New and Old #249
Giant houses, political contempt, trade as a way of life, and suburban food tours
How Giant White Houses Took Over America, Slate, Dan Kois, March 6, 2025
Giant White Houses are white, with jet-black accents: the shutters, the gutters, the rooves. They are giant—Hulk houses—swollen to the very limits of the legally allowed property setback, and unnaturally tall. They feature a mishmash of architectural features, combining, say, the peaked roof of a farmhouse with squared-off sections reminiscent of city townhomes. They mix horizontal siding, vertical paneling, and painted brick willy-nilly.
Like the giant White House just down the road from us in Washington, D.C., the Giant White House may be occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, but whoever they are, they are rich.
These houses are everywhere in the D.C. suburbs. I suppose they’re just what’s on trend right now, the same way bungalows predominated a century ago and ranches half a century ago. There’s always something slightly unnerving about a current trend, and something slightly comforting about an obsolete one.
I guess what I mainly wonder is, what does a likely family of no more than four people do with a house this big? It’s always struck me as a little lonely that house size and family size have inversely correlated for many decades now.
Sic Semper Contemptui, Maximum New York, Daniel Golliher, December 28, 2025
This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this kind of interaction—an otherwise amiable person is suddenly seized, as if possessed, by cruelty and disregard. They are seemingly not in control of themselves, and make uncharacteristic statements wishing specific deaths upon others, sexual assault in men’s prisons, and other baldly uncivilized comments. Their facial features twist with pleased bitterness, and their presence triggers the same part of the brain that would activate upon sight of a rabid dog. One knows that they are no longer a trusted interlocutor who can handle things with grace; they must be treated carefully, either to guide them back to self control and sanity, or to excise them from the conversation (and the event, if need be).
Golliher is writing against contempt as a vice here. He notes that of course, contempt can be warranted:
Like justified anger, justified contempt is appropriate, even healthy when expressed well. Justified contempt is felt by an individual who has truthfully appraised the target of their contempt, truthfully appraised their values, and who manages the emotion in a fashion commensurate with that which is contemptible. This individual would also understand that contempt, like anger, burns the spirit and curdles the mind if it’s held more than temporarily.
It is possible to hold views very strongly, and not dehumanize people who think differently. Even if they are very bad! This raises a question about a fractious democratic country: how do you deal with fellow citizens whose views are so divergent from yours that you consider them not merely mistaken or even wrong, but essentially inadmissible? I don’t really know. But the warning against basking in anger and contempt, and justifying it because the other guys really are bad, is well taken.
On the Modern Silk Road, Coco’s Newsletter, Coco Liu, November 9, 2025
This is one of the most interesting things I’ve read in awhile, and I’m going to write something more bouncing off of it. It’s about the difference between doing business in a kind of abstract, financialized setting, and actually doing trade: being the actual buyer or trader who goes to expos, factories, does logistics for import/export, etc.
And this is striking:
It felt like the modern Silk Road—a network of trade routes connecting the East and West, linking China to the Middle East and Europe since Marco Polo times. Despite seeing people of all colors, the fair was dominated by those from Central Asia, India, and Russia, along with a number of Africans and some Europeans and Australians scattered throughout. In the days I was there, I didn’t meet a single American—an absence shaped by our geopolitics, our tariffs, our deliberate distance from this world.
America feels almost sheltered from this world of trade.
It makes me wonder how much of the general sense of decline in America with regard to product quality, knowledge, customer service, etc. has to do with this, broadly; with American businesspeople operating at a remove from the physical things they sell and the mechanisms by which those things actually end up on shelves, or in warehouses. How much tacit knowledge, how much of an entire je ne sais quoi, a mechanically literate worldview, is imperceptibly lost?
Virginialicious Food Tours Offer an Insider’s Guide to Annandale’s Koreatown, Northern Virginia Magazine, Alice Levitt, December 30, 2025
I will also be writing more about this, but just wanted to note it here: a small company founded a couple of years ago is doing food tours in Annandale, Virginia, an older suburban community known for its large Korean population (and lots of Korean restaurants!).
This is interesting:
The typical guest list, says Kim, is 90 percent composed of DMV locals. “Quite a few people have told me, ‘Hey, I’ve lived in Annandale for 26 years, and had never been to any of these restaurants, because it was a little intimidating to walk into these restaurants.’ So that makes me really, really happy that now they can go back to their neighborhood restaurants,” says Kim. On my tour, participants ranged from total Korean food newbies to the founder of a DC kimchi company.
And so, to me, is the fact that this is taking place in suburbia. This is one of those founding aspects of my work: the phenomenon of older suburbs growing into very interesting, diverse places, of immigrant communities settling in suburbia instead of old urban cores, and of much of “urbanism,” broadly, taking place in these aging suburbs.
It’s a warning to me not to view them with snobbery, or as blank slates for redevelopment. They’re really places of their own, and it’s so cool to see someone from a totally different background and angle doing something unique with that.
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These new builds are super common where I live too (NC) and the thing that drives me nuts about them is that the first floor is almost always entirely open concept. So yes, the house is big but there’s no real privacy or delineation of space. You can’t have one kid practice piano while another does homework and you cook dinner and your spouse watches tv. Or, I guess you can but it’s loud and unpleasant. My house is 1200 sq ft but I have different rooms for different activities which makes the house actually feel larger and flow better than its enormous neighbors.
How big is the house?
I can answer - 1 bedroom for the parents, 1 for each kid. A home office because one if not both parents work from home. A guest bedroom because one of not both parents moved away from the place they grew up, so in order to maintain relationships with even just their nuclear family, not to mention any cousins they were friends with in their youth, or college friends, they should have a place for guests to stay overnight. A dining room and living room for company, and a playroom or den for their kids to make a mess in.
Having separate entertaining rooms for company is huge for facilitating adult social life because it already takes a couple of hours to make food and stuff. If you also have to straighten up the room where your kids play together (because you only have one living room) AND keep it picked up it adds a whole other dimension of work. Also of course, the kitchen should be separate from the entertaining rooms because again - making food AND cleaning the kitchen before anyone gets there isn’t realistic, especially if you’re also watching the kids while this is happening.
That’s 8 rooms - 4 bedrooms, 1 work room and 3 living/ entertaining rooms; not counting bathrooms. IMO people don’t really need more than 3 bathrooms for a house like this but now a days the trend is to have one bathroom for each bedroom plus a half bathroom, so a house like I describe would have 4.5 bathrooms. Plus a two car garage. That’s about 3000 sq ft.
The wHo nEedS a BiG hOUse discourse is a NIMBY, degrowther mindset imo, and that’s me being nice. It’s people who don’t have small kids, or else maybe they do, but their kids don’t need space to do things because they just watch tv and iPad all day. Also people who don’t ever have guests.
But most damagingly, it’s people who see that today’s tradeoff for most people is less space in a walkable neighborhood VS more space in an exurb and (1) take that tradeoff as a given and (2) valorize it.
To be clear - we have 5 people living in 1600 sq ft, because given our constraints, I’d rather trade walkability for space. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t rather have both space and walkability. They’re not inherently impossible. We can still build more.