Too Many Americans Are Missing Out on the Best Kitchen Gadget, The Atlantic, Matteo Wong, April 21, 2023

This faithful companion had accompanied Wu through at least four cities, a marriage, the birth of two children, and jobs in both the Obama and Biden administrations, outliving as many as 10 phones, several computers, and multiple cars.

My wife has a very similar Zojirushi rice cooker, one of the first things she bought on her own in grad school, and it works like the day it was purchased. (It’s crazy to think that at one time, Japanese stuff was considered junk.)

This rings true:

So much modern technology, especially in disruption-obsessed Silicon Valley, promises that over time it will improve dramatically and inevitably—a computer that was the size of a room in 1955 can now fit into your pocket. But the rice cooker hasn’t changed much at all, because it hasn’t needed to.

And the history is fascinating:

This kitchen masterpiece was developed as the country [Japan] was rebuilding after World War II, when a Toshiba salesman advertising a washing machine to housewives learned that preparing rice three times a day was more arduous than doing laundry.

This is fascinating and gives me some food for thought: the idea that the technology is merely getting better at emulating something that long preceded it:

Many of these steps forward in technology have really brought the rice cooker back in time—making it better emulate the traditional kamado cooking method, says Marilyn Matsuba, a marketing manager at Zojirushi.

It’s great; read the whole thing.

The best diners in New Jersey according to this couple trying them all, New York Post, Jeanette Settembre, March 6, 2023

I don’t read the New York Post much, but this is a lovely piece devoid of tabloidy politics or sensationalism. I don’t know any of the diners mentioned, as the friend who sent me the piece asked, but I might as well. There probably isn’t a “best” diner, and if you don’t go for diner fare the best and worst will all look about the same. And they kind of are. But it’s such a great and quintessentially New Jersey project:

The couple were marveling over the massive, book-like menu, when Karri, a nurse, took a candid snap of her hungry hubby reading the specials.

“I joked, ‘You know what would be really cool? What if we had this exact same snapshot from every diner in New Jersey?’ I was half-kidding,” Jon, who owns a delivery dry-cleaning business, recalled. 

They started canvassing Google Maps, New Jersey restaurant Facebook pages and diner blogs to compile the ultimate list in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s organized by county, town and name — and they estimate they still have 220 to go. (Unfortunately, many from the initial list have since closed, particularly during the pandemic.)…

The couple say they plan to downsize soon — and not a moment too soon.

“We’re thinking of possibly relocating to the northern half of Monmouth County, which will make the rest of this project a lot easier,” he said.

The only problem is, the couple doesn’t like Taylor ham. Look it up.

On Niagara Falls, Scope of Work, Hillary Predko, July 3, 2023

Last week I went back for the first time in 20 years, and it was immediately clear why I hadn’t been tuned in to Niagara Falls’ energy legacy: All evidence of it has been deliberately hidden from sight.

My wife and I were just in Canada in May, and we stayed a couple of nights in Niagara Falls. There’s a little bit of info in the official tours about hydro power, but it’s very much in the backseat. The town, as Predko notes, is full of tacky and overpriced tourist stuff. But:

The well-manicured parks, the deliberate invisibility of the generating infrastructure, and the fall’s facelift are compromises that aim to protect the natural beauty of the falls (and the value of the tourist dollars it attracts) while maximizing their industrial potential.

Part of the piece is paywalled, but check out the preview.

Iceland, Without a Phone, Brickstackr, Hannah Thoreson, May 31, 2023

Hannah has liked and shared my writing before, so I’ll share hers. She’s a tech worker, so this meditation on the smartphone is interesting. “The last time I had been without a phone for any serious length of time was in 2014 after I wrecked my SUV on another similar adventure,” she writes. It’s striking, isn’t it, how hard it is to put these things down, let alone exist for any length of time untethered to them?

Other than feeling extra-keenly that she had packed the wrong clothes, not just functionally but aesthetically, being phoneless meant this:

It was like a huge weight off of my shoulders. I felt none of that anxiety at all until I got much closer to being home, then I suddenly wondered what was going on with work or what everyone else did over the weekend or a million other things.

It seems pretty obvious that smartphones produce a sort of mental fog, or at least some alteration in our resting mental state. And it also seems obvious that putting them down or turning them off is very difficult for many if not most people. Any other object—or, not to put too fine a point on it, substance—that did that? You know what we’d call it.

Related Reading:

New and Old #79

New and Old #80

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