Two More Days To Subscribe For A Discount!
And on to year six for The Deleted Scenes!
Last Monday, my newsletter turned five years old. Every anniversary week and every pre-Christmas week, I run what I consider some of the best pieces of the year, and offer new subscribers a discount. This week is no different, but I’m even more excited to mark five years of writing every day.
I think of what I do here as much more than a “newsletter” in the colloquial sense of an organizational update or an industry sheet or something like that. Really, I think of this as a little magazine, for which I’m the editor, publisher, writer, art director, social media promoter, copyeditor, headline writer, etc. Of course my central focus is “urbanism”—housing, zoning, land use, architecture, place, the built environment broadly. My other topics are, in my mind, loosely related. But I also think of them as the “back of the book” section.
I like to use my anniversary-week slates to cover different topics and styles that capture, in a week, what my publication is about. This week, if you missed any of them, I published the following pieces:
Does YIMBY Mean Open Borders?, on the relation between housing, zoning, and immigration, and whether YIMBY should be understood as mostly about housing, or mostly about the ideals of cosmopolitanism and the free movement of people. I also use the second half of this piece to discuss the meta-question of discerning substantive points of disagreement, which is tricky but important work, both from an ideas perspective and a political action/policy perspective.
Who Has The Buyers?, a fun, somewhat speculative dive into different approaches to running businesses, with nostalgia for the more regional and granular approach of retailers whose founders or officers came up through the industry rather than through the world of finance.
An Untold Piece Of Fast Food History In Alexandria, Virginia, a deep dive into the history of an interesting commercial building, and—possibly, in my estimation—the best piece I’ve ever written. This one brings together so many of the reasons I love “newslettering” as a writing format: a wildly long and specific story; research; journalism; photography; storytelling; finding fascination in the mundane. I write this newsletter so that I can produce pieces like this and find their audience.
NIMBYism, Nostalgia, And Place Final FINAL, my last (of course it isn’t) piece on the psychology of NIMBYism, the importance of place and continuity in the built environment, and the intra-urbanist-movement tensions between YIMBYs, Strong Towns, and the general tension between big political action versus slow, incremental work.
New and Old #261, a more fleshed-out edition of my weekly link roundup.
I would greatly appreciate your paid subscription, if you appreciate the quirky, idiosyncratic work I do here and would like to support this newsletter going into year six! Till the end of Sunday, new subscribers get an anniversary-week discount. Thank you for reading, following, sharing, and subscribing. It goes without saying that I couldn’t do this without you.