The People Who Hate People, The Atlantic, Jerusalem Demsas, May 24, 2022

Writing about the combination of NIMBYism and 20th century environmentalist arguments against overpopulation, Demas says, “Lest you worry that this is a California-specific brain disease, let me reassure you that this antihuman thinking has permeated discourses all over the nation—and the world.” Read her, please.

If comparing NIMBYs who oppose new buildings in their neighborhood to Paul Ehrlich sounds a bit outlandish, well, actually it’s not far off. Much of the 20th century’s anti-growth movement in cities and suburbs was inspired by concerns about “too many people,” and Paul Ehrlich’s misanthropic, racist book was in many cases the inspiration. This should all be of concern, as well, to conservative NIMBYs, who in other instances may consider themselves pro-life. As I recently wrote, “When babies grow up, they become neighbors.”

Read the whole thing.

The Decade of Cheap Rides Is Over, Slate, Henry Grabar, May 18, 2022

Uber has lost an astounding sum since its founding in 2009, including more than $30 billion in the five-odd years since the company’s finances became public. Together with earlier losses and a similar strategy at rival Lyft, this has amounted to an enormous, investor-fueled subsidy of America’s ride-hailing habit.

This is a strange thing—a couple of pumped-up faux “tech firms” transformed the way Americans, especially young Americans, experienced cities. “It’s the end of a decade in which we changed our systems, our habits, even our architecture, around the assumption that we could be driven around for cheap,” Grabar writes. What will happen to all of that as ride-sharing doubles or triples in price? And is it possible to have actual ridesharing—an app to coordinate drivers and riders—without it morphing into something heavily corporatized like Uber?

For 40 Years, Crashing Trains Was One of America’s Favorite Pastimes, Atlas Obscura, Justin Franz, July 1, 2019

Organizers would lay a stretch of track, usually anywhere from 1,800 feet to a mile-long, and then get two old steam locomotives and put them at either end of the track facing each other. They would then hire two brave locomotive engineers to wait for a signal from the organizer. When they got the go-ahead, the engineers would pull the throttles back as far as they could to get the locomotives up to speed. They would then jump from the locomotive before the two trains crashed in front of a crowd who had paid a few dollars to see the spectacle.

Americans, I guess, have always been Americans. The story details the “Crash at Crush,” an infamous staged train crash that killed two people in the audience and injured many others. It also recounts the general history of the staged-crash phenomenon, a sort of railroad-era version of demolition derby. Interestingly, it was the Depression which ended the staged crashes, as they were seen as wasteful. Car dependence, of course, emerged on the other side of the Depression.

The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones, Scientific American, Zeynep Tufekci, May 17, 2019

I never watched Game of Thrones and dislike gratuitously violent entertainment like it, but this article I came across is pretty interesting.

At its best, GOT was a beast as rare as a friendly dragon in King’s Landing: it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual. This structural storytelling era of the show lasted through the seasons when it was based on the novels by George R. R. Martin, who seemed to specialize in having characters evolve in response to the broader institutional settings, incentives and norms that surround them.

It’s an interesting analysis of something most people probably don’t think about or notice explicitly.

Related Reading:

New and Old #38

New and Old #39

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