New and Old #275
How to do tech like the Amish, pizza history, A-frame history and future, and the future of optical discs
This is great:
[I]t was at this inflection point — when everyone seemed to be emphatically saying yes to technology — that I began to seriously investigate why a certain community preferred to say no.
I first began studying the Amish in 2012 as a doctoral researcher of media studies at Indiana University, located within a few hours of settlements in Elkhart, LaGrange, and Daviess counties….
….the more time I spent in these communities — three years total — the more I realized that my original frame on their world was too myopic: It wasn’t the metaphorical fish I was interested in; it was the water. Which is to say that I became less intrigued by Amish restrictions on technology than by the social world they sought to preserve and protect with those restrictions. In the end, I came to realize that the Amish are, in fact, technology-agnostic. They do not care much about what a new technology is or how it works; they care about what its adoption would mean for the surrounding community.
As I understand it, the Amish objection to technology isn’t dogmatic, in the way that, say, the Catholic Church’s objection to contraception is. It’s more, as this article notes, a means to an end, while the specifics of the technology allowed, or not allowed, or accommodated to some extent, are flexible, at least theoretically.
For example, this kludgey contraption that allows an old-school phone to connect to the cellular network:
The black-box phone, by contrast [to the smartphone], was a happy medium that posed threats to community members’ social and spiritual health. Its design reflects that: The phone is an intentionally bulked-up contraption that enables mobile communications from a vehicle but is highly inconvenient to carry. It only allows public, audible conversations — no texting or internet access. It is also shared among the crew members. Ministers in the settlement hoped that adopting these devices would make individual cell phone ownership among their constituents unnecessary.
The approach here is really about intentionality. This reminds me of the old approach we had to computers, when they were expensive and bulky: typically they sat, if not in a proper home office, in a shared room on a first floor. Using the computer was not private, and it was a thing you had to ask for. (Of course, you could sneak downstairs, or be very quick when you heard someone approaching, or figure out how to wipe search history or even get around parental controls.) But nonetheless.
As computers became smaller and cheaper, that “family computer” model mostly disappeared. In fact, looking back, we are likely to perceive the family computer as an artifact of size (big), expense (high) and novelty (this is new, it’s not for the kids to mess with like a toy), not an actual approach at all.
The Amish difference is choosing how to interact with technology, instead of passively allowing cost and abundance to determine those things. That is fascinating, really: it is an insistence that the mere affordability of a technology does not mean the technology should be adopted or used following the path of least resistance.
“Everybody can have a personal pocket computer because they’re cheap now!”, in other words, is an ideological or philosophical idea, not a purely economic or descriptive one. The Amish approach is ideological or philosophical too, but we are accustomed to thinking of our view as a bare observation of fact, and only of theirs as an idea.
Read the whole thing.
A Slice of New York Pizza History, Serious Eats, Ed Levine, October 25, 2023
As we traveled all across town to hit pizza spots, and as we discussed our findings, I realized just how much of NYC slice lore is apocryphal. I came to this realization in no small part because of Scott, whose idea of a good time is digging up old NYC Department of Finance tax photos featuring pizzerias. As Scott has said, he, and people like me and Adam, in our slice zealotry, have inadvertently peddled some of this apocrypha as if it were true.
So we decided to write up a brief history of the NYC slice before we put out our list of the slice shops that define the current slice era. Some of what you find written below may contradict things we’ve said in the past, collectively and individually, but we’ve done our best to give a general picture of how the New York City pizza slice evolved over the years, using the best of our current knowledge on the subject—all without introducing more confusion. Let’s go!
This is a nice piece, my favorite kind of thing: a deep dive on something ultimately inconsequential, but that illustrates bigger trends about society. For example, this, which suggests that in the United States pizza preceded the actual pizza oven!
At the beginning of the 20th century, pizza in New York was cooked in massive coal-fired masonry ovens originally built to bake bread. Lombardi’s, which claims 1905 as its founding date, making it allegedly “the first pizzeria in America,” used this type of oven at its first location at 531/2 Spring Street, and still uses one in its present-day spot down the street.
And also this, suggesting from the description that the earliest New York City pizzas were not “New York style” but basically the Neapolitan style pizzas from Naples:
Whole pies were the norm at the time because coal-oven pizza, cooked at high temperatures and for a relatively short time, is best eaten quickly, since it tends to get tough and chewy after it’s cooled down. This was pre-slice-culture pizza, designed to be eaten hot out of the oven.
This or something like it is found today in those 90-second personal pizza restaurants, but they’re now the “style,” whereas the rough NYC style pizza is basically what we’d now call just pizza, at least in the part of the country I’m from.
And then this, which suggests that a lot of historical information has barely been retained at all, and that very likely much of it has not been, meaning that “history” increasingly diverges from the past:
The slice movement really got its jump-start with an Italian immigrant named Frank Mastro, a consummate salesman who ran a restaurant-supply business on the Bowery. After buying a used coal oven, he installed a gas line in it and began playing around with baking pizza. By 1934, Mastro had invented* the first of the gas-fired pizza ovens that we now see in countless slice shops today, and had convinced the Blodgett oven company to manufacture them for him. Mastro even set up a model pizzeria on the Bowery to sell Italian-Americans on the concept of opening their own shops.
*That we know of Mastro at all is largely thanks to the work of Norma Knepp and Walter Tore, longtime readers and community members. Norma and Walter met Mastro’s daughter, Madeline Mastro Ferrentino, and recorded her telling of the tale, which later helped shape the article about Mastro in PMQ magazine.
This oven was the slice-culture catalyst, because it produced pies that were fundamentally different from coal-oven pizza.
Read the whole thing. It’s great.
Adaptive Reuses of Classic A Frame IHOP Restaurant Buildings, Repurposed and redeveloped commercial real estate, Jason Miller, May 19, 2024
Some former A-Frame IHOPs have even re-emerged as trendy restaurants.
Like a Culver City, California IHOP that was remade into the aptly named A Frame —a Hawaiian themed restaurant — for nearly a decade and later became Best Bet, described by its founders as a California-meets-Italy pizzeria.
There’s a wild one at the end too, and a lot of nice photos in here. I think this process, by which a brand’s old brand-centric buildings enter the public domain of the built environment, is so cool. It’s one of the ways our humdrum surroundings contain history.
The successor to 4K UHD Blu-ray is already here, Pocket-lint, John Kanellakos, July 7, 2026
Researchers have been experimenting with next-generation optical media tech for some time now, and the reality is that there’s a lot of upward mobility theoretically present when it comes to total deliverable storage space at a per-disc level. Modern material science allows for the vertical stacking of layered data to a far greater degree than in the past, facilitating what could soon prove to be a major boon for optical media as a whole.
That’s where Folio Photonic’s Folio Disc comes into play. This little-known startup has made it its mission to craft a truly impressive optical disc successor product, and it has its eyes set on conquering the enterprise data storage market for starters. A single Folio Disc is theoretically capable of storing up to a whopping 1TB of data, which is equivalent to 1,000 GB or roughly ten triple-layer 4K UHD Blu-ray discs.
This thing is apparently not quite there, but that’s an incredible number for an optical disc. And this would suggest that the death of optical media has been exaggerated. It’s a funny thing that this is coming from some startup called Folio Photonic and not from, I don’t know, Sony.
Related Reading:
With the Amish thing, understanding that their focus was on intentionality of technology had really opened my eyes in a lot of ways. I first learned about it when I found out that there is a specific Linux distro designed for Amish users. It's super pared down and made to only be useful for business software, but it's still hilarious ("The Amish have computers, and they're running Linux!").
I've often joked about wanting to create an offshoot of the Amish where the tech cutoff is closer to the 90s, which gets a lot of traction whenever I mention it to friends. Really, I think it would just be better if television and the internet weren't allowed in the home but instead were something you had to go to something like an internet cafe to experience.
I think this logic also holds a lot with the logic of wanting car-lite or even car-free neighborhoods (and instead keeping the cars more on the outskirts). Trying to mitigate the negative aspects of technology while still retaining the most obvious benefits.
I think it's ultimately a mistake to assume that "giving the people exactly what they want, when and where they want it" is the best way to increase happiness. It seems like some restraint could actually lead to healthier outcomes. The hard part is defining it...
With the pizza oven thing, I think it's kinda funny when people are surprised that specialized tools didn't exist until well after the thing they are specialized for already existed. It's sorta like when people are surprised that the can opener wasn't invented until decades after canned food was invented. The immediate question is "Well, how did they open the cans?", for which the answer is "Very inefficiently, with a knife". The can opener only made it much easier. The real question would be "What good would a can opener be before cans were invented?".
Also, for the optical disks, I can definitely see a use for those for TV collections. I'm very much a physical media guy if only for the surety of having it on hand (I've lost so many shows I bought online simply because the storefront doesn't exist in the same way anymore, or I forgot how to easily access it), but boy is it inconvenient to watch old shows that way, constantly changing disks. Especially when there are like dozens of them. I usually just rip them onto my computer and use the disks as backups, but even that is a pain to do when you have so many disks. So having one big disk would be a legit answer that gives you the best benefit of both physical and digital. It remains to be seen if it gets used, though...