The Deleted Scenes - New and Old #78
Whatever Happened to the Starter Home?, New York Times, Emily Badger, September 25, 2022 What we now call “tiny homes” were once just…homes. Take a look, for example, at these detached single-family homes in Cambridge, Maryland, a post-industrial city on the Eastern Shore: They are about 600 square feet each! Would I want to live in one of these? Well, not really. Would I choose it over not having a home? Absolutely. That’s the choice that we’ve taken away from many people, and it’s creeped up the class ladder from a “poor people’s issue” to an issue that affects everyone but the very rich.
It’s a masterful deep dive into how a crucial segment of American housing has almost gone extinct. Read the whole thing. How Waffle House Helps Us Respond To Hurricanes, FiveThirtyEight, Maryn McKenna, September 29, 2022 This is actually a 2016 article written during Hurricane Matthew, and in the editor’s note they write: “we thought we should revisit what happens when the famously resilient restaurant shuts its doors for a storm — and why even the federal government pays attention when it does.” I remember in 2012, after Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey and New York, there was a lot of talk about Home Depot helping with rebuilding logistics. And I also remember that a random Chinese buffet just across the state line, in Pennsylvania, was one of the only places you could go eat for a few days. It was cool, and kind of eerie, to drive past dark houses and businesses, downed trees, and other reminders of natural disaster—and then walk into this packed restaurant and eat unlimited sushi and lo mein. But in New Jersey, all of this is pretty unusual, whereas in hurricane country, Waffle House is famous for braving the weather and, when it doesn’t, serving as a kind of barometer of just how serious things are.
Read the whole thing. It’s very cool. The American Camry, National Review, Wells King and Dan Vaughn Jr., September 29, 2022 The authors start here by arguing that Tesla—cast as an all-American company all the time—is too cozy with China, due not only to the large Chinese market but also to Chinese industrial policy. And then they argue that Ronald Reagan actually implemented very good industrial policy to draw Japanese auto investment to the United States. Reagan’s trade policy on cars, motorcycles, and maybe most famously microchips is often derided as protectionism, but I think you can distinguish protectionism from legitimate industrial policy. After Reagan’s quota on Japanese cars, they write:
Some argue that Japanese industrial policy did not, in fact, birth the Japanese auto industry, and argue a counterfactual that in a freer market, Japan would have been even more competitive. That strikes me as being in the same category as the argument that without zoning, we would still have paved the country with suburban sprawl. It treats a theoretical scenario as more real than the one that actually happened. Trade policy happens to be one of my interests, and I know how easily policies that favor an industry in some way can be, and often are, little more than political favors. But industrial policy was a plank in both major party platforms up to the 1980s, and the increase in global trade hasn’t made those concerns go away. The Internet is Made of Demons, Damage Magazine, Sam Kriss, April 21, 2022 I wrote a longer piece in The Bulwark sort of bouncing off this piece, thinking about social media as a vice akin to smoking or gambling. This is one of those things that you can’t take too seriously or literally, but it definitely made me think. (Especially the part where I realized I had thought about the internet as “a consciousness drilling itself into your brain” before I had ever seen it compared to demonic possession.) There’s a reason I saved this one for Halloween month. But all that aside, this is the real core of the essay for me:
Let me be a broken record and say that driving does something similar to our psychology. Like the anonymity of the internet, the privacy of the automobile cabin, and the visual and physical separation from other motorists, lowers the cost of anger. It makes it easier for us to be bad. I’ve already mentioned demonic possession, so let me mention something lighter to do with my faith. In Catholicism, we have a concept known as “the near occasion of sin”—i.e., something we know will tempt us. It is considered a sin even to expose yourself to a near occasion of sin, because the flesh is weak. Tempting ourselves is not virtuous. Bad situations—dangerous situations—are not opportunities to build character. That feels like something that needs to go in a longer essay, and this is just the link roundup. So until next time! Related Reading: 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! You’re a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber. |
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