We Owe It to Our Children to Build Things That Last, The Dispatch, Bonnie Kristian, August 10, 2026
This is a nice piece, and it is neither an argument that all housing must be architecturally unique or outstanding, or that no housing should be built unless it is. Nor is it a paean to a subjective idea of “beauty” which reduces to “whatever we used to build is better than anything we build now.”
Instead, it is an argument that quality, workmanship, and permanence matter; that a home is more than a consumer product; that the work of improving it is neither some magical emblem of “responsibility,” nor is it a pointless waste of time.
We stayed the night after a family wedding, and the next morning, I discovered I could see through the front door. Not through a window, mind you, but a half-moon of open air below the doorknob hardware that had been installed in an overly large cut in the door slab. The builder had been too rushed or cheap or lazy (or all three) to fix it.
This stuck in my mind because our house had come with a front door problem too. Over decades of occupancy by renters, the door had lost its original hardware and accumulated a bizarre amalgamation of mismatched cabinet handles and deadbolts. There was no knob, and where there’d once been a large brass keyhole plate, someone had nailed on strips of dirty linoleum.
I spent weeks working on that door. I pried off the linoleum, removed the eclectic hardware, stripped layers of beaded shellac, filled holes, replaced cracked wood, sanded and stained and hunted through architectural salvage to find a period-appropriate mortise lock and matching escutcheons. It wasn’t perfect work, but it was good, and the door was worth the effort: solid, beautiful, ready for another century of use.
Will your home still be standing in a century?
I personally consider that permanence of some sort in the built environment—I prefer the term “continuity”—is an important element of making a place feel like a place, and that this is not just a personal or an aesthetic preference, but an inherent element in great neighborhoods, towns, and cities. It is unfortunate that this often gets reduced to an argument over “beauty,” and then, a narrow question of whether “beauty in architecture” will or will not neutralize NIMBYism. That narrow question, to me, is tangential to, and almost unrelated to, the larger insight that continuity in our surroundings is good for our places and good for us.
This is a pair of two pieces:
Why Sony Can’t Bring Back Its Classic Walkman Models, ObsoleteSony, July 23, 2026
Well, first of all, the reality is less cut-and-dry than the headline seems to imply. This is probably not a question of technical possibility, but rather of cost. It would be shocking if it were impossible to design a better cassette player than the ones commonly available today; it is much more believable that the old models could not be precisely resurrected one for one, but rather would have to be reverse-engineered or redesigned:
The miniature motors, magnetic heads, optical pickups, and proprietary integrated circuits used by these players have gone out of production. Sony cannot pull an old bill of materials from its files and order everything again. Suppliers moved on, production equipment was retired, and some companies may no longer be in those businesses. A working WM-EX2000 can make this difficult to believe, but any drawings still held by Sony describe components that nobody manufactures today.
Replacements could be designed, but nearly everything around them would need to change. A new cassette Walkman would need a transport, motor, head, control system, power supply, tooling, and housing built around components available now. A CD Walkman would need a new optical assembly and disc mechanism. A MiniDisc player would add a magnetic recording head, signal processing, and software. Sony can do all of this, but each format would require a new development program.
This is more important, I think: it’s about the question of tacit knowledge, which I wrote about recently, and why a mere written blueprint or “recipe” cannot capture the entire process of making a thing:
That work depended on dedicated production lines and adjustment procedures. Drawings can record dimensions and tolerances, but they do not always record how a line was tuned after the first few thousand units, which jig solved an alignment problem, or which adjustment stopped a mechanism from wearing too quickly. Much of that knowledge stayed with the engineers and factory workers who used it.
This is why a new cassette player can be larger and mechanically worse than a Walkman sold more than 30 years ago. The factories making portable cassette mechanisms today are serving a small, inexpensive market. During the Walkman’s peak, shaving another millimeter from the body could justify a new motor and new tooling. That level of spending ended with the mass market.
But as you see, even then the theoretical return of a mass market could bring money that would make this worth it. I have myself written about the loss of capabilities in manufacturing, and even specifically about cassette players. But I do think the “impossibility” angle can be overstated. Anyway, this is a very good read if this sort of thing interests you.
Now pair it with this:
(Bonus: This article, to my pleasant surprise, cites my own 2021 article on the end of cassette-player manufacturing! Not to boast, but that article was a ton of fun to write, and it has made some rounds among people who follow these things.)
Anywah, this author looked over the reasons the retired Sony engineer gave, which the ObsoleteSony piece analyzes, and comes to a slightly different conclusion. TLDR: “Not every reason on his list survives, and the strongest one is not obvious.”
Basically, it is unlikely that this knowledge is lost, as much as that it is locked behind too small a market to bother to either rediscover or rebuild.
Here’s also a Hacker News comments thread on the Sony engineer’s claims.
Bonus, here’s an article on the 70mm IMAX projectors which have been reported as impossible to manufacture today, but which, again, seem rather to be too expensive and boutique of a market to invest in new production.
And another pair of two pieces:
The original version of Computer Space, as you may already know, was launched in 1971 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney (under the name Syzygy Engineering), in collaboration with the manufacturer Nutting Associates.
It was designed as a variation on the 1962 computer title SpaceWar!, featuring space combat, but inevitably proved difficult to market as its controls were considered slightly too complex for the audiences at the time.
Originally released as a one-player game, a two-player variant was launched by Nutting in 1973, featuring joysticks on the cabinet, in place of the original rotational buttons, with this version being one in Perry’s possession.
And it is that two-player version for sale here, worth some tens of thousands of dollars. (The final price was just short of $25,000). That is a museum-worthy piece: one of the earliest artifacts from what is now, but which at the time nobody knew for sure, a massive, successful industry. To think that in some way everything in the video-gaming world is descended from something like this, like the primitive bottom of an evolutionary tree, is fascinating.
A few years ago, a pop culture store owner in Wisconsin mentioned to Jason Ganos, a well-known Nintendo game collector, that he had a box of Super Mario cartridges that had been sitting in storage for years. It stopped Ganos in his tracks.
It turned out to be an ultra rare collection of 97 “absolutely pristine” copies of Super Mario Brothers Duck Hunt, a popular Nintendo game that had been released in 1988, Ganos said.
After some initial research, Ganos found that the cartridges he held were not only a new variant of the game, but also the last known production date of it.
Every once in awhile, you see news of a pallet of sealed retro games discovered, or something like that. One of the things I think about sometimes—tangential to urbanism and the public realm, actually—is the question of space. The United States has so much space. Not just land, in terms of making it easy to sprawl, but storage space for stuff like to just disappear for decades and come out intact later.
That ability to just squirrel something away for a marginal cost of basically zero must be a kind of dark matter shaping consumer behavior, secondary markets, perceptions of space and privacy, and more. I will come back to this idea.
Related Reading:
Manufacturing processes really are a documentation nightmare all their own.
My girlfriend once relayed a story to me of a chocolate factory (not that one) where part of the process involved putting the chocolate under some kind of air blower for cooling it effectively, or at least something to that effect.
How did they determine how long to cool it for? A technician named Dave just watched the process and could tell when it was done. No procedure, no sensors, no nothing. Just Dave.
And worse, no apprentice. So when Dave retires, I guess the recipe will too.