The HGTV-ification of America, The Atlantic, Amanda Mull, August 19, 2022

These floors—almost always made of what’s called luxury vinyl plank flooring in trade terms, or laminate or fake wood in real terms—can vary in shade anywhere from vape cloud to wet gravel. The companies that market them tend to use terms like sterling and chiffon lace and winding brook. Gray laminate seems to have begun the journey to popularity about a decade ago; when I last apartment hunted, in 2017 in Brooklyn, it was already common in listings that bragged of newly renovated units. Now gray flooring is so ubiquitous that all kinds of people—interior designers, real-estate agents, random Redditors—have begun to plead for mercy.

I know exactly what she is talking about. Often the paint is the same hue, or maybe it’s just white. Motel 6 rooms, from a mid-2010s renovation sweep, kind of look the same. It sort of looks classy and upscale when it’s new, reverse-engineering a minimalist aesthetic out of being cheap. I assume these finishes also wear well, although maybe not.

What’s more interesting here is that Mull identifies our housing shortage and aging housing stock as the culprit here, and talks about the aesthetics and economics of house flipping. It’s a good read.

A Car Nut Questions Car Culture, Luca Gattoni-Celli, March 22, 2022

For most of my childhood I thought I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. I still like cars quite a bit, still geek out over turbochargers and suspension, and still research minivans for fun. But I am not sure I truly love cars anymore.

Also:

The car we choose to drive can be an expression of individuality, but if we are forced to use it to travel even a short distance, it is almost a rolling prison cell.

Gattoni-Celli is, and used to be more so, a libertarian. This long piece is not ideological. It’s about realizing how much of our default on land use and transportation is the result of deliberate policy, not the free market, and how that makes it much harder to see the car as a symbol of American freedom. “Urbanism has expanded and complicated my view of what freedom is and how humans actually experience it. That might be the simplest explanation for why my enthusiasm for cars has cooled.”

This is very good. Read the whole thing, especially if you’re skeptical.

How a Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire, Washington Post, Geoff Edgers, August 5, 2022

“Not that you can’t make good records with digital, but it just isn’t as natural as when you use the original tape,” says Bernie Grundman, 78, the mastering engineer who worked on the original recordings of Steely Dan’s “Aja,” Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic.”

Well, since nobody really knew that wasn’t what this label was doing, maybe that isn’t true. It’s a neat story and fun to read—high-stakes in its details, low-stakes in its importance—but the notion that analog sound has some indescribable “warmth” is the least true or important thing about vinyl.

The Lost Glamour of the Department-Store Restaurant, Atlas Obscura, Anne Ewbank, June 20, 2022

Recipes abound online for department-store specialties of yesteryear. Often, people track down instructions from old newspapers, cookbooks, and even the aging chefs of long-gone restaurants. The following foods—a candy, a pie, and a chicken salad—together represent some of the most classic department-store delicacies.

That’s really neat. The piece goes into the overall history of the department-store restaurant, which is basically extinct today. The concept survives, I suppose, mostly in the Subway bundled with the Walmart, which is interesting. It’s a fun piece of history. Check it out.

Related Reading:

New and Old #66

New and Old #67

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 400 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!

Share