Readington, N.J.: A Farm Community Intent on Preserving Its Charm, New York Times, Jill P. Capuzzo, November 25, 2021

I grew up in this part of New Jersey, so it’s always interesting to read outside impressions of it. These New York Times profiles of small towns in New Jersey at the commutable edge of the New York metro area are always interesting to read. (For example, this profile of Mountainside, which acknowledges the sentiment that the community’s popularity is diluting the reasons it was desirable in the first place. There’s NIMBYism here, of course, but also plain old nostalgia for what one knows, which isn’t always bad.)

But anyway, back to Readington:

With its deep roots in farming, open space has long been a defining element of this 48-square-mile town, home to about 16,000 people, 93 percent of them white, according to census data. In 1978, seeking to avoid the kind of overdevelopment that occurred in neighboring Somerset County, Readington became the first municipality in New Jersey to put an open-space referendum on the ballot.

(Capuzzo uses the word “town” throughout, but Readington is a “township,” with some actual compact settlements—small towns—sprinkled throughout. Forty-eight square miles is more than double the size of Manhattan!)

Nonetheless, read the whole thing for a sense of how people in this part of the state think about development, open space, and land use. Also read my piece on Somerville’s urban infill (it’s the county seat of Somerset County), and this piece on Madison, New Jersey, arguing that open space and development need not be at odds.

Just Like Brandma Made, TASTE, Cathy Erway, December 14, 2021

This piece delves into the workings of corporate test kitchens, whose job is to produce recipes that require products made by their company. Erway points to a number of “classic” dishes, like casseroles made with cream of mushroom soup, as well as to some more obscure examples. Many people, she writes, are a little upset when they learn that a beloved family recipe came, essentially, from a corporate sales office.

But on the other hand, these test kitchens, while tasked with selling products, still staff actual chefs, and so the resulting recipes are often high quality, more usable and rigorously tested than many cookbook recipes. What’s more, the better ones can be reverse engineered with homemade or more natural ingredients, for those home cooks who enjoy the challenge or the time in the kitchen.

The broader point here is a fascinating one that applies to many things (including to much of the custom and products surrounding weddings.) That point is, in Erway’s words, that “moving product has been a significant contributor to culinary innovation in America.” This is not an indictment of capitalism, but merely an observation.

Cancel Amazon Prime, The Atlantic, Ellen Cushing, June 22, 2021

Prime is Amazon’s greatest and most terrifying invention: a product whose value proposition is to help you buy more products. With 200 million subscribers worldwide, it is the second-most-popular subscription service on Earth.

This is reminiscent of science fiction writer Frederik Pohl’s “spherical trust,” a series of imaginary products from his 1952 novel The Space Merchants that lock the user into a circle of addiction, jumping from one product to the next, over and over.

Low prices draw customers in, which provides Amazon with more data, more bargaining power, more market share, and more advantageous economies of scale, which then allows it to gobble up more businesses, grow its footprint, build more warehouses, increase selection, and lower prices even more—which then draws even more customers in.

The classic argument against monopolies is that they use their market power to overcharge consumers. Amazon isn’t really doing that, but the company’s rapid growth in so many different sectors certainly raises antitrust issues. Will we look at Amazon’s dominance one day with nostalgia, the way many now remember Sears? Maybe.

Read the whole thing for a fun and eye-opening critique.

Covid Malaise, New York Times, David Leonhardt, December 10, 2021

Americans think the economy is in rough shape because the economy is in rough shape.

A quick piece that brings a breath of fresh air to some attempts to deny that things just aren’t quite right. That goes well beyond any critiques of America’s COVID policies. I suspect that even when prices and staffing return to normal in stores and restaurants, there will just be a certain weirdness to American life for awhile. See my two pieces on this phenomenon from earlier this year, here and here, on what I called “the great unsettledness.”

Related Reading:

New and Old #31

New and Old #32

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