Year Five
My, and your, ideas for the coming year of The Deleted Scenes
I was almost going to make the sub-head “My, and your, ideas for what’s next,” but I despise that HR we’re-going-to-fire-you-without-telling-you-we’re-going-to-fire-you-but-what-else-would-‘what-comes-next’-mean style, so none of that here. 2025 will be the fifth year of this newsletter, and it, and I, aren’t going anywhere.
At the end of each year, I write three things: a full week of longer pieces exploring really core themes (during which I offer a discount for new subscribers—thank you to everyone who subscribed!), a top 10 roundup piece, and then, on the last day of the year, a piece thinking about some of what I want to write in the coming year.
I don’t always end up writing all of them, and of course I get new ideas throughout the year, but it’s a fun little exercise. I’m also curious what you, especially the more regular readers, would be interested to see me do more of, or if you have some place you think I’d love to visit/photograph/write about, or some neat building that would be fun for my series on what various old buildings used to be. Leave a comment!
One of the things I’d like to do this year is return a little more frequently to the topics outside of “urbanism broadly defined.” From the start here I’ve always mostly written about housing, land use, NIMBY vs. YIMBY, small towns, old buildings, etc. But I’ve had a few other topics I sprinkle in. Those are mostly food and cooking, design and old consumer products, retail history and trends, and consumer issues like my occasional thoughts on inflation, specific stores I really like, or pieces where I actually disassemble and work on a product.
I saw a very interesting video on YouTube over the Christmas break where a video game and tube television collector managed to confirm the existence of a Sony TV set from the 1980s that nobody had ever actually found and documented—it was documented by Sony’s marketing materials, but some folks thought it had been a marketing stunt and never made it to production. It was fascinating to me that this YouTuber was essentially doing both historical research and reporting—a much higher level of journalism than what you see in a lot of legacy media. So there you go—that’s a piece of the sort I’d like to write occasionally here.
There’s also a fun and pretty random piece I intend to wrap up trying to pin down when that cheapo cassette/record/CD player/radio unit in the big wooden case first appeared—you know, the all-in-one stereo that appears at the holiday season in places like Kohl’s. I think I have a couple of interesting things to say about it.
Another theme I’m sure I’ll be coming back to is the intersection of urbanism and the family, and the question of whether cities are family-friendly. I have this hypothesis that suburbia and childlessness are actually sort of different forms of the same thing—both urbanism (living in community with lots of other people in close proximity) and family life (the chaos of dealing with young children) are things that are difficult but worthwhile. So conceptually, at least, it seems to me that the spirit of suburbia cuts against the spirit of the family, because suburbia is about privacy and control and individualism, and both the city and the family are not. I’ll be thinking about this.
I also love doing these pieces tracing the history of a company that’s largely forgotten or almost gone. I did something like that here and here, and I’d like to do one of these again. I’ve got a few old restaurant chain names in a draft post in my dashboard here, any or all of which would be fun bits of corporate history/hunts for identifiable surviving locations.
Finally, I still think about the road trip I took down Route 11 in Virginia back in 2020, where I photographed a bunch of small towns and various spots along the highway, including some cool midcentury stuff that was abandoned but pretty well preserved. I’d like to do at least one big road-trip piece this year, either to an interesting town or city I’d have to drive a bit to, or just down a stretch of an old highway full of old time capsules and conversation starters.
These pieces aren’t exactly “urbanism,” but they sort of fit into the broader theme of being aware of and appreciating your surroundings; of having curiosity and cultivating an ability to feel wonder.
That, more broadly than the whole cluster of issues around housing and land use, is really what I think this newsletter is about at heart. But it can be more than one thing, and with a piece every day, maybe it would have to be. In any case, I’m looking forward to year five, and I hope I’ll see all of you next year!
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That's an interesting thought about suburbia and childlessness. I wonder if the privacy and control that the suburbs offer are more appealing when you have children to care for? I'm looking forward to that one.
Been a subscriber for a few years and have found it to be worth every penny! I’d love if you visited St. Louis and wrote it up. It’s been in the news a lot for typical post-industrial struggles, but I think it has a lot to offer and have seen some hopeful signs. It also has a great food scene. I feel like it’s a city that could really see a resurgence if it really embraced urbanism.