New and Old #248
The (almost) end of Sears, modernist McMansions, weird music formats, and the Lord's Prayer
Why Sears’s Last Great Hope Was a Promise That Never Materialized, New York Times, Lauren Coleman-Lochner, December 26, 2025
Five Sears stores are still operating in the country, but they won’t be around much longer, industry experts predict.
Neither will Seritage Growth Properties, the real estate investment trust created to cash in on the value of the retailer’s properties. It abandoned its somewhat audacious plan to turn Sears’s rich real estate holdings into dazzling mixed-use properties. Today, Seritage is offloading the last of its assets as it pays down a $1.6 billion term loan from Warren E. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
“The goal is to sell the remaining Seritage assets as quickly and profitably as possible, but we are also very open to an alternative transaction that could enhance shareholder value,” Adam Metz, chief executive of Seritage, said in an interview.
The winding down of both companies in tandem brings to an end a two-decade saga that the hedge fund magnate Edward S. Lampert started when he bought Sears in 2005.
When Mr. Lampert combined Sears with Kmart, which he had bought out of bankruptcy in 2003, investors were betting that the retailers would be better off dead and their land repurposed.
Surprisingly, Wikipedia says Sears locations peaked in 2011, with 2,705 stores. I quite wonder how a chain of only five stores even manages to buy inventory anymore. You would think the mechanics of running a big chain start to break before you reach zero. Maybe they’re already broken; unfortunately none of the five remaining stores are close enough to me to visit any.
I admit I was surprised to learn that there are any Sears stores left. Believe it or not, there is still one single Kmart store left in the continental United States (Guam and the Virgin Islands have one each still). The mainland location is only in the former garden center, with the body of the store having become at At Home.
It’s really a shame and a waste that these companies were run so poorly, and that they were not simply shut down and sold off, but slowly killed and left to decay ignominiously. It strikes me, I suppose, as almost unpatriotic.
The McModern, a term Wagner coined, is the latest iteration of the McMansion. It’s a sprawling, hyper-streamlined house with a flat roof, perpendicular white walls, large expanses of glass, and cantilevered platforms, often overlooking a vista. But like its predecessor, it often lacks the careful intentionality of its source material.
There are a lot of these popping up in the D.C. suburbs, and I find them even less tasteful than the ridiculous McMansion styles of old.
And this—the colonization of the resale mentality over everyday living choices—seems not great, and is no doubt a reason houses feel somewhat sparser and less lived-in, in a general, subtle way, than they used to:
There are clear reasons McModerns came to be the mansion style du jour, nearly inescapable in 2025. The first: resale value. The rise of Zillow and other real estate aggregators now easily reveal the value of your and any neighbors’ homes, and as such, design mindsets have changed. “In the last 15 years, the house has become an asset that must be protected from any kind of devaluation,” Wagner continues. To help safeguard it, builders are paring back its look to create more universal appeal.
It’s a good read; read the whole thing.
How DCC Pushed MiniDisc Into Existence, Obsolete Electronics Archive, ObsoleteArchive, December 18, 2025
When digital audio began moving beyond the Compact Disc, reinvention was not the first thing on Philips’ mind. What stuck with them was a past decision they had no desire to relive. Ownership mattered this time, perhaps more than innovation.
Digital Compact Cassette followed that thinking. Rather than break with the past, it extended it. The design leaned toward continuity and predictability, shaped by the assumption that Sony had nothing immediate waiting.
Philips announced DCC in late 1990, marketing it as the successor to the analog Compact Cassette, a digital tape housed in a familiar cassette-sized shell, with players designed to remain compatible with existing tapes.
This is about how the MiniDisc was pushed into the market by Sony in a period when there were a lot of attempts at developing the next physical music format in the vein of the cassette or the CD. The article doesn’t mention the DAT, Sony’s own digital tape which had come out just a few years before the DCC.
None of these formats ended up becoming dominant or even mainstream, but it’s a neat period in consumer and design history, like a kind of Cambrian explosion of technology ideas.
The Lord’s Prayer, Cass’s Substack, Cass Sunstein, December 17, 2025
Yes, this is the Cass Sunstein who co-wrote Nudge. This is a very nice and subtly political reflection:
All of those words stuck in my mind, of course, though some of them seemed to run together, and I didn’t know what they meant. I think I long thought that “HallowedBeTheName” was one word, just as I remember thinking, when I first said the alphabet, that “LMNOP” was one word. (Doesn’t it sound like one? Say it quickly, and see?)
Here’s a part of the Lord’s Prayer that particularly got to me early on, and that has stuck with me over the decades: “And Forgive us our trespasses/As We Forgive those who trespass against us.”
Any young person feels trespassed against, a lot, and it’s natural to be angry, unforgiving, and punitive. (We tend to feel trespassed against more than we actually have been.) Any young person trespasses, and hopes so much for forgiveness. (We tend to acknowledge that we trespass less than we should.) The Lord’s Prayer links one’s own forgiveness of others with the Lord’s forgiveness of oneself.
Related Reading:
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For anybody interested the YouTube channel Ray out There has done a couple of good videos on the last remaining Sears stores.
I have the same question about Sears inventory. Three years ago, I visited the last remaining Sears in New England (which as far as I can tell is still operating). At the time, the majority of their floor space seemed to be devoted to hundreds of pieces of a single SKU. Like literally what used to be an entire department would just be a single coat, faced dozens of times. I doubt much has changed since I was last there.
https://heathracela.substack.com/p/the-last-sears-in-new-england