New and Old #270
Tiny businesses, different kinds of cities, the cost of car-centric cities, and bitter drinks
I’ll be doing some traveling and will be taking off from the posting schedule here, which I’ve not done since starting this in 2021; I think I deserve it! I’ll see you at the end of the month.
Why Kissas Intrigue (Places for People), Craig Mod, November 2024
On tiny, sole-proprietor businesses in Japan, many of which are some sort of cafe or restaurant:
I’m here in Saboten, sipping some OK black coffee, drinking a “lemon squash,” eating some buttered toast, smoking a single cigarette, typing these words, knowing that if I had come here twenty years ago it would have been sort of like it was today. Maybe even with some of the same folks chatting with the owners I’m seeing today.
Shōwa is a weird era — spanning war terrors to cute cafés — but the defining characteristic of so many of these beloved Shōwa spaces is simply that they are human. Undeniably human. Sadly, that’s a contemporary rarity: Pillars around which relationships can be formed over the course of a lifetime. Constants against which to measure time. I think often what a contemporary version of a kissa might look like, and think that maybe this younger generation will be the ones to really kick it off.
This is like a lot of things: things which served a social purpose beyond their narrow business, but which did not necessarily do so intentionally or by design; it just kind of worked that way, and worked. We replaced the narrow business of such institutions with what may be technically superior narrow substitutes, but they do not substitute for the wider purpose the old thing informally fulfilled.
This reminds me of a bit in Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she talks about urban renewal and the public housing projects. Specifically, there’s a discursion on candy stores, and how dozens of tiny candy stores with an owner known to the neighborhood were replaced by much larger, impersonal stores inside or near the projects, with hourly employees who didn’t, maybe understandably, care to provide the sort of “known and trusted neighborhood confidante” role that the old tiny store proprietors did almost by happenstance.
This is a huge element of what “urbanism” is, and we almost no longer even have the language for it. And there is so much cultural amnesia in America that when we observe the same thing abroad—the same thing that governed American towns and cities really up until midcentury—we find it to be some sort of pleasant but slightly weird only those slightly different can do.
Read the whole thing.
The Four Types of Cities, The Caravan & The Throne, Akhilesh Pillalamarri, May 25, 2026
On different kinds of cities:
These types don’t necessarily refer to just city layouts — such as whether the city has a grid plan or winding streets — or their density or the nature or quality of their services. Rather, they are four models for how inhabitants and visitors experience a city, how businesses and functions are distributed, and how different parts of the city are connected. These four models are not mutually exclusive, and indeed, most cities evidence elements of multiple ones, or may have evolved from one type to another.
It’s a quick read with some links to other deeper essays on particular essays. Check it out!
Escaping The Auto-Financial-Industrial Complex, Challenger Cities, Iain Montgomery, January 7, 2026
Life doesn’t just feel more expensive, it is more expensive. The basic cost of living, from rent to groceries, going out to car payments has all gone up.
Some things take more effort, or feel like that in a realm where we were promised it would be frictionless. And what used to be an option, is now often an obligation.We tend to describe this as a set of separate problems. A cost-of-living crunch, a housing crisis, a public safety challenge, constant congestion, the hollowing out of neighborhoods. Not to mention this insistence that we must now “return to the office”, delivered with the tone of a Victorian school headmaster who has mistaken obedience for productivity.
These aren’t individual failures, they’re symptoms of an interconnected system that is now chafing against the people living in it.
This is Strong Towns-esque critique about the planning priority of cars and detached houses, and the distance and debt they put on cities and on people. But he specifically critiques car reliance:
Distances became personal inconveniences, band-aided by the freedom promised from the automobile, rather than a public cost to be managed collectively. Mobility was democratised, privatised and ultimately, financialised.
This is interesting, and frankly a little foreign to most Americans: the idea that distance or mobility or proximity are public questions with public answers.
This way of putting the whole thing is also illuminating:
For a long time, this was a tolerable deal.
You could live far from where you worked because cars were cheap enough to fade into the background of the monthly finances. While they might have been a bit of a status symbol, and lead to a bit of keeping up with the Jones’, this was broadly manageable.
The car offered enough comfort that the commutes could be tolerable, so long as the traffic flowed. You could afford a home because land was plentiful, regulations were simple and prices broadly behaved themselves.
The system assumed mobility, and consumer lifestyles, would remain affordable. Only, that assumption has failed … spectacularly.
It reminds me of a point an urbanist I follow made on Twitter a few years ago: car dependence was designed before seatbelts and car seats. In other words, the (mostly positive) evolution of safety standards stranded a lot of people in a sense. You used to just pile everyone in the station wagon; now three or even two kids demand an SUV. One of the weaknesses of conservative thinking, and I say this as as a conservative in the small-c sense, is that we have trouble seeing these structures as optional or chosen things; we often mistake the status quo for reality itself.
There’s a lot more here, but one more bit:
Finance needs to adapt to cities, not force cities to contort themselves around outdated assumptions. We should borrow ideas shamelessly from elsewhere … Europe, Asia, anywhere something works … but translate them to the local context, not imitate them, or say “this would never work here”.
Yep. Read the whole thing.
The Bitter Miracle, Quench Magazine, Matthew Sullivan, January 21, 2010
I just bought my first bottle of Cynar, an Italian bitter liqueur with an artichoke on the label. I’ve always wanted to try it. It’s an amaro, the category of bittersweet herbal liqueurs generally had as aperitifs or digestifs, or as spritzes. Sullivan is writing mostly about a different one, even more bitter apparently:
Fernet Branca is an Italian herbal liqueur with an almost magical ability to assist digestion. No matter how much I eat, no matter how rich the sauce or how fatty the duck, it can calm my stomach. My wife and I take it like medicine when we are afflicted by any sort of dyspepsia, be it the flu or food poisoning. If that weren’t enough, Fernet Branca is also recommended for motion sickness, headaches and hangovers. Since it’s 40 per cent alcohol, it can presumably also be used to disinfect wounds or clean your CD player.
Fernet Branca is part of the family of Italian liqueurs called amari or bitters. In Italy, an amaro is traditionally drunk as a digestif. Like bitters from Germany or France, they are produced by steeping herbs, roots, flowers, bark and spices in alcoholic spirits. The ingredients are limited only by the imagination; some amari contain nuts, fruit peels, vegetables and bits of mineral.
A lot of these liqueurs originated as health tonics, and this particular one was perhaps considered so unpalatable as a drink that it was regulated as a medicine during Prohibition!
As a fossil from Prohibition days (when Fernet Branca was legal to sell as a medicine), it is still popular in San Francisco’s nightclubs. It is usually drunk in shots with a chaser of ginger ale. In New York City, Fernet Branca has established itself as the drink of choice for off-duty bartenders and waiters — partially because it is revivifying, but also because an ability to stomach it signifies that you are an insider. But this is nothing compared with Argentina, where Fernet Branca (mixed with Coke) has the status of a national beverage — sales there exceed 12 million litres a year. That’s about the same amount of annual sales for Ontario’s VQA wines.
I trying a little new thing and then learning about it. Most of the time it’s knowledge I’ll never use, but going out and filling your brain with new ideas is a good thing. Fun little read.
Related Reading:
"One of the weaknesses of conservative thinking, and I say this as as a conservative in the small-c sense, is that we have trouble seeing these structures as optional or chosen things; we often mistake the status quo for reality itself."
I don't think you even need the "conservative" modifier here - it's not limited to political spectrum by any means.
I am reminded of this every time the city of Alexandria proposes changes to street alignments, parking, adding bike infrastructure. The interim administrator of one of ACHS campuses sent out an anti-bike lane diatribe in the last PTSA newsletter of the year. Was much of her statements debunked by cursory fact-checking? Yes. Was it out of line for her to use that medium as a bully pulpit for her transportation views? Probably.