The Enduring Nostalgia of Hawaii’s Historic Drive-In Restaurants, Hawai‘i Magazine, Tracy Chan, May 18, 2017

My wife and I got back earlier this week from a trip to Honolulu, and the large number of surviving early post-war restaurants, complete with vintage signs, is one thing you’ll notice about the city. As the article notes, few or none are really drive-ins anymore; they’re more like small diners or fast food joints. But the aesthetic and the food pretty much brings you back to the Fifties.

Unfortunately, one such iconic establishment, open since 1953, closed last year. Hopefully, it will be reopened by someone else as the pandemic passes. Most seem to have made it, however, and I saw a number of these types of restaurants while there. It’s unusual to see an area with such expensive real estate retain old-fashioned places like this. For whatever reason, they seem to exert more of a cultural and nostalgic pull in Hawaii than in many cities in the continental United States.

Never Going Back, The American Mind, Joel Kotkin, September 27, 2021

I mostly disagree with Joel Kotkin’s attitudes about cities, suburbs, and density, but this is an interesting piece about the ongoing uncertainty regarding remote work. Kotkin argues that a major shift was already slowly underway, sped up by the pandemic, and likely to continue afterwards. He thinks this is mostly good, and on this I agree completely.

However, I will nitpick. For example, when discussing the decline in commuter traffic to cities, he conflates “downtown” and “central business district.” In my experience these are often two completely different parts of the city. (In D.C., the large office-dominated area I used to work was quite barren in terms of social and cultural amenities. While in some senses it might be “downtown,” it isn’t at all what you think of when you use the term to refer to the vibrant core of a city.)

He also juxtaposes the idea that Millennials are attracted to urban life with the fact that they’re embracing work-from-home at high rates. These are not opposites at all—or rather, they’re only opposites if you think the basic function of cities is to be temporary holding spaces for commuters from outlying communities.

All that said, the trends Kotkin is describing regarding work and offices basically seem to be real and ongoing, and they’re very much worth watching closely.

How Conservatism Misses Black America, Law & Liberty, Rachel Ferguson, September 27, 2021

This is a strong piece that rips into the standard Republican attitude towards African Americans as a voting bloc, which is appealing in some ways—support for small business and entrepreneurship, social conservatism which African Americans actually largely share—but also kind of condescending, at best.

Ferguson argues, perceptively, that Blacks face strong pressure within their communities to vote Democratic due to history and policy, and so Republicans need to make it non-embarrassing for Blacks to vote for them, basically. She also notes that rap and the problems of the poorest “inner-city” neighborhoods are no more representative of African Americans than, say, Hollywood movies are representative of America overall. This is the kind of thinking conservatives should be doing.

In John They Trust, Smithsonian Magazine, Paul Raffaele, February 2006

While reading about Pacific islands while in Hawaii, I came across this piece on the phenomenon of “cargo cult” religions. Some people find this whole thing to be a projection of Western ideas onto rather complicated Pacific island cultures, or even to be kind of racist. I’m not sure whether the story the article tells is accurate, but I can imagine how strange the sudden appearance of massive modern armies during World War II must have been in these remote and mostly pre-industrial societies.

But the real value of the “cargo cult” idea is that we are every bit as susceptible to superstition and magical thinking as we imagine these pre-industrial societies to be. Maybe Pacific islanders built fake airstrips and fake radios, thinking they would summon more American airdrops. How are we doing that, in our own technologically sophisticated ways?

Related Reading:

New and Old #9

New and Old #10

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