The Deleted Scenes - New and Old #47
Redlining Didn’t Happen Quite the Way We Thought It Did, Governing, Jake Blumgart, September 21, 2021
Redlining very much existed and was very much a method of denying home loans to African Americans. But this piece goes into the details of how racism in mortgage lending played out in specific policy terms:
I can see some folks saying, “Oh, so redlining didn’t really happen.” No, this doesn’t mean that at all. Rather, I’d say it draws out a similar point to the one I’ve made a lot lately: that a lot of small but important details in recent events can be lost to time a lot more easily than we think. Do You Want a Boring Floor Lamp or an Ugly Floor Lamp?, The Atlantic, Amanda Mull, February 18, 2022 Mull touches on something I’ve noticed a lot, in the age of Amazon/Wayfair/Walmart and Target third-party sellers, etc.—that you tend to see a small number of basic designs sold in huge quantities under tons of very minor variations. Sometimes I wonder where the heck all this stuff comes from. These deep dives into extremely ordinary everyday objects illustrate so much about how our bigger systems work. This one is fun, read the whole thing. Serving Up a Medley of Cultures, Washington Post, Kenneth Bredemeier, May 26, 1999 This article, now more than 20 years old (!), is about the extremely diverse D.C.-area suburbs. I’m not sure how much this was a new-ish trend in the late ’90s, and how much the media just didn’t pick up on it—to this day, you’ll sometimes see breathless articles about how America’s suburbs are diverse/evolving/culturally interesting places, even though many of them have been for a long time. And few have been more so than those surrounding the nation’s capital. Here’s a sentence that wouldn’t likely be written today: “Walk into the Eden Center and one can easily remember the vibrance and commotion of Saigon that so many Americans remember from the Vietnam War.” Yep, the Vietnam war had ended little more than 25 years before this article was written! Also:
It’s neat to read something from back then and see how correct it was. Google Search Is Dying, DKB, February 15, 2022 I came across this blog post and found it quite interesting, even though it’s outside of my usual cluster of topics. He argues that Reddit, not Google, is basically the most useful search engine on the internet. That’s because it’s a sort of bottom-up, crowdsourced compendium of basically everything people do, talk about, or think about. (Incidentally, that’s probably why Reddit is kind of creepy and unsettling, something I wrote about awhile ago. I’m curious if anyone else has had this feeling.) But a commenter distilled the gist of the piece well, which fits with my own experience:
Have you found internet search quality to be degenerating lately? One interesting phenomenon is the growing mismatch between online business information (open hours, etc.) and the reality, due to the pandemic. But that’s a different story, I suppose. Related Reading: Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekend subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive of nearly 300 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. |
Older messages
Shopping Center Missing Links
Thursday, March 3, 2022
The ubiquitous retail format was not created, but evolved
A D.C. Building Mystery
Wednesday, March 2, 2022
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #47
Have You Seen the Price of Gas?
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
Thoughts on an expense that is not inevitable
Another Look at Two New Jersey Towns
Monday, February 28, 2022
We love them, but could we built them today?
The Howard Johnson's Sign
Saturday, February 26, 2022
Being the only person to record a piece of trivia
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