

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It’s on a corridor with a lot of medical offices:

Now those buildings in the first image don’t exactly look like medical offices, but you never know, and the preponderance of medical offices would make you think this whole strip was built out around the same time with all of these medical practices.

However, we learn that at one time this was a lightly developed commercial strip, with an A&P supermarket sitting where the building in question sits now, a new suburban supermarket with free parking just a stone’s throw from the town center:

Winchester Tales, a Facebook page run by a local historian, even offers this side-by-side image:

Huh.

But this couldn’t actually be the old A&P, could it?

An easy way to identify buildings is to look at the aerial images and look closely at the roofs or any ridges or funny details in the back of the building; a remodel will typically not touch those things, so you can tell it’s the same building.

Here’s the current building on the Google Maps satellite view:

There’s a building there as early as 1963, making this an early suburban A&P, probably a location which began life in the old town. (Groceteria, a supermarket history website, notes a handful of A&Ps in Winchester over the years, both urban and suburban stores.)

Here’s a 2002 aerial image from NETR Historic Aerials; we know this is the A&P structure because of the peaked roof element at the front, although the cupola has been removed (Groceteria’s entry on this location says it was converted to a Superfresh before it closed, probably in the late 1990s or early 2000s.)

And here it is in 2006:

It has the exact same dimensions, an altered roofline element at the front (with a new cupola-like design!), and you can see at the top left there’s some kind of roof element that was flattened out. You would never see those kinds of similarities on buildings that were complete demos/rebuilds.

The other building next to the A&P is also the original Drug Fair! At one time it was a Rite-Aid, and now it appears to be empty although Google notes it as another medical office. It does not appear to have been renovated. But look at this! On the building’s right side is a two-story section of likely offices of some kind:

The building’s dimensions did not change from its time as Drug Fair to now, so this is not an extension; it is probably some kind of remodel, though I can’t find anything about it. I doubt a suburban retail structure would have had this originally.

There is so much to see, if you look.

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There is some truth to this critique of American life, and there really is something almost otherworldly and yet déjà-vu familiar about life in beautiful, walkable, pleasantly crowded cities. Now, maybe I just really shouldn’t have been in Europe in one of the hottest weeks of the year, during one of those heat waves that never happens that happens at least once a year now. But our recent vacation spanning Italy, Austria, and the Czech Republic felt less like an aching whisper of what could be, and more like a confirmation of the oversized, air-conditioned American way of life.

TLDR: the intense heat, from which you can’t escape all day and maybe not even at night, makes you a little goofy, in a laugh-so-you-don’t-cry sort of way, and a heat wave is a good time for a roast, isn’t it?

What you imagine when you go to Europe is fairytale sightseeing followed by a lazy evening on a town square sipping an aperitif. The hardest question you’re supposed to wrestle with is, Aperol or Campari? What they don’t tell you is you sit outside and nurse a drink because you work four days a week, your apartment makes a shoebox look like Versailles, and it’s too damn hot to do anything else. It’s too damn hot to do that too, but at least you have a drink. And France even tried to ban that!

Some say Europe is just poor. I don’t think that’s quite right; they’re rich enough to choose to live like they’re in the third world. During the height of the heat wave, the French were chalking over their windows to deflect heat, like cavemen scratching at a wall. The difference is, the cavemen didn’t have beautiful churches.

Speaking of beautiful churches, we went to Mass at one of them. If not for a couple of stragglers and a few nuns padding the stats, you could’ve mistaken it for the Last Supper itself; 12 people showed up.

Beautiful architecture only gets you so far. There’s certainly some very nice new construction in Europe, and some modernism which does not appear designed to offend the sensibilities of normal people. But most of the beautiful buildings are just…old. Even the beer is old. I saw a brewery founded in 1861; we were abolishing slavery while they were drinking lager.

And the thing is, they’re not really building these things anymore. If America had an extra 1,000 years, we’d be Europe. We’d have houses and cathedrals from the dark ages too. Europe isn’t better at this; they’ve just been around so long, they’ve stopped doing it for longer than we’ve even been around.

And those picturesque cathedral squares that anchor every city and draw so many people into the old cities (where most people don’t live anyway)? They’re the product of a state of affairs that very few modern Europeans, probably rightly, would return to. There was no separation of church and state, no negotiation over whose denomination got to have the most centrally located church. You can have communion in any church, as long as it’s Catholic. How many Europeans these days even know exactly what a cathedral is? How many of them appreciate that these majestic structures that define so much of the look and feel of their cities were built by a religion they don’t believe in, and whose preeminence they would not return to?

Europe is very secular these days; it’s Portland and Seattle with history. Most of what people think of as “Europe,” and what Europe sells as “Europe,” is old and obsolete. The world that built it now resides firmly in the past, and this is considered a triumph of liberalism, democracy, and human rights. So it may be, but there’s a certain irony in this. The line goes that Americans love Disneyland but don’t realize it’s basically just a walkable car-free city; I felt the creeping suspicion that walkable car-free Europe is basically Disneyland.

And in any case, most of Europe isn’t car-free anyway, and the drivers on old European streets are crazier than the drivers in a Costco parking lot. It does make you appreciate the safety factor—for pedestrians—of smaller vehicles. I’ve never been so grateful for a tin can with a manual transmission.

I shouldn’t be too negative. Italy was very nice, especially the Alpine regions. Certainly, we enjoyed it more than Sicily. The Czech Republic was alright too. The people were wonderful. In particular, the Czech women are supposed to be very beautiful. I guess they were all out of town. The food is tasty, but it has no green. It makes British pub fare look like a garden salad. The beer is cheap, though, and goes well with the food. It’s almost like reverse razors-and-razor-blades.

Austria did not wow us quite so much (and it was what made me think of Seattle). Some even say schnitzel was invented in Italy, so Austria hasn’t done much of anything. They do make a good schnitzel, though, and a schnitzel—that is, one schnitzel—is enough. The Austrians think they’re good at fighting wars and frying meat, and they’re good at one of those things.

Well, they’ve done one other thing: Mozart was Austrian. (So was someone else.) Mozart was from Salzburg. Salzburg is very lucky; if Mozart had been from Albany or St. Louis, Albany and St. Louis would be international tourist attractions. Salzburg is also famous for salt, which it’s actually named after. They might even like salt more than Mozart. At least they’re still making salt.

Salzburg also has a castle—the imposing Fortress Hohensalzburg—yet another reminder that most of the reasons anyone goes here are hundreds of years old. In the middle of the castle’s museum, in between tidbits of medieval history, is a display about the persistence of poverty and inequality, complete with a little poor box if you should be so moved.

I mean, look at this. What are you doing, thinking you should feel nice on vacation?

And now for a break in our scheduled programming, we would like to remind you that we haven’t beaten poverty, even in our high-tax paradise, but your stray coins might do the trick. Remember, making our visitors, who are just trying to learn about our history, feel bad about the problems we can’t solve is how we achieve economic equality!

The museum also has a section with “accessible language.” If you’ve ever taught a toddler to read, it will be familiar. This is a castle. A castle is very big. A person called a king lives in the castle. He is very important. Oh, and maybe he rules an independent ecclesiastical principality:

Why, a four-year-old child could understand this exhibit! Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can’t make head or tail of it.

Personally, I find this not so much “accessible” as condescending. And I’d like to know how many people who read at a kindergarten level are visiting a museum of cultural history. Maybe I’d be surprised. But it’s worth noting all the rest of the exhibits are explained in normal language. The poor peasants only get one accessible section. They should be thankful they get that much, I suppose. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Maybe it’s the secularized echo of Catholic guilt or Calvinism, but these Europeans really do seem to like taking a swipe at their own beautiful history, and impose just a little guilt on the tourists substantially keeping their economies afloat.

Over in Vienna, they thought a sculpture depicting plastic garbage would be a fine addition to a major historical street which is now a luxury shopping district.

Oh, sorry, it’s not a pile of garbage, it’s a baroque-inspired “still life.”

Look on my works, ye mighty, and perspire.

Plastic is killing our environment, you see. Don’t forget about that just because you’re on vacation. International air travel and luxury shopping, on the other hand, might be the key to solving global warming.

Looking at this stuff in the sweltering heat, the right-wing jingoistic Euro-bashing felt like it might have a grain of truth. This is a civilization that euthanatizes its depressed people and leaves its elderly to die in heat waves, and then pats itself on the back for riding bikes and drinking from paper straws and having refrigerators the size of Rubik’s cubes.

In Europe, it’s easier to end your life with a doctor’s prescription than to install air conditioning. It’s easier to buy a gun in America than install air conditioning in Europe; you don’t need a doctor’s note, after all, to buy a gun.

This contrast does make you question the rationality and morality of anything else they do over there. Europe today coasts on the things it didn’t build, and which its ossified bureaucracy would not allow to be built again. What could such a decadent, exhausted, civilizational dead end possibly have to teach us?

Well, now that I’ve cooled off, of course I understand that this doesn’t say anything about urbanism or principles of good land use, and whether or not we can take examples of those things from other places. But it does say something about the near worship of “Europe” as an idea among a certain set of professionally ashamed Americans.

The question that Europe makes me wonder—in all seriousness—is whether private discomfort or at least simplicity is, in fact, a sort of requirement for, or flipside of, great public spaces and cities. I’m kind of kidding when I say you sit on a piazza with a spritz because your apartment is tiny and it’s too hot to go indoors, but not completely kidding. And yet the observation that American suburbia is a privatization of what should ideally be public—the yard for the park, the large comfortable home for the public gathering space—is also in some sense true.

But Europe exists on a kind of path dependency, where there’s much less land to sprawl, a longer history of tight, dense urban living, and—importantly—less toleration of antisocial behavior than in the United States. Americans might at one time have ended up like Europe, and in many ways we were like Europe (in terms of having great cities), but American life diverged from that common origin so long ago that to go back is really to become something that we no longer are. Europe flirted with car dominance and turned back, but it never had the system of complete car dependence and suburban sprawl that most Americans are now quite used to.

In other words, does urbanism in America necessarily mean a tradeoff between expected and familiar private comforts and a speculative, hoped-for beautiful public realm? And if it does—and I think it probably does to some extent—is this a tradeoff more than a small minority of Americans are really willing to make? The problem of disorder and antisocial behavior, and the homelessness crisis, and the conflicts over race and policing and much ugly history there, also create a lot of thorny issues.

That’s what I think when I visit Europe: this is very beautiful, but so much would have to change for anything like it to be daily life for most Americans, in most of America. And I’m not sure how much of that change I would really be willing to take, and how much of it most people outside of the urbanist coalition would be willing to take.

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Somehow, weirdly, the single-family home has morphed from a place to raise kids into a place to die. It has become the death house.

“I’ll only leave this house feet first.”

You’ve probably heard this phrase. Maybe your dad said it. Maybe you’ve said it yourself. Empty nesters, still living in the b…

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Been out in some of the most desolate and depopulated country in NYS these last couple of days.

The post-industrial regions of the Adirondack Park are truly strange. Many towns have lost more than 50% of their population since 1960. In quite a few of these towns, there are no longer any publicly-operating businesses at all.

But it turns out that when iron mines and paper mills shut down, not everybody actually leaves. A certain percentage of the inhabitants and their progeny stay on indefinitely, scraping by in what anyone could reasonably call total obscurity and isolation.

Many are likely commuting an hour (or much longer on snowy roads) to fairly low-wage jobs. Others are marginal self-employed types, and others are content with a combination of welfare, hard liquor, scrap metal, and long days of hunting and fishing. And a handful of lucky ones, of course, work for the DOT or the school. Tourism is virtually non-existent this far north and west.

That idea—that when the economy goes, the people don’t necessarily leave—is a little “fall of Rome,” isn’t it? The Romans were still there after the fall of the empire. They were the same people even as their world fell apart. And after the dark ages, Rome came back, and today we can trace a line of continuity all the way from those days to the present.

This makes me think, as I thought about last year when I’d just finished the book, of the thesis of Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck, and the overall thrust of the YIMBY movement. YIMBYism is about housing; Stuck is about the relationship between housing and mobility, and a probing of the downstream effects of the housing crisis artificially reducing mobility and opportunity-seeking.

Here is how, for me, these two seemingly divergent things—the “forgotten” places, and the housing crisis and economic opportunity—are related. I wonder whether the mainstream success of the YIMBY movement—that is, the restoration of the idea that it is completely normal and good to building housing to keep pace with jobs and residential demand—could actually help revive these “forgotten” places.

I think there are two broad versions of YIMBYism, or at least two emphases. One is basically big-city boosterism, and is an effort by and for urbanites in the handful of high-growth, high-wage, particularly housing-crunched cities. These are, almost by definition, the places where the YIMBY movement has the most purchase. One of them, San Francisco, is the city which birthed the movement.

Then secondly, there is also the subtly different emphasis of Stuck’s housing-mobility synthesis. This is a more general idea about seeking opportunity: of housing as the means by which people can access opportunity. “Seeking opportunity” certainly overlaps with moving to one of those 3-5 top cities. But it is not always the same as that, and there must be other places where opportunity can be found.

Now I think some housing folks hear anything like this as If you just didn’t buy espresso and avocado toast you could afford a home or why don’t you just move to [economically downscale, remote community where you have no ties] so you can afford a house? Housing advocates often feel that talking about alternative places to live is just repackaged NIMBYism.

I’m not suggesting that

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This is a good critique of Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger’s watering down of some important state-level housing bills:

The gulf between the campaign theme and enacted policy invites comparison to last year’s splashiest policy book– Abun…

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This makes me think of an old anti-YIMBY essay that inspired one of my first long pieces here at this newsletter, back in 2021. It’s a simplistic and moralistic article, but it’s full of ideas I grew up hearing: that owners care more for their properties than renters, that ownership builds virtue, etc. Maybe there’s a grain of truth in that, but ironically, I think it abstracts what are supposed to be practical considerations into an ideology.

A similar piece, which I’m not able to find now, mentioned in passing how all the young people want to move to the same 3-5 big cities because they see them on social media. There’s an idea that what we call the “housing crisis” is just a figment of a small handful of cities taking up too large a share of our economy and culture. Ross Douthat, back in 2017 when the housing crisis was first becoming a mainstream issue, demanded that we “Break Up the Liberal City,” arguing that the big cities are more like monopolies than wealth-generating assets.

Jack Seiden, the guy who wrote the tweet above, is not someone I’m familiar with, but his social media profile suggests he’s a YIMBY with some reservations—a pretty normal stance, and not a basically anti-urban right-leaning person like the ones I’ve just quoted. His point is that we kind of imagine we’d like to live somewhere in a way that is maybe relatively modern.

If that’s true it suggests that there is something to the conservative gripe about the small number of big cities. Descriptively, at least. Now it’s not true that

social media or even economic concentration drives the housing crisis—lots of smaller cities and towns have also seen price increases, because basically all communities pulled back on housing production for a few decades.

But part of the reason that’s become a problem is because

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My wife and I ate there after we both saw a local news item about the restaurant, noting its 40th anniversary. It seemed lik…

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This is a good a piece about a local housing policy idea from Atlanta:

Atlanta, like most American cities, has long deployed the standard menu of housing subsidies. These include Inclusionary Zoning, LIHTC-financed projects, and demand-side policies like down pa…

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It’s nice to see a local paper. The building it’s in looks like a custom-built office building, to me. However, as you would probably guess, it is not. In fact, it isn’t even a previously existing office building.

Take a look at this, from a very neat post at the Cham…

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I obviously cannot read the label, but it appears to be finely crushed pepper flakes, a pretty common ingredient in Korean cuisine. What really caught my attention, though, was not the product …

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