New and Old #247
The loss of winter, the changing classic rock canon, the meaning of neighborliness, old Maryland rail lines,
Winter doesn’t exist, Anandi Mishra, Either/Or, December 13, 2025
A kind of pseudo winter ennui has taken over me these last few weeks. A kind of perpetual worry and sadness, even a variant of homesickness, for the planet that I once knew and called home. Wherever I go, read about, talk about the environment as we once collectively knew it has changed in ways I find distressing. Perhaps this is what they call solastalgia?
The days when the sun does peek on us, the city feels like it’s thawing, coming out of whatever small freeze it had experienced in the day before. Yesterday evening I sat till late at night working on something, completely oblivious to the window open next to me. This was on December 11. I checked the temperature and it was a tepid 9 degrees with more rain than anything else coming our way down the days. I cannot emphasise enough on how calamitous and deeply mournful this is.
This is a moving piece and it expresses something that is often very bland and wonky—a “global” problem which means nothing to so many people—in an aching, personal way.
What is solastalgia? Google tells me it means “a form of emotional distress, grief, or homesickness experienced when your familiar home environment is being negatively transformed by environmental change, like climate change, mining, or urban sprawl, making it feel unfamiliar or desolate even though you haven’t left.”
On some level, this is, I suppose, how NIMBYs feel when their neighborhoods change. Whether or not the change is good, the sense of loss is real. The disappearance of distinct seasons, and whatever environmental problems are downstream of it, seems like a real and great loss.
Mishra’s piece reminded me of a review I wrote of a book about global warming and the fate of Tangier Island, a small settlement off the coast of Virginia. I wrote this, addressing it to a conservative audience which tends to see climate change as a “liberal” issue, or at best as a very abstract and distant one:
Climate change isn’t a threat to “the planet” in some amorphous sense, nor is it a “global” problem. It is a threat to thousands of very local cultures and ways of life all around the world.
Read Mishra’s whole piece.
Classic Rock is Changing, Can’t Get Much Higher, Chris Dalla Riva, December 11, 2025
In one sense, the crux of this piece is pretty simple. First, our conception of what constitutes a genre changes over time. Musical categories are not static. Second, this conception is not just influenced by new music coming out but our changing view of the past.
When it’s laid out as I’ve done here, I don’t think you’re that shocked. But I think these ideas cut against our intuitive notions of how we think about music. You might think that since “Hey Jude” is a classic rock staple today that it will always be. That isn’t necessarily the case. The past is alive, and we are constantly wrestling with it.
This is very interesting, and it has a lot to do thematically with my thinking recently about old consumer goods, old buildings, how we throw our experience of “the past” now into what we think of as the past itself, etc. It’s a nice, fun read.
Which neighborhood was neighbor?, Political Devotions, Bryce Tolpen, December 16, 2025
Whether we call them friends or neighbors, such basic, nickel-and-dime public relationships are rare without a city’s mix of residences, businesses, and the strangers who are drawn over time to the businesses, to the diversity of uses, and to the spectacle of other people.
Public life is rare, then, in project housing. Like most suburban neighborhoods, city projects contain only residences and attract no strangers looking to share in public life. Consequently, most project residents, Jacobs says, are “faced with the choice of sharing much or nothing”—of developing close friendships or of maintaining complete distance from their fellow residents. Making acquaintances, on which public life thrives, isn’t often plausible in projects: residents often fear that making acquaintances will lead only to trouble.
This is a really interesting piece. This bit is recounting Jane Jacobs’s theory as to why old-fashioned urban neighborhoods fostered a kind of casual community that kept order in a way that project housing failed to.
It also raises the question of what makes someone a neighbor in the Christian sense—in the sense that Jesus meant when He answered the question, “Who is my neighbor?”
While Baltimore’s path to becoming one of the four largest cities in the US began long before its first railroad tracks were laid, the city’s growth in the years before the Civil War was deeply intertwined with the rail network that developed around it.
In 1860, Maryland had only 55 miles of railroad per 100,000 residents — less than 40% of Virginia’s 145 miles per 100,000 residents — but its network consisted of lines that tied Baltimore to important out-of-state destinations, such as Philadelphia, the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, the Ohio River, and Washington, DC.
Wow. It’s curious how economics can alter mental geography; Baltimore must have loomed larger in people’s “mental maps” when it was a more powerful economic center. Now Washington, D.C. is the central city in the region, but it wasn’t always like that.
Give this a read for a bit of history that is probably not familiar.
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The link to the classic rock piece is taking me to the winter piece instead