The Deleted Scenes Top 10 of 2025
What you liked the most
Every year I go back and find the ten most-read pieces from my newsletter, and share them in a final end-of-year roundup. It’s always fun to see what took off or really sparked interest. In particular, it’s curious to me how many of the top pieces are not straight urbanism or building-history or look-at-this-neat-small-town pieces, but more abstract pieces tying some of these broadly urbanist questions to questions about culture and history.
After the top 10, I’ll also shout out a few of my personal favorites from the year. Thank you for reading, and enjoy the roundup!
Backyard Coffee And Jazz In Kyoto, Japan
By a wide margin, this was the most-read piece of the year! It’s about the importance of commerce at a small scale, with low barriers to entry: small enough and low enough that regular people can basically turn a hobby or a passion into a small enterprise, even at a step or two below the scale of what we typically call “small businesses.”
This was in Japan, which does this sort of thing very well. But my point is that there’s nothing “magical” about it—like, “wouldn’t it be nice if we could be like those people?” There’s no reason we can’t be.
It’s Harder To Just Impulsively Eat Out Now
I often write about inflation and the experience of being a customer or consumer nowadays. I don’t do it just to gripe; I’m interested in how a whole particular experience of going out casually and spending a reasonable amount of money for decent food feels difficult to do now. And I’m interested in how the actual mechanics of running a customer-facing business have broken down in this post-pandemic world.
What I’m thinking of is how many fewer plain old family-owned, unpretentious places there seem to be, compared to when I was growing up:
What I miss about dining out is the sense of actual hospitality. Maybe it’s just the way I grew up, but I remember restaurants typically feeling unassuming, unselfconscious, with decent food and fair prices. No “bar programs” and “bar managers” and gimmicks and concepts and trendy, overdone Instagrammable decor and generally pretentious, over-engineered vibe. You weren’t made to feel like you worked for the restaurant in some way or like you were being condescended to. I remember seeing owners and managers working, or regular waitstaff who you got to know. It was like you were a guest, in the real sense. Not spending my own money helped, but more restaurants feel nakedly commercial to me today. Less cozy, less casual.
“We’re Rich, We Can’t Afford That”
There are two threads in this piece. One is about Baumol’s cost disease, an insight from economics about labor prices (high-productivity fields with high wages have a kind of inflationary effect on all wages, which can cause lower-productivity sectors to be artificially expensive. Basically.)
I take this and think about how strange it is for a country to kind of collectively outgrow certain kinds of work, and to literally be so rich that we can no longer afford things that were standard in a poorer time. More broadly, I’m thinking about my hypothesis that a great deal of what we think of as generational or political arguments really have to do with the fact that America is a much more highly developed country than it was even two or three generations ago.
Maybe Cities Aren’t A Beautiful Inconvenience
One of the arguments I frequently use with regard to urban vs. suburban living is that suburban living is about private convenience, while urban living is less convenient but more joyful, with a greater sense of a shared public realm.
What I realized, though, is that I’m still kind of assuming that on some level we all want suburban life, and have to be enticed to give up its conveniences—to make a sacrifice to get something more worthwhile in return.
What that misses is that some people completely prefer living in the city, and find suburbia not comfortably, addictively convenient, like junk food, but actually lonely and unpleasant. They find driving everywhere not indulgent, but frustrating. They don’t experience being far apart from everything and dependent on a car as complete autonomy; they experience it as a mental and time tax on doing things.
In other words, while I love cities, I’m still looking at them from the outside on some level, and in this piece I acknowledge that.
This was another not-urbanism piece, on the question of whether American culture has taboos which are shared by Americans generally and not dependent on being part of a particular demographic group.
I’m trying to think of something which to a random onlooker does not appear to have any significance at all, but which in a certain context causes shock or disgust or at least is viewed as very rude. (A couple of good answers proposed to me as examples of American taboos are various bits of wedding etiquette—apparently, not every culture has the norm that the wedding is the bride’s day and all about her—and baseball and sports superstition stuff. Also, the best answer I got was that driving exactly the speed limit in America is taboo.)
For whatever reason, when I wrote this, I was on about high-end sushi etiquette in Japan, which I find somewhat mystifying and bordering on superstitious:
If you don’t actually enjoy eating the whole sushi piece in one bite, or if you have a small mouth and find it uncomfortable, or if you want a nibble to make sure you aren’t going to have to spit the thing out, well, too bad, his house, his rules. Either people raised that way don’t experience that annoying small-ball anxiety that a foreigner does, or they get used to it, or they have no expectation that society would be oriented around ameliorating it.
But then, I suppose, all culturally specific “rules” look that way from the outside. Which is precisely what the piece is about!
I even think I probably inferred that a lot of people my age weren’t very bright, simply because they used words that I somehow had come to associate with this matrix of bad traits. Stuff like “I did a thing” or “I don’t want to adult” or “I don’t know how to science” or “sammies” and “tendies” and “noods” or “metric f**kton” and…whatever. Silly stuff that I guess I’d picked up the idea was supposed to signify an unserious or unprofessional approach to life. This, by the way, is probably the context in which a lot of people heard Millennial YIMBYs talking about housing costs and decided that caring about housing costs or wanting to be able to live in a vibrant job market was just another example of lazy softness from the youngins.
This piece is a little self-critical, again. It’s about self-care, burnout, and why going out to lunch isn’t perceived as “indulgent” in the way getting a latte is. Lots of bad logic and politically tinged resentment here, I think.
Is There Opportunity In The Lack Of Opportunity?
I was surprised how well this piece did, and it touches on something I’ve thought about a lot over the years: what do urbanism and housing advocacy, broadly, have to say or offer to economically struggling places? A lot of people in these broad movements kind of bristle at this question.
Sometimes they’re right to, because it can function as a way to pretend we don’t need to build housing in the places that have jobs and opportunity. Housing is not fungible: a house in Gary, Indiana is not the same as a house in San Francisco. The market tells us that.
But I do get the sense that this can extend into a kind of derision for these places. And I also wonder, more to the point of the piece, what sorts of genuine economic opportunities there might actually be, right now, in down-on-their-luck towns and cities that aren’t really being realized fully because of a narrative that writes these places off.
How Do You Know When You’re Seeing What You’re Looking At?
For example, we saw some Hispanic women selling cut fruit out of little carts. It was a hot day, and some fresh chilled fruit would be nice. When my wife and I visited Peru, we saw street vendors selling the same thing. I guess wherever in Latin America or South America these women were from, fruit stands are a common form of low-investment street commerce.
But if you’re a New Jersey conservative who reads the New York Post, you might see this Hispanic woman selling fruit and think, Aha! Biden’s open border!
I used this idea of “seeing what you’re looking at” to explain how people often read their political ideas into their experiences, and end up feeling as if they’re seeing evidence for them when in reality they’re the ones reading it into something. It’s almost like playing telephone with yourself.
I think we all do this; I think we all have a tendency to experience our own emotions as revelations about the world. We can literally become convinced of a thing because we think our feelings are truths nudging us towards it. This is why I say that a great deal of urbanism is about humility: realizing that your own feelings about things are not floating facts that you have perceived; realizing that it is possible for a thing that should happen to make you uncomfortable, and to be able to be okay with that.
Of course, I called into the virtual meeting. I have to admit—I am the baby in the headline—this was my first time actually attending or tuning into one of these. I’ve seen and heard clips of them, and read dispatches from them, but no particular project has been close enough to me for me to go to the hearing versus simply reading up on the project or the final decision. Because this one is just about in my backyard, I wanted to be there.
I was not surprised by anything I heard.
I was not surprised by what I heard—mostly polite NIMBYism with a small handful of favorable comments—but I was struck by how immensely wasteful the whole process of public input is. The conceit is that it reveals local issues with particular projects, but it rarely does. So many of the comments people offer could be about any project, anywhere. This one stood out to me:
One commenter—not intentionally, I suppose—perfectly summed up what we mean when we talk about NIMBYism. He said: “We don’t deny the need for affordable housing in Fairfax County. We think everyone who wants to live in Fairfax County should be able to live in Fairfax County. That doesn’t mean it can or should be built here.”
And I felt that the process is a sink for genuine local devotion to place. Speaking for housing advocates broadly, I said:
We see the devotedness people have for the places they live, and wish that there were a more productive, pro-social channel for that passion. And it just seems like we’ve layered process on top of process until we’ve almost lost sight of what any of it is actually for.
Some Thoughts On Crime In Cities
In New York City, Eric Garner was choked to death for selling loose cigarettes not labeled for individual sale, while for the most part tobacco executives got away with lying about cigarettes. Maybe one of these has nothing to do with the other. But I can see why, for progressives, “tough on crime” or “law and order” signal ideologies, not obvious, neutral ideas about how to order public spaces. These terms almost always imply a certain subset of crime, which, for many unfortunate reasons, happen to be committed often by a certain subset of the population.
I’m basically working through why I think so many progressives have trouble unreservedly endorsing tough policing with regard to urban crime. This in turn looks to conservatives like endorsement of public disorder, which leads to more extreme rhetoric around policing, which leads progressives to be even less willing to exist in a coalition with the tough-on-crime folks.
There may also really be differing views as to how crucial a thing crime prevention, at least through law enforcement, really is:
Underlying the tough-on-crime viewpoint is the idea that crime is a primary problem, something intolerable that cannot be fought too hard or at too great an expense. They understand their fear of, or concern about, crime not as a personal feeling, but as a discernment of something true about the primal importance of safe streets.
For other people, crime is a thing that happens, in the same basket as car crashes and heart attacks and lightning strikes. For these people, crime is bad, but it is not uniquely bad, to the point of demanding a particularly outsized share of scarce public resources.
You can see some themes here of political psychology and the fallibility of human judgment.
And some of my favorites from the year:
A deep dive on the strange afterlife of a failed video game console
Hi, It’s “They,” We’re The Problem
Arguing against the notion that being a good neighbor implies being a NIMBY
Do I Have A Right To Visit A Business?
Thoughts on parking as a public utility
Back To Basics On Towns And Urbanity
A piece on the urbanity of small towns and small cities
Do urbanites have a duty to understand rural people?
A fun piece on how thrift stores have evolved in the age of e-commerce
Related Reading:
The Deleted Scenes Top 10 of 2021
The Deleted Scenes Top 10 of 2022
The Deleted Scenes Top 10 of 2023
The Deleted Scenes Top 10 of 2024
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