New and Old #199
Friday roundup and commentary
Remember the old days when a project was announced, and then it happened?
Not quite:
Building the subway was not easy, and it was constantly in danger of being killed. It was not as simple as “government decides to build the subway, awards the contract, and it is quickly executed,” a view which I think Ezra’s remarks might inadvertently propagate as they bounce around the internet (I don’t think this was his intention). It’s important to understand the harshly adversarial conditions under which the subway came to be, because they reveal how the subway really succeeded, and give us a potent example to which to appeal for modern legal change.
NIMBYs existed who wanted to block the subway. Private capital was scared to invest in it. State courts slowed it down, and pushed back the construction start date. The U.S. Supreme Court had to extinguish lawsuits seeking to stop construction. Politicians had to cut compromises left and right, including sub-optimally altering route plans, to account for the public fear of governmental corruption and construction-related disruption. Cultural commentators confidently opined that no one would want to spend that much time underground. Macro conditions repeatedly derailed the subway’s construction.
This is a really thorough inventory of all the obstacles to the construction of the New York City subway system. They all existed. It still got built, but it wasn’t as simple as “government announces project, builds project, the end.” Read the whole thing, for some good historical perspective.
The Lost Satisfactions of Manual Competence, Cal Newport, May 22, 2020
There’s something uniquely misery-making about days spent in a Makework Matrix of ceaseless digital communication that doesn’t seem to generate much beyond additional digital communication — we’re simply not wired for this as a species. Not surprisingly, I’ve received an increasing number of messages from Office Space Neos, tumbled into a state of introspection by the disruption of the lockdowns, and now wondering if they can tolerate this digitized busyness for the decades that remain before their retirement.
What Newport dubs “manual competence” is something I like to call “mechanical literacy”: a familiarity with physical things, how they work, how to tinker with them, etc. In other words, having a little of the handyman about you. (And digital tech makes that harder, because the actual operation of many things is not taking place via visible moving parts in a way that a regular person can observe and understand.)
That this piece hails from the low point of the pandemic is fitting:
Before the pandemic, the ritual of traveling to a physical office helped obfuscate the disembodied nature of most knowledge work. But when this element was stripped away, the intrinsic abstraction of our efforts became impossible to miss. Fred Hauser ended his spring with a working four-stroke engine. We’ll end ours with an email inbox fuller than when we began.
It’s true that while digital work is no doubt “real” in many ways, there’s just something different about doing things in the real world, with real objects. It fires up a different part of your brain. And those of us who sit a desk behind a screen all day could all probably use a little more of it.
Pretend It’s a City, City of Yes, Ryan Puzycki, August 30, 2024
Like my experience in New York City last year, Puzycki experienced a city that felt unselfconsciously alive and full. Not perfect, but no longer in the pandemic-era trough that really did plague a lot of big cities. Crime, homelessness, disorder, antisocial behavior? Yes, of course. But there is a great deal of ruin in a city, and yet it goes on.
This is the core of his essay, though, which explains what exactly that puzzling headline (what do you mean pretend New York City is a city?!) means:
The meta-level challenge is that it could be doing better, if not doing great—if New Yorkers and their leaders acted as if they were living in America’s largest, most productive, most transit-enabled city and not, say, some parking lot or suburban subdivision. Like the mayor, I, too, beseech them:
Pretend it’s a city—and not a thruway for suburban drivers to consume at taxpayer expense. Implement congestion pricing to improve the experience of those who must drive while funding capital investments that will make it possible for more people to access transit. (And prosecute fare-evading freeriders, too.)
Pretend it’s a city—and rebuild the city for people, not cars and car storage, prioritizing parking spaces for more productive uses like outdoor dining or parklets, or multimodal mobility improvements.
Pretend it’s a city—and redevelop the massively underfunded, underdeveloped, car-centric superblocks of public housing, replacing subsidized units, building a lot more taxable market-rate apartments and mixed-use spaces, creating accessible green spaces, restoring the street grid, and reconnecting communities long segregated from the city by midcentury urban renewal.
This is a subtle but key point: America doesn’t lack cities. What we lack is an urban mindset, a way of properly understanding urban governance and urban growth. The problem for urbanism is not architectural or even political, as much as it is conceptual. It is a deficit of imagination; a deficit of discernment for what we already have and what it truly is.
What are women allowed to want?, Terms of endearment, Sarah Menkedick, August 09, 2024
This is a pretty good piece on the whole “tradwife” thing, which in my view is sort of old-fashioned normalcy passed through the funhouse mirror of the internet and social media.
In particularly, Menkedick does a pretty good takedown of an interview with Hannah Neeleman, who Google’s AI describes thus: “a social media influencer and business owner who posts about her traditional lifestyle as a Mormon farm wife.”
The writer asks Neeleman if she’s a feminist and Neeleman begins to say yes, then questions what this means.
“I feel like I’m a femin-,” she stops herself. “There’s so many different ways you could take that word. I don’t even know what feminism means any more.”
As a journalist, this should be a charged moment, wrought with compelling tension. Why does Neeleman start to say the word, then stop? The writer could ask: What did it used to mean to you? What does it now? Why? How did having children change this? How did farming? How did rural versus urban life? So many ways to use this as an opportunity to delve and deepen.
But the writer has zero curiosity. She doesn’t follow up. The point here is not alternative views. It’s not to get us to think, to nudge any of our givens and expectations. It’s judgement and outrage.
She quickly moves on to point out that Neeleman doesn’t support elective abortions and she doesn’t use birth control. The writer does not ask a single question about what’s informed these beliefs or changed them over time. They are simply litmus tests, and Neeleman fails, and we are meant to groan and roll our eyes at the horror of it. There is only one angle and one appropriate reaction. This is now passing as journalism.
Someone tell me that she’s wrong, when it comes to a certain very-online contingent:
When Hannah Neeleman insisted she was not, actually, being oppressed, feminists did not trust her. On Twitter, the overwhelming response on the left was a mixture of scorn and pity: sure, sure, you really chose your Utah farm life with eight kids and no childcare, poor thing who was manipulated and abused and oppressed by your terrible husband into this traditional existence! This sounds a lot like another phenomenon leftist feminists are usually quite quick to criticize: gaslighting.
Do we actually trust women? Or only the right kind of women?
Related Reading:
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