New and Old #123
Friday roundup and commentary
This is a fascinating piece about tiny Japanese pickup trucks, which are beloved not by lefty urban environmentalists but by rural farmers, largely for use on their properties rather than on public roads. Why? Because American pickup trucks are too damn big and flashy, and are mostly not real work vehicles. There’s no reason these have to be imported—rather than made in America to American regulatory standards—but American carmakers simply don’t make them.
So there’s all that—a case where some kind of deregulation would actually serve ordinary people against the interests of corporations. But I found this bit interesting:
In one critical way, though, kei trucks and other small-format foreign cars actually exceed U.S. safety standards: because Japanese and European regulators both factor in the safety of people outside of vehicles, while Americans don’t.
We sort of treat safety as zero sum. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to think that a lot of motorists feel safe knowing the other guy will die in a crash. Conservatives mock the term “traffic violence,” but I think it’s profound. There really is an expectation and acceptance of violence baked very deeply into how we think about these things. We behave as though 40,000 dead Americans are simply the price in blood of freedom of movement. I think that is morally corrosive.
It seems to me oversized cars are classic examples of products which offload harm on other people—negative externalities—and as such should be regulated as nuisances or hazards.
The Real Reason Middle America Should Be Angry, Washington Monthly, Brian S. Feldman, March 14, 2016
The relative decline of St. Louis—along with that of other similarly endowed heartland cities—is therefore not simply, or even primarily, a story of deindustrialization. The larger explanation involves how presidents and lawmakers in both parties, influenced by a handful of economists and legal scholars, quietly altered federal competition policies, antitrust laws, and enforcement measures over a period of thirty years.
Some things were happening in American politics around the time this article came out, and, of course, it’s sort of bouncing off that, as well as an NFL controversy.
This is what feels like an old-fashioned economic progressivism; one that embraces free enterprise contra economic concentration:
After World War II, Congress continued strengthening these anti-monopoly laws. The 1950 Celler-Kefauver Act, for instance, closed a loophole that allowed companies to thwart competition by gobbling up competitors’ regional suppliers. At the Wholesale Grocers Association convention held in St. Louis, the law’s cosponsor, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, declared that the 1950 act would “blast out those pillboxes of monopoly . . . that threaten our free enterprise.”
It’s a good read, and there aren’t a whole lot of folks in politics carrying this general viewpoint today. There probably should be.
Restaurateurs are not oblivious to the fact that social-media — TikTok especially but also Instagram Reels and even YouTube — is an essential restaurant-discovery tool for young diners.
Ugh.
Joe Isidori is the chef and owner of Arthur & Sons, a meatballs-and-macaroni Italian spot that opened in the West Village last year. He is also an engagement guru, having previously invented the candy-loaded milkshakes at Black Tap Burgers that became a defining beverage of the 2010s Instagram era.
More ugh.
Compared to traditional publicity, the cost of comping a meal is relatively low, though influencers with more than a million followers often want cash, too. To Goldburg, even these rates are justified: “For some restaurants, it would be stupid for them to not pay $10,000 for the day,” he says. “I know that sounds high — but you’re genuinely getting a million-plus views.” How does he quantify this? “Dozens of restaurants have shared case studies with us detailing the before-and-after impact of our videos,” he claims.
Sometimes, you know, I feel like sitting here writing a newsletter isn’t exactly work. So it’s good to get a corrective like this once in awhile.
The TikTok stuff is gibberish to me, but the idea that social media is actually changing expectations about food is an interesting one. Nonetheless, it’s one that drives me crazy. And I find the descriptions of some of the dishes in here frankly disgusting; I’ve never wanted good, cheap food thrown on a chipped white plate more in my life. But then, I guess that’s an “aesthetic” of its own.
“The most successful tactic is always scarcity,” says influencer Audrey Peters (782,000 followers). Madison Shapiro, one member of Sistersnacking (494,000 followers), points to Bohemian, a “referral only” Japanese steakhouse that recently closed but for a time required guests to receive an endorsement from an existing member or submit in writing why they should be allowed to dine there (it lost “allure and buzz” after relaxing this rule during the pandemic, Shapiro says), and the Office of Mr. Moto, a “sushi speakeasy” decorated with a 19th-century nautical theme that asks guests to type in a pass code to gain access. The influencer Kit Keenan (578,000 followers) prefers 4 Charles Prime Rib, “a very New York, dark, hard-to-get-into, can’t-get-a-reservation type place — those are the spots that do the best on social media.”
The devolution of restaurants in buzzy locales from places to eat to brazen money-extraction schemes that treat their customers like schmucks is really one of my pet peeves. But on the other hand, I made these dinners recently:
Critiques of the Reformed Eucharist as an “empty sign” are nothing new. From the beginning of the Reformation, Catholic polemicists talked about nothing so often as this, and before long, Lutherans too made this accusation against the Reformed. Whereas the early Reformed fiercely denied the charge, somewhere along the way, they started to believe it about themselves, and then to wear the charge of subjectivism as a badge of pride.
I find these debates interesting, as intellectual matters. I’m Catholic, but I like knowing more about what other faiths and other Christian communities believe. (I was rather surprised, for example, to learn that Methodists frequently receive communion kneeling at an altar rail, which I have only ever seen once or twice in a Roman Catholic church. Or that Methodist communion services can look like this.)
And this is certainly something I’ve heard before, which is also interesting. Pushing back against it is the point of this essay.
Whereas medieval Catholicism saw the whole created order as a seamless tapestry in which the lowest was knit together with the highest, in which, in the inimitable words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” Protestantism had, wittingly or unwittingly, “disenchanted” the world, leaving it, in the words of Hamlet, “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable” with only the inner recesses of our minds serving as a site of communion with God.
And while—of course—I’m not convinced by Littlejohn’s defense of Reformed eucharistic theology, I find this discrete bit compelling:
At the eve of the Reformation, most believers actually partook of the Eucharist just once per year, instead worshipping the body and blood of Christ only from a distance, as the consecrated elements were reserved in a chapel for adoration or paraded through the streets on the Feast of Corpus Christi. What Christ gave as a means to come near to his people and be united to them, the late medieval church had transformed into a means of maintaining a barrier of distance between Christ and his people.
If you find this sort of thing interesting, give it a read.
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okay, I'm intrigued by the old Mere Orthodoxy essay! My husband and I are Protestant, but like to dapple in learning about Catholicism. That quote on sacramentality was honestly a pretty valid, sick burn so I am interested. haha