A love song for Lakeforest Mall, Greater Greater Washington, Dan Malouff, January 19, 2023

Lakeforest is just about the same age I am, dating to, uh, around 1980. We spent our youths together. When the mall was exciting and busy, I was a kid, enchanted by its color and vigor.

I remember playing in the pebble pit lounges, buying pretzels with high school dates, riding that neon-outlined glass elevator, and feeling like an absolute 11-year-old king as it rose above that luxurious amphitheater fountain.

The best store the mall ever had was Natural Wonders, but I spent more of my hard-earned babysitting money at Lids, Vie De France, and Waldenbooks. When Cinnabon first opened it blew my mind.

I remember, very vaguely, this feeling. I’m old enough now, and consumer behavior has changed enough, that those memories have begun to have a sense of myth about them. Was it really all real?

Malls are pretty much the opposite of what urbanists consider good land use. But it’s complicated. It’s not even the first time Greater Greater Washington has published an article in praise of a mall; one of the others was mine, on an old-fashioned, bustling mall in Greenbelt, Maryland full of independent, immigrant-owned businesses.

All malls are is buildings full of small-ish (and a few huge) storefronts, and the only real limit on what they can be is imagination. And the parking lots? They can be redeveloped if they’re no longer needed. This particular mall will be demolished and the property turned into a walkable town-center-style development. Those can be quite nice, and the glut of aging indoor malls in the D.C. area (many already demolished) certainly points to most of them being replaced.

But town centers are still private properties managed by single companies, and as they age, they will probably encounter many of the same problems as indoor malls. We’ll see.

An Ode to Kraft Dinner, Food of Troubled Times, Catapult, Ivana Rihter, January 19, 2023

I have to give you a long bit from this, which is delightful:

Baba made Kraft like nobody else. She never measured anything when she cooked, so the proportions the box recommends (four tablespoons of butter, a quarter cup of milk) were more like one fat mound of butter plus a huge glug of milk. I would sit on the counter to better see the whole production unfold. While the water boiled, she’d shuffle around the kitchen in her house slippers and fleece sweater-vest, always too cold to sit still. I would lean over the pot to watch the noodles dance for me. I never remember Baba checking the doneness of the macaroni. After all, the noodles do not need to be al dente to really sing.

As Baba dumped the water into the sink, the steam would rise up like a mushroom cloud. It was at this point that my mouth began to water. Then came the butter, milk, and cheese packet and lots of vigorous mixing with a wooden spoon. Baba believed that the noodles could not be eaten immediately––they had to sit for a while and “absorb” the cheesy sauce. When they were adequately soaked, she would sprinkle feta over the top and take the plate of macaroni out to the balcony so the night air could cool it down. Sometimes she would light a cigarette while holding the dish outside, letting tiny pieces of ash rain down over the plate like freshly cracked black pepper.

The first bite was bliss. I usually started eating so fast that I had to pause while all the mouthfuls I had barely chewed could make their way safely to my stomach. I’d wait for a moment while a knot of noodles shimmied down my throat, and then I’d start again, only slightly slowed by my poor motor skills. It would be far too easy to write Kraft off as soulless junk food, but how could I, with its inextricable place in my upbringing? My baba taught me to make it with the same care she taught me to make baklava. Guess which one I make more often.

More than twenty years later, the sound of dried pasta tubes sliding across cardboard soothes me like a rain stick. Kraft was the first meal I ever truly loved, the first one I attempted to cook on my own, and the first food I could not live without. There are four boxes tucked into my pantry as I write this.

When I left my childhood home in Canada to move to the United States, Kraft with feta cheese became more than just a comfort meal when I was missing my baba––it became a private ritual. It also became a form of self-protection. As many children of immigrants can attest, the lunchroom crowd is not exactly welcoming of foreign foods (especially not stuffed grape leaves, which, in the words of one of my classmates, looked like “a bunch of wet little turds”). Kraft was safe; Kraft was cool. There was nothing remotely turd-like about Kraft. Yet even in my attempts to assimilate, the feta has always remained vital to the dish. A secret little piece of the home country mixed in with all-American shelf-stable cheese.

I always wonder if there is anything more than nostalgia to these stories—mom or grandma made the best (X, Y, Z) anyone has ever made. It can’t be true, literally. But it must be capturing something. My dad observed, when my wife and I were cooking pretty much the whole day on Christmas Eve, that maybe this whole thing was a bit outdated; a holdover from the era of the housewife, when women cooked because that was what women did, or because it was very important to please the guests and show off a bit.

Perhaps they got preternaturally good at it, in a way that is simply closed off to most people today. Maybe everyone’s grandma back then was to cooking what the Beatles were to classic rock. Not that we should go back to that.

Also this:

Like my own story, Kraft’s origin story has all the classic American dream plot points. James Lewis Kraft was born in Ontario, Canada (as was I), the second of eleven children. As a young man, Kraft set out to make a name for himself, and in 1902, he secured a job in Buffalo as secretary and treasurer of the Shefford Cheese Company. Kraft rose through the ranks and became a partner at the company, only to be unceremoniously removed by his fellow partners while on a business trip to Chicago. He used all he had, a measly sixty-five dollars, to rent a horse and wagon and establish his own business buying and selling wholesale cheese to local grocers. By 1907, the business was failing. According to company lore, when Kraft found religion and decided to “make God a partner” in this venture, his cheese business suddenly began to improve and eventually became an empire.

So many American business stories go like this. Another very good one is Colonel Sanders of KFC fame. These guys inhabited a rough-and-tumble America with low entry costs. The flexibility and tumult they enjoyed made what they did possible. It’s like reading about another country. Can we, or should we, go back to that? How much of that comes packaged with things we cannot accept today?

As I said, read the whole thing. This is a really expertly done piece of food and culture writing.

When Did We All Become Pop Culture Detectives?, New York Times, Nick Haramis, January 13, 2023

Scouring for these narrative tricks is addictive — for one thing, they flatter consumers’ sense of themselves as nobody’s fool. In today’s media landscape, across the political spectrum, it can seem as if only dupes would take what they’re shown at strict face value. But the danger in searching for additional layers of meaning — another spool to unravel on Twitter or Reddit, whether it’s about an entertainer’s upcoming tour or the origins of the novel coronavirus — is that at some point you’re bound to find something that isn’t really there, or misinterpret what is.

Really, an Easter egg enthusiast is often just a conspiracy theorist with popcorn.

Interesting piece here, on how the occasional hidden pop-culture reference has ballooned into something very weird and obsessive. Give it a read.

Nintendo president Doug Bowser: Switch is ‘redefining what a console life cycle can look like’, Washington Post, Gene Park, June 18, 2021

We’ve been enjoying our Nintendo Switch that my wife got us for Christmas in 2021 quite a bit. For many years I only occasionally played my older games, and while they hold up, they really are from a different era; the technological shift from 2D to 3D was huge. As was the shift from basic 3D to hardware that could handle true “open world” adventure games.

The Switch is an incremental improvement over previous recent consoles, but it doesn’t do anything they couldn’t do, really. The system’s big innovation isn’t a technological one but a design one: making the “console” a dockable handheld, such that the same games can be played on the TV with a controller, or with the handheld sans dock wherever you like.

I found these remarks (from a year and a half ago, and maybe a bit outdated) really interesting:

“We are always looking at technology and how technology can enhance gameplay experiences. It’s not technology for technology’s sake,” Bowser tells The Washington Post. “It’s how specifically can technology enhance a gameplay experience. And then where do you apply that technology? Do you want to apply it on current existing hardware or platforms, or do you want to wait for the next platform? And then what’s the right gameplay experience with that? There’s a host of factors that goes into it, and it’s something we’re always looking at.”

….“As we enter into our fifth year, Nintendo Switch really is redefining what a console life cycle can look like, and the vibrancy of that overall life cycle with a strong cadence of content,” Bowser said.

It’s kind of refreshing to see a company prioritize the software while also being very fun and innovative—cutting-edge in a different way—with the hardware.

Related Reading:

New and Old #33

New and Old #34

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