I used to a) live in San Francisco, and b) have more disposable income, no kids, and a taste for dining out. In these, my irresponsible 30’s, I almost certainly overspent on dinners at fancy restaurants. But there’s nice, and then there’s excessive, as Pete Wells ponders in the NY Times, asking, “Are These Really the World’s 50 Best Restaurants?”

Today the list is dominated by tasting-menu restaurants, and every year those menus seem to get longer and more unforgiving. There are more courses than any rational person would choose to eat, and more tastes of more wines than anyone can possibly remember the next day. The spiraling, metastasizing length of these meals seems designed to convince you that there’s just no way a mere 10 or 15 courses could contain all the genius in the kitchen.

One well-traveled diner told me about a recent, four-hour meal at Disfrutar, in Barcelona — No. 1 this year. He said he was “blown away” and at the same time he never wants to go back. “It was an assault, and not fun,” he said.

I have eaten at a few of these, for prices in the high three-digits (I know! It was a wild time!), and some of them have featured dishes that will live forever in my memory. But making this a lifestyle to aspire to as an individual, I’ve come to realize, was a pretty irresponsible way to spend money – even when you have lots of it. And steering an industry’s highest ambitions toward competing over who can best cater to the privileged few who can afford (and endure!) these gastronomic trials seems… pretty nuts?

[Which is why, as an aside, I will also give a strong recommend to 2022’s underrated The Menu with Ralph Fiennes and Emma Stone – a hilarious and freaky thriller that examines this very argument, and would have received its own post had I been writing at the time!]

So…
What’s the worst thing about how we think of fine dining right now?

Is it even ethical or worthwhile to spend that kind of money chasing “experiences” like these?

If these restaurants are in fact kinda bullshit, what’s the right balance to strike between respecting food and people? Who’s doing it right, if not The World’s Best?

Part of my recent love affair with newsletters includes the discovery of Blackbird Spyplane, a weekly update on fashion, style, and living a beautiful life that includes the occasional interview with a stylish and cool person. And sometimes, they get pretty deep on what it means to be an ethical consumer, too, like in the recent post You Are Not A Commercial For Yourself. (You really should RTFA (read the full article), it’s super worthwhile.)

Using an Ozu film as a jumping off point (see? they’re cool folks), the post explores the tension between chasing trends and coolness versus the genuine pleasure and affirming qualities of dressing well and feeling confident.

Sure, sick clothes can be a superficial object of vacuous consumerism and ego-affirmation. But sick clothes also affirm the creative ingenuity and labor of the people who made the fly s**t, weaving us into a social relationship predicated, at bottom, on celebrating and sharing what’s best and most beautiful about human creativity.
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Where things get muddy is when our healthy desire for beautiful man-made things — intimately connected to our healthy desire for connectedness & community — gets hijacked and zombiefied by manipulative, profit-hungry, fundamentally anti-social souls…
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Remember that buying s**t is not the same as having swag … Remember that having cool interests beyond cool clothes, and doing good deeds besides putting together sick outfits (which, to be clear, is a good deed), will make your clothes look better on you… Remember that you don’t even need to own things to feast upon their beauty. “Sight is sensory, after all,” Rothfeld writes, “and voyeurism can be voluptuous.”

And remember that a ravenous desire for cool clothes is tight so long as you keep it “gourmand” mode and avoid slipping into “glutton” mode, where, in the throes of a boundless acquisitive frenzy, you keep shoving food down your face without even tasting it, without thinking about how it got on your plate — without ever stopping to consider whether you’re enjoying it or not.

Which puts me very much in the mind of how far I’ve come in terms of choosing clothes with intention to fill needs or color palettes I’m looking for in dressing like myself, versus trying to mimic trends. After all, the looser clothes I grew up with are very much back in style. Plus, I care much more about spending more on longer-lasting, higher-quality articles of clothing versus acquisition of any kind. So…

How has your “style” changed with age, for better or for worse?

Are you “cooler” or “less cool” now than you were when you were younger? In what ways?

How have these evolutions changed your relationship to the clothing you own, wear, and shop for?

I have let this site languish for several years since a short-lived pandemic-inspired attempt to pivot to video, which, let’s be honest, was the kind of hilarious decision we all made at least one of in the year 2020. (That’s not to say I’ll never make a video again, because I find video editing meditative; it’s just pretty time consuming to do in service of a hobby.)

HOWEVER, since 2020 I have: 1) become unemployed, 2) worked freelance for the first time, 3) changed careers (!), 4) finished a return to grad school (!!), and now, 5) find myself in a job that will involve even MORE reading and writing than my previous discipline. As such, regular writing should probably re-enter my weekly routine.

For that reason, as well as the ever-present belief that the original idea for this website / blog remains a good one, I am going to return to weekly posting this summer. It will be useful writing practice for me, give a home to all the links I’d love to share after reading great articles I stumble across, allow space for book/movie reviews that deserve more than a tweet-length reaction on Letterboxd, and refresh the content for my favorite tool, the “Pick One Randomly” button at the top of the page.

Perhaps, in time, a return to regular writing will justify a new pivot to Substack or some other newsletter format, a recent trend which I am now totally into. Blogs are back, baby, except now they’re email. The Good Web of the early aughts is making its return in the oldest format on the internet, and I want in. Maybe. Eventually.

Anyway, more posts soon.

Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker puts a name to something I’ve felt for many years while attempting to navigate the pervasive recommendation machines of the internet: algorithmic anxiety. As he relays in the article:

“I’ve been on the internet for the last 10 years and I don’t know if I like what I like or what an algorithm wants me to like,” Peter wrote. She’d come to see social networks’ algorithmic recommendations as a kind of psychic intrusion, surreptitiously reshaping what she’s shown online and, thus, her understanding of her own inclinations and tastes. “I want things I truly like not what is being lowkey marketed to me,” her letter continued.

…

Peter’s dilemma brought to my mind a term that has been used, in recent years, to describe the modern Internet user’s feeling that she must constantly contend with machine estimations of her desires: algorithmic anxiety. Besieged by automated recommendations, we are left to guess exactly how they are influencing us, feeling in some moments misperceived or misled and in other moments clocked with eerie precision. At times, the computer sometimes seems more in control of our choices than we are.

Personally, this means being afraid to ever ‘dislike’ anything on Netflix or YouTube, with the fear that anything remotely related will now be banished forever from reaching me, or hesitating to like even the most enjoyable clips only to be inundated with identical clones. I’ve begun listening to mid-tempo synth music as background while working, and though I still prefer energetic indie rock, Spotify has now almost completely shifted its picture of my tastes toward retro paradise vibes. It’s now become a side job simply to manage a computer-generated picture of who I am and what interests me.

What are your strategies for optimizing how the machine will predict your tastes?

Are you doing a good job managing them? Are they delivering as a result?

What are the best examples of the algorithm nailing it for you, or totally missing the mark?

What are your alternative discovery methods to get out from the yoke of a digitally dictated taste profile?

When I was young, I thought sports — and especially school sports — were mostly pointless. A waste of time and money that could be better spent on other things, like more resources for education and the arts. I think this is a common stance for bookish teens, like I was back then, who cling to any ways in which they can feel superior to those who are actually good at sports.

But as an adult I grew to recognize that sports play a valuable role in culture, too. They’re a communal experience that unites people across dividing lines in shared rituals and a mutual pride in their cities. There’s a reason sports have been around since ancient civilizations. We may have invented basketball, but cheering for the home team is timeless.

My feelings towards sports in general evolved along with a growing love for my favorite sport, college football, which if you’ll quickly indulge me, I believe is objectively the best because:

One, It’s a lifelong loyalty that you personally decide to opt into, which is at least theoretically based on some set of attitudes or ideals, versus being determined purely by birth or proximity.

Two, college football is a precious limited resource. There are only about a dozen games per year, with maybe a few more if your team does well. That scarcity means that each game is a special event. Something to be relished. It also means that being a fan doesn’t come with the huge time commitment of any other sport. It’s a win-win for people with other interests, like, say, film or literature or the outdoors.

Three, football games are broken down into a series of discrete decisions that play out with a mix of strategic planning and luck, action and reaction, which to a nerd like me makes it the sport that’s most like a board game. Every play has clear intent behind it, with a setup and a resolution, and every game is a series of plays that add up to success or failure, making each contest exciting on both the micro and macro level.

Then this week I found out that, for the first time in my adult life, my favorite sport is just… not happening this year.

So whether I like it or not, I’m going to have to put that time and energy somewhere else until 2021. Which has me thinking again about my old idea… do we really need sports?

Especially when you zoom in on what also makes college football the most problematic of the major televised sports, it’s worth examining seriously: Here we have young, unpaid athletes risking permanent damage to their health for the enrichment of a league that exploits them, under the guise of school spirit and raising funds for educational institutions.

Is it not worth wondering if there’s a better way to entertain ourselves?

In favor of sports, of course, there’s the economic argument: that sports is an engine for billions of dollars and millions of jobs, from athletes to shoemakers, security guards to hot dog vendors. And there’s the local and cultural argument: that cities need something to rally around and cheer for as a collective. A logo to put on a hat to show civic pride. A broadly approachable common interest to bond over with neighbors.

And of course it’s obvious that we love, and maybe even need, competition. Humans have always wanted to root for their city, region, or country to win at things. But are there other things we can compete in that both provide entertainment, but also contribute more to life in our communities? Without all that money, manpower and attention directed to the massive sports leagues of today, what else could we turn into sports that leaves us better off?

Could we replace baseball teams with squads of aspiring restauranteurs and make Top Chef a seasonal sport, where its participants go on to build up their city’s culinary industry? What could we create if we cheered for debate teams the way we do basketball players, while setting up rising stars to succeed in local politics? What if groups of young coders and engineers competed in an innovation challenge that we treated with as much importance and celebration as playoff season?

It’s a crazy notion, I know, but in a year where everything’s changing against our will, maybe it’s worth considering what we rebuild in the years that come after.

How would your life, and our society, change without sports as we know them today?

What would be a more productive alternative that still fulfills some of those same cultural needs?

If you could only keep one sport alive, which would you save, and why?