Sink in a $2 million dollar new-construction house in Fairfax County, VA Oh, and Home Depot store brand finest for the toilets!

Chives minced for dumplings tonight! (My wife actually made them)

I was just writing about how some people appeal to the magic of the dancing flame to defend gas stoves, or to high-minded ideals about risk and human flourishing to defend doing nothing about COVID. This is a great entry in that genre.

https://mobile.twitter.com/NRO/status/1616461052274741249

There must be a name for this type of argument - appealing to something very abstract and seemingly unobjectionable to make a very specific and often self-interested point.

"I suspect that some older homeowners and long commuters don’t quite relish being reminded that a good deal of the trouble and hardship they put up with for most of their lives was actually optional." thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/apartments-o… "To say renters or apartment dwellers lack virtues or values is like saying hotdogs are more virtuous than hamburgers. It just isn’t in the moral sphere."

I tracked down the exact supermarket that Queen Elizabeth II visited in 1957, in Prince George's County, Maryland. I used it to tell a history of supermarket evolution over at @ggwash. Here, I wrote about how I track down things like this thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-queens-g… This one wasn't hard, but it did take a bit of research. You really have to *do history* to figure out stories even about things that happened fairly recently. I think, based on my research, that this is the only piece on the internet that assembles all of this in one place.

As a driver, I like right on red. But I also don't. Once you make an exception to "red means stop and wait," every time you actually do have to stop and wait feels like an unbearable imposition. Stable, simple rules are good. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/wrong-on-red A few things inspired this piece. One, Washington, D.C. just banned right on red at most intersections, so it's been in the news. Two, a discussion I recently had. And three, a memory of a driving mistake I made a few years ago (and have made more than once.)

The difference between what we call a “city,” a “town,” or a “village” is entirely of degree, not of kind. A town is an embryonic city. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/an-embryonic… I wrote this following a drive to Three Bridges, a tiny town not far from Flemington, in Hunterdon County. I grew up around here, and last week I was back. As always, these visits give me a lot of new ideas. I was in Three Bridges to photograph this piece: thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/a-bridge-too…

"The only times my sister-in-law and her husband seem to have truly struggled with their son—sustained bouts of crying and distress—involve getting him into the car." An incredible letter from a reader responding to my recent piece on pro-family urbanism: thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/kids-and-cars That original piece here: thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/more-on-pro-…

"The all-you-can-eat buffet was an American innovation, a space for unselfconscious diversity, and a meaningful part of childhood for at least a generation." I'm in @BulwarkOnline this morning on the decline of the buffet as a restaurant concept. thebulwark.com/the-late-great… This is not the first time I've written about buffets - if you've been following me awhile, you know buffets are my thing - but I've been disappointed that this far out from the low point of the pandemic, buffets still seem to be particularly struggling.

I'm in @TheSpectator's latest print issue with a mostly-positive review of @MaxHolleran's "Yes to the City." As the headline suggests, one of the most interesting angles here is the intra-left split over housing issues. Enjoy! spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/n… @TheSpectator @MaxHolleran And that was before Barack Obama recently chided progressive communities for refusing new housing!

"You cannot bemoan the suburbanization of Fairfax County—and now Loudoun, Prince William, and beyond—without addressing why it actually happened." Thoughts on Northern Virginia as a real place and a modern melting pot, suffering under subpar land use. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/in-praise-of… This is a follow-up post to a piece I had in @TheSpectator, trying to see the history, culture, and energy underneath the region's typical and infamous problems of traffic congestion and sprawl. spectatorworld.com/life/in-defens…

Our recent trip to Croatia demonstrated what cities can look like when they're not dominated by cars. But the highways were also some of the best I've seen. Maybe that's two sides of the same coin. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/beautiful-hi… Here's what happened when we brought our car into Split's old city and tried to use the free parking our little hotel had advertised. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/old-city-dri…

There’s a widely held idea that zoning is itself a kind of property right, or a kind of “contract” that the government should not break by changing the zoning. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/get-your-gov… This is kind of ironic, given that zoning is fundamentally government regulation of private property. Zoning had to be found constitutional, and under a different set of Supreme Court justices, it very well might not have been.

I wrote about trying to park my rental car in the old city of Split, in Croatia thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/old-city-dri… We were driving up to Split from Dubrovnik, and the freeway system was impressive. Clean, well maintained, lots of gas stations and rest stops to pull off. "Where does this idea come from that Europe is kind of hostile to cars?" I thought.

I'm back at Eden Center in suburban Falls Church, Virginia. It's one of the coolest strip malls in America. And I thought that before I found out about it's indoor shops. That's what this piece is about. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/inside-eden-… Some background. Eden Center began life as a standard strip plaza in the 1960s, in a traffic-choked Northern Virginia intersection known as Seven Corners. By the early 1980s, it was showing its age. strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1…

For today's piece, I published the most interesting letter from a reader I have ever received. She's a young-ish married woman living at the far edge of the Albuquerque metro area. She mentions everything from housing to appliance repair. Read it. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/rural-new-me… What occasioned this response was my long piece about trying to get my washing machine fixed and then replaced (linked). Apparently, at the outer edge of Albuquerque, it's almost impossible to get appliances repaired. But there's so much more here. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/a-hard-days-…

"Too many people" is not a bad thing. Catholics like babies, marriages, families. When babies grow up, they become neighbors. Housing is a pro-life policy. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/housing-and-… A lot of people think of the trappings of suburbia as being family-friendly in and of themselves, but if they’re not actually available for young couples with young kids—and if zoning doesn’t even let you build the stuff that might be affordable for them—what does it really mean?

I’m not someone with a planning background, or an activist background. I’m not someone who was radicalized by a tragedy involving a car. I just began to realize that a lot of what I heard growing up in low-density suburbia just didn’t feel true. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/urbanism-and… If you like this kind of thing, I do it every day. Sign up for the newsletter here! thedeletedscenes.substack.com

I'm thinking that one under-discussed aspect of urbanism is the larger scale at which things are done today. In New Jersey, just about every little town of a few thousand people had a hotel, a supermarket, etc. All that stuff is bigger and further apart now. This is obviously a land use question, but it's also a much bigger question of how business is done in the era of globalization, container shipping, etc. (That would apply to things like discount stores, which used to be on every main street too.)

Half the fun of Flemington is the historic train! Modern ruins

Dramatic view of my hometown, looking towards Main Street There's a lot of emptiness and vacancy here. Not because the town is poor or disadvantaged, bur because local politics have been strongly NIMBY for a long time. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-screen-w…