Go slow to get unstuck, We Can Have Nice Things, Stephanie Nakhleh, August 4, 2026
If we take aesthetic concerns seriously, we can let them guide policy priorities. But it’s very important to establish up front that addressing aesthetics alone won’t solve the housing shortage. No matter how pretty anything is, zoning and land use rules will still prevent housing from being built.
I’ll be touching on this question in a piece coming soon, but yes.
Which leads to:
That doesn’t mean we cave to every NIMBY demand. But if we accept that many people sincerely dislike abrupt changes in neighborhood scale, and also that we need political will to build more housing, how do we reconcile those?
This is a good, rigorous attempt to take aesthetic concerns seriously without pretending it would be a panacea or mollify many, or any, of the “professional” NIMBYs, as opposed to regular people who sincerely value harmony or continity in the built environment. Read the whole thing.
No One Sings About Kalamazoo Anymore, Can’t Get Much Higher, Chris Dalla Riva, August 27, 2026
This is one of those pieces I wish I wrote. It’s a really interesting question, and it feels like part of a larger cultural shift. (It brings to mind two pieces I’ve written, here, and here.) Anyway:
[Joe] Weisenthal recently reposted an old tweet from another financial commenter, Michael Antonelli. Antonelli’s post pondered why musicians of the 1930s and 1940s were so often singing about unexpected places, like Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Anontelli is alluding to “(I’ve Got a Gal In) Kalamazoo,” most famously performed by Glenn Miller’s Orchestra in the 1940s. And his observation feels correct. I don’t know much about music of the 1930s and 1940s, but I can easily call up scores of songs about places that (a) aren’t that large in terms of population and (b) don’t often get written about today.
He includes this fascinating chart:
This roughly tracks the fortunes of cities and small towns themselves; the 1990s are an absolute low, and the 1940s are the high (although we don’t know the data before that), which precede the era of urban renewal, mass suburbanization, and the crime wave. Then in more recent decades (except the 2010s) American cities specifically see more mentions, which tracks with the revival of cities and the urban housing crisis.
But of course I have a one-track mind on this stuff, and there’s much more in the piece. Read the whole thing.
This is cool:
Atari has today announced a new physical game collaboration with Activision called the Atari x Activision Collection. The unexpected project reunites Activision with Atari after almost 50 years.
The full set of working, physical game cartridges includes 39 classic Activision games, like Pitfall!, River Raid, and Kaboom!, and there will be three ways to purchase them.
I’ve been following this phenomenon of “retro tech,” I guess you could call it, for awhile. The most famous example is the vinyl record revival, which for a time was viewed as a bit of a bubble composed of aging people who grew up with vinyl and young people getting into it for aesthetic reasons.
But it has proved quite durable—vinyl records sales have been climbing year over year since 2007—and a lot more “retro” stuff has seen a revival of interest. You see this with tube televisions, cassette tapes, the recent revival and quasi-re-release of the Commodore home computer, and this revival of Atari consoles and games.
Some of this, of course, is aesthetics or nostalgia. But I think there’s a real demand for what they actually represent, which is purpose-built, internet- and ad-free entertainment. That demand is substantive, and while it obviously overlaps with “retro” tech, since that stuff mostly predates things like the internet and social media, it’s also an independent demand all on its own.
Change My View: Almost all food dishes are sandwiches, Reddit
And for some light fare:
I kept on thinking on this topic, slowly went insane, and I realized that almost everything is a sandwich.
A sandwich is defined in the dictionary as two pieces of bread with meat, vegetables, and other ingredients. The US FDA says it’s two pieces of bread with meat in the middle. This is an outdated definition because a peanut butter sandwich is a sandwich. I would say an ice cream sandwich is a sandwich, which uses chocolate graham cracker and ice cream as its ingredients. I mean...sandwich is in the name. Change the structure a little and a chicken wrap is a sandwich, bread wrap with similar ingredients to a traditional sandwiches. Go radical in both ingredient and structure, and you get a Pop-tart is a sandwich, which to me is a logical step. What about ravioli? Sandwich. Burritos? Sandwich. Egg roll? Sandwich. Crab Rangoon? Sandwich. Corn Dog? Sandwich. But let’s go deeper...
An amusing little read.
Related Reading:
Thanks for the shout out. I actually considered originally titling it something like “Urban Decay and the Pop Song” but I felt I didn’t have enough to say on the topic. Also unmentioned is the decline of rail travel.
Regarding songs, I have yet to read the arricle but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t partly the share experience of people traveling by rail with stops in these towns.