New and Old #273
To leave or to die in your home, the curious technology behind a video game soundtrack, and two angles on Anglicanism
The death house, We Can Have Nice Things, Stephanie Nakhleh, March 10, 2026
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 big home where they raised their kids, defiantly declare it when someone—often an annoying (grown) kid—suggests it might be time to think about downsizing.
More than a generational attitude or personality tic, this has become a policy problem.
This, which is adjacent to the question of whether older folks should get tax breaks to stay in their oversized homes, is tricky. I think part of the issue is not just not wanting to think about when you’re too old to climb stairs or take care of a lawn or whatever; maybe even a bigger part of it is that your house is like a microcosm of your town or city; moving to a new home is like leaving an entire version of your life behind. Everything is in relation to the layout of the house; you know where everything is; all your memories took place there; etc. Leaving a longterm house is like dying, in a way.
On the other hand, part of all that narrativizing is due to the fact that it is also difficult to downsize, because of the housing crisis (which is ironically often the outcome of the attitudes of the aging homeowners themselves).
At the local, state, and federal levels, governments have effectively squashed the supply of the variety of housing needed to match the variety of human experiences. The vast majority of residential land in America is legally reserved for single-family detached housing, often on large lots. And it’s not simply a lack of variety—there’s just not enough housing overall. A dramatic inventory shortage has frozen seniors in place and diminished even the possibility of homeownership for everyone else.
Nakleh acknowledges the emotional connection people have to their homes as well, but of course this doesn’t change the hard realities of aging:
A house became a promise but also a bit of a trap, as the structure grew ever more entangled with the self—in particular, the past self. More than just a place to cook, sleep, relax, and do your private activities, a home (when thought of like this) slowly becomes a museum. You see ghosts of your children in every corner. Memories accrue of babies, baths, soccer in the backyard, and homework at a table.
Ask someone why they want to stay, and they’ll often reply, “my memories are here.” What they usually mean is: I am here. The house has become a sort of container for an ageless, immortal soul.
This is a good, long, nuanced piece on a tough topic. Read the whole thing.
“Stickerbush Symphony,” Pitchfork, Billie Bugara, March 7, 2026
“Stickerbush Symphony” is a fairly well-known track from the Super Nintendo game Donkey Kong Country 2. It’s a dreamy, wistful, slightly melancholy piece of music that certainly doesn’t sound like most of the other SNES music.
Pushing the SNES to its technical limits was practically an employee requirement while working at Rareware. As their most ambitious composer, Wise set his sights on the console’s SPC700 sound chip, maximizing its potential by conceiving an inventive, maddeningly strenuous composition process. The majority of SNES composers took a standardized route of composition, using a shared pool of MIDI instruments alongside Nintendo’s lent-out development tools. The SPC could easily recognize and process these sounds, and an entire score could snuggly fit within the tiny 64kb of allotted space. Wise knew that these hackneyed tools would get him nowhere.
Instead, he coded his own instruments from scratch, altering their pitches, lengths, and timbres second-by-second in a tracker with hexadecimal code. On an actual synth, like the Korg Wavestation, it takes a split second to write and record a series of complex notes with varying timbres. Wise’s coding meant it took days, sometimes weeks, to do the same. He felt “frustrated all the time,” but he kept pushing. By the time he got to “Stickerbush,” the arduous process was “mastered,” in that he no longer had to play refrains on a keyboard first: He’d code them directly from his hums.
This is fascinating, and in a lot of ways, it is a lost art already:
Walter Benjamin would call it as it is: Reproducibility is not the same as replication. We can’t replicate the specific grainy bliss of “Stickerbush,” because Wise’s compressed lexicon is the product of a process reserved to a specific time, place, and technique. There’s a reason why Wise’s DKC work is a staple of modern sampling: from Yung Lean to Drake and hundreds more. The constricted fruits born from his process are often more ripe than any modern synth’s capabilities.
Read the whole thing.
George Washington and Religion: Interview with Mary V. Thompson, George Washington’s Mount Vernon
There are many historians who feel that the dearth of references to Jesus is a sign that George Washington was not a Christian (a follower of Jesus)—or at least not an orthodox Christian. I’ve spent most of my adult life working on George Washington, but not so much on Washington’s contemporaries. Ideally, to come to a meaningful answer, I think we’d have to look at all the statements by both Washington and his contemporaries and see how his uses of the name Jesus compare with those of others of his class in 18th century America. Having pulled together both George and Martha Washington’s writings relating to religion, I can say that Martha Washington, who is generally considered a very devout, orthodox Christian, refers most often to “God,” occasionally to “Providence,” and never to Jesus. On this question, as well as on so many others, the critics seem to expect Washington to sound like a modern, evangelical Christian, when he was an 18th century Virginia Anglican.
This is a really interesting piece on “doing history”—on the element of interpretation and judgment involved in determining what often seem to be almost quotidian questions.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, most of England’s churches were mediaeval structures swiftly adapted to reformed worship in 1559-1562, with the introduction of the 1559 Prayer Book and the accompanying Elizabethan Injunctions. These had then been subjected to a process of slow evolution over the next two centuries as reformed worship matured and evolved its own customs leading to the classic “Prayer Book” interior. This developed around the turn of the seventeenth century as the church’s nave was filled with pews, a two or three-decker pulpit placed towards the east end of the nave for the regular services, and the screened-off chancel served as the Communion space. This two-room plan worked well as it allowed an easy adaption of the mediaeval floor plan to Protestant worship. Indeed, so successful was it that new churches were built to the same ground plan throughout the 1600s including some of the earliest colonial Anglican churches.
This, part of a series on the different aspects of Anglican practice in the 1700s, kind of pairs with the George Washington piece. I had no idea that Anglicanism was basically very “low church” in those days, nothing like the “I can’t believe it’s not Catholicism!” of a lot of Episcopal Church services nowadays. It was much more Calvinist/Reformed in practice, sparser, with much less focus on communion and with the altar not even the centerpiece of the sanctuary. (What made Anglicanism more “Catholic” was something called the Oxford Movement, an attempt to recover what its proponents saw as the original Anglican heritage.)
Anyway, I just find it interesting how much things can change, and how little the present can reveal those changes sometimes. Robinson notes that very few of these pre-Oxford “Prayer Book” churches—the very Reformed pulpit-centered layouts—survived, with almost all Anglican/Episcopal churches today either built or renovated in the post-Oxford-Movement era, creating an appearance to an observer today of continuity with Catholic-ish liturgical practices, which was largely not there for most of Anglican history.
These are the same sorts of questions I think about when researching old buildings, or looking at towns and cities that have either declined or risen and no longer match the way they were seen and talked about in the past, etc. I also find the transitional nature of Anglicanism interesting.
Related Reading:
Wanting to stay in a house until you die is something I understand intellectually, but it is hard to feel sympathy for how much importance older people seem to place on it when I've never lived in the same home for more than two years at any point in my adult life.