Clive Thompson isolates this fantastically revealing kicker from an NYT article about correction fluid:
An enduring drawback of correction fluid is the solvent vapor. That could be fixed, but not without damaging the psyche of faithful consumers, said Mr. McCaffrey of Liquid Paper: “People who have grown up using a product tend to equate its smell with quality, and you don’t want to change that – whether it’s crayons or correction fluid.”
Halfbakery. This site’s been around forever, but I’ve spent precious little time there. Until now. This is awesome!
Meh. Pretty much the only one I’ll miss is Kristof. Krugs, occasionally. The NYT‘s announced a decision to charge for the op-ed page online, and bloggers are already saying their sayonaras. (This will be on Every Blog in the World in 5 … 4 … )
Update: Changed the link to a more complete story. The $50 annual fee (yowza!) will also allow subscribers access to the NYT archive.
I love the thought that our children are growing up used to having domestic robots in the house. Robots for them are slightly dim but friendly vacuum cleaners, not fearsome weapons or fantasy toys.
I have a reflexive dislike of the suburbs. I grew up in Orlando, in one of its suburbs stacked on suburbs, all in distant orbit around a tiny center of faux-urbanity we called downtown. (Which in turn hovered in distant orbit around a giant center of faux-reality we called Disney World.)
Orlando feels horribly lifeless to me. I often say that in Orlando, you have to drive 20 minutes to get to the convenience store. I can’t think of a single good Mom-and-Pop shop around where I grew up. When I go back to visit, there are no places where my friends and I can sit idly and chat until the wee hours. For a while, we seriously took to frequenting the lobbies of the nicer hotels.
When I was a sophomore away in college, my parents suddenly moved away from the house I’d lived in since 4th grade. To this day, I haven’t even gone back to see what the house looks like. I have tons of memories of that time in my life, but the house, lifeless and suburban, figures in none of them. Meanwhile, my grandmother’s house in Chicago, where I spent only a week each year until my late teens, is a living place brimming with unforgettable corners.
So it feels instinctively right to me when I hear James Howard Kunstler describe suburbs as resource-sucking parasites, or when I read essays like David Owen’s magnificent “Green Manhattan” (about how super-urbs like Manhattan “offer one of the few plausible remedies for some of the world’s most discouraging environmental ills”) and Michael Pollan’s equally magnificent “Why Mow?” (about how the once-democratic suburban lawn has become a symbol of near-totalitarian conformity).
How could anyone choose a suburb over a city? I ask myself. Cities engender creativity and comity and efficiency. The Renaissance could never have taken place in a suburbanized Europe.
But I occasionally get jolted out of my city-worship when I encounter a bit of reality like this post by Terrance at the Republic of T:
Education is something that’s important to both the hubby and me, and without question we want our kids to have the best shot we can give them in that department; just like a lot of other parents. For us, that either means private schools in D.C. or public schools in the suburbs. Private schools in D.C. are more than we can afford for two kids. So, we’ve sold our house we’re moving to a new house in Chevy Chase, MD, that’s in the process of being built. (Just this week, we noted that Parker’s future high school made Newsweek’s list of the 100 best high schools in America. Let’s hope it stays that way.) In the meantime, we’re moving into a townhouse in Maryland until the new house is finished, later this year.
Another issue for us, that the article touches on, is space. You may have to understand the general layouts of D.C. Victorian townhouses, or even have seen our house to understand why the space doesn’t work as well for us as another space might. You could start with the family room on the second floor and the kitchen on the first floor (you wouldn’t believe how many trips up and down the stairs this involves – many with an infant/toddler while juggling dinner/lunch), segue with the lack of room to grow, and finish off with the cost of more space – in the city. It’s pretty much like the article says.
It’s also another step on a journey that started the moment we – a couple of urban-dwelling gay men – committed to becoming parents.
The article Terrance refers to is this piece from The New York Times, headlined “Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children.” The article goes into some of the intractible, real-world problems that drag perfectly sensible people into the suburban cookie-cutter.
Dig a little deeper into that Kunstler interview, and you find that while he hates suburbs, he’s not all that keen on super-urbs, either:
The huge suburban metroplexes like New York and Chicago are not going to function very well. They’re products of the oil age. They are oversupplied with skyscrapers and mega-structures that have poor prospects in a society with scarce energy. We will see a painful contraction in these places.
And even city-lover David Owen describes Manhattan this way:
Manhattan is loud and dirty, and the subway is depressing, and the fumes from the cars and cabs and buses can make people sick. Presumably for environmental reasons, New York City has one of the highest childhood-asthma rates in the country, with an especially alarming concentration in East Harlem.
I only have to remember how stressed I could get trying to pay the bills in my beloved, bustling Boston to realize that cities aren’t exactly utopias. So if suburbs are unsustainable, but cities are hemorrhaging families, where do we end up?
PS: I only mentioned them briefly, but both of the essays I linked above are very good. Highly worth checking out. See Short Schrift for more on “Green Manhattan.”
“Why Mow?” is shrewd social commentary at its best: “Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans love them so much.”
Also see WorldChanging for more on all this.
Dang. I thought I’d be the first to point to Dan Gillmor’s new project, Bayosphere, currently in beta or soft-launch or gestation or something else short of ta-da. But it looks like Tampa Bay stalwart Laura Fries (that’s Fries like French) beat me to the punch. Why you always gotta be blog-blocking, Laura? Sheez.
Anyway, Dan Gillmor, formerly of Typepad, formerly formerly of the San Jose Mercury News, has begun to unwrap his first citizen’s media venture that isn’t necessarily tied to a book. As of this moment, there isn’t much describing exactly what this new venture is about, besides citizen’s media and the SF Bay Area, but worth noting and bookmarking, if you’re interested in either of those two things.
A link worth posting even if many of you probably already saw it on Boing Boing.
The trailer for fashion photographer David LaChapelle’s documentary about krumping, Rize, has been released. Despite appearing a full year ago on BoingBoing, the art of krumping (a.k.a. clown dancing) remains the next hot thing in hip-hop dancing.
Most recently, krumping was featured to great effect in the Chemical Brothers’ video “Galvanize,” although Missy Elliott probably deserves the most credit for piping it into the mainstream with last year’s summer jam “I’m Really Hot.”
From the reviews collected at LaChappelle’s site, it sounds like Rize impressed the Sundance crowd. It’s been compared to Paris is Burning, a strong contender for my favorite documentary of all time.
At least superficially, the comparison makes sense. In PIB, a straight Jewish woman captures New York’s brilliant, predominantly black and Latino voguing scene at its height — and also at the height of AIDS and violence against queers and within the queer community on and around Christopher St. With Rize, a gay white photographer takes on LA’s brilliant, predominantly black krumping scene — a splash of positivity set against the violent backdrop of South Central L.A.
Here’s hoping it makes it to Fresno.
Platypus lets you edit Web pages to appear however you want (remove elements, insert your own HTML, move things around), then saves those changes as a Greasemonkey user script, so the Web site always displays just how you like it. Best ever. (From Waxy.)
