New and Old #129
Friday roundup and commentary
Why furniture got so bad, Washington Post, Rachel Kurzius, September 5, 2023
No one expects an Ikea bookcase or West Elm sofa to last for generations, or maybe even to survive another move. But walk into a vintage furniture store and you’ll find all types of old pieces that were inexpensive and mass-produced in their day, yet have still managed to achieve heirloom status.
Furniture isn’t what it used to be.
“Everyone is just trying to reduce cost,” says CoCo Ree Lemery, a furniture designer who has worked for brands such as Pottery Barn and West Elm, and is currently a visiting professor of furniture design at Purdue University. Rubber wood, for example, is less expensive than most other lumber because it’s a byproduct of latex manufacturing, but it’s prone to decay. Chinese-made wood products are similarly cheap, but the quality is wildly inconsistent.
Quality being inconsistent is interesting. I feel like I’ve seen this: products where you read the reviews and the product is good if it works but half of them are lemons.
As seems to be the case with most things, much of the blame falls on social media. Rather than seeing furniture as an investment — and seeking more timeless styles — customers often look for trendier pieces that fit the online micro-aesthetic of the moment.
Ugh. “Turn off social media” is an all-purpose cure.
There’s a lot here, and it’s pretty dismal. The bit on container shipping is very interesting. It’s not even clear to me the extent to which there is intent here; the system just sort of pushes towards these outcomes. It takes real intent on the other hand, to resist it.
As for me, I go for refinished old furniture—cheaper than “good quality” modern furniture and at least as good—or Ikea stuff, which is often better than you think.
MSG Is Finally Getting Its Revenge, The Atlantic, Yasmin Tayag, May 11, 2023
The main reason salt has remained a problem is that it’s a major part of all processed food—and, well, it makes everything delicious. Persuading Americans to reduce their consumption would require a convincing dupe—something that would cut down on unhealthy sodium without making food any less tasty.
No perfect dupe exists. But the next best thing could be … MSG. Seriously.
Also:
MSG isn’t a one-to-one replacement for salt, but that’s what makes it such a promising alternative. It is a general flavor enhancer, meaning that it can amplify the perception of salt and other flavors that are already in a dish, as well as add an umami element, Soo-Yeun Lee, a sensory scientist and the director of Washington State University’s School of Food Science, told me.
Some people think MSG is bad for you, which isn’t really true, and others think it’s “cheating,” which I don’t think is true either. I do a lot of cooking, some of it pretty fancy, and I sprinkle a little salt, sugar, and MSG in almost everything. You don’t taste it, but it would taste different without it. There’s a puritanism hiding behind opinions like that.
There’s also some interesting discussion of the honesty of this kind of applied commercial science and the trickiness of doing this sort of thing via regulation. It’s a good read.
If birds aren’t dinosaurs, then we have no idea what they are. Birds share so many features with theropods and there are no other candidate fossil groups. When you understand that birds are a type of dinosaur, that the evidence has stacked up, everything starts to make more sense. Birds inherit their bipedalism from theropods, explaining why they evolved flight using just their forelimbs, unlike bats or pterosaurs.
What’s almost being argued here is that dinosaurs are actually a kind of bird, in a loose sense. It’s quite interesting. To bring this back into my wheelhouse: I guess birds are dinosaurs in the same sort of sense that small towns are cities!
I read this too late to share it closer to Labor Day, and I had never heard of this disaster before. There are probably a lot of disasters that have happened in these smaller, somewhat post-industrial New Jersey cities, in this case Passaic. (New Jersey has more Superfund sites than any other state, which is not very nice.)
After noting that the logistics center will be in the area impacted by the 1985 “Labor Day fire,” that left over 2-million square-feet of factory space destroyed, thousands unemployed and dozens homeless, Danahy said that the development aims to “restore Passaic to its foundational industrial roots.”
That’s an interesting way of putting it, in terms of seeing some continuity between the city’s history and the burgeoning logistics industry on the East Coast and in the Mid-Atlantic. And I guess pretty much everywhere.
News reports three days after the incident unfolded stated the fire was started by two teen boys, ages 12 and 13, who lit a match and tossed it into a dumpster filled with vats of naphthalene — a solid used to make mothballs and bathroom deodorizers….
After burning for two days, 40 acres covering four city blocks on Passaic’s heavily industrial Eastside had been destroyed. The fire took down 17 industrial buildings that housed 62 businesses, ranging from textiles, to chemicals, to a warehouse that stored costumes for the New York City Opera….
Early efforts to stop the flames from becoming an inferno were hindered by low water pressure and a lack of working fire hydrants, which the city had shut down during the summer to prevent vandals from opening them to cool off.
The 1980s were a tough time for urban America, and all of this is a shame. It’s very nice to see revitalization in places like this, and it’s also nice to see local or semi-local news following it.
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I think there's still quality furniture being made today, but the problem is that if you're moving a lot or renting an older, ackward space, then vintage furniture isn't a great option. It's heavy, it doesn't disassemble easily and it might be hard to fit in a rented space, not to mention protecting it from roommates.