"I walk around the neighborhood that encouraged me for so many decades, and I see the reminders of Harvey and the Rainbow Honor Walk, celebrating famous queer and trans people."

"I just can’t help but think that soon there will be a time when people walking up and down the street will have no clue what this is all about."

Said Cleve Jones, who lived in the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco for 50 years before moving out of the city altogether, to live in a small house with a garden, quoted in "Once a Crucial Refuge, 'Gayborhoods' Lose L.G.B.T.Q. Residents in Major Cities/Many are choosing to live elsewhere in search of cheaper housing and better amenities. They are finding growing acceptance in other communities after decades of political and social changes" (NYT).

It's not just about housing costs:

"Why operate your business from an expensive midtown office when all you need is a smartphone and laptop, a tasteful backdrop for your video calls, and Amazon Prime?"

"Ask the same question on a societal level... why... pour billions into a staggeringly expensive system of urban infrastructure when all you need to keep the wheels of commerce turning is Zoom, Signal, and a reliable, super-fast wireless network…. After Covid, nothing defined 2020 more than an explosion of crime across urban America, even though there were far fewer people outdoors to victimize…. [A]re nightclubs as much of a draw when dating can be now conducted online?… Covid has [sped the] demise of retail stores…. [M]useums and concert halls [and] sports stadiums and arenas to theaters and neighborhood cinemas… are all under assault, [from Covid and from] streaming video and virtual events. Another potential threat to density is the green movement… The manufacture of density’s core ingredients, steel and cement, produces some 15 percent of the world’s carbon emissions…. The fates of major metropolises are hanging precariously as they grasp at untested policies predicated on borrowed stimulus dollars, short-term business bailouts, non-eviction mandates, and other spit-and-glue measures that are most likely unsustainable…. All these challenges will be made even greater as the politics of cities grow increasingly polarized." 

From "The Death of Density?/To survive and thrive, cities will have to overcome a number of formidable trends" by Richard Schwartz (who has "served in senior positions under 3 New York mayors).

I've compressed a lot, and I completely omitted the last paragraph — which calls for hope, hope for density. But the argument against density is so strong. You've got environmentalism counting in favor of the suburbs now. You've got all the new patterns of work and social life, all the speed and connection of the internet replacing the physical proximity maintained within a city. And you've got the crime in the city. And the politics, which will skew evermore to the left as people who want the benefits of nondensity — and want out of the ever-tightening grip of left politics — exercise their option to leave.

"The women come up to me, the women who they say don’t like me, they actually do like me a lot. Suburban women, please vote for me."

"I’m saving your house. I’m saving your community. I’m keeping your crime way down. I keep hearing, you know, it’s all fake stuff. Remember they said last time about women. Women will never vote.... Then the end of the evening, they’re all crying. Oh my God, what happened?...  They want to... destroy your suburbs. I say that to the women because I keep hearing. They said, 'The women from the suburbs.' No, I think the women from the suburbs are looking for a couple of things. One of them is safety. One of them is good, strong security. And one of them is they don’t want to have low-income housing built next to their house. And you know, who makes up 30% of your suburbs? Minorities. African Americans. Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, minorities. Okay? People think, 'Is it racist?' It’s not racist. It’s the opposite. I’ve had people come to me and say, 'Thank you so much.' But they keep talking about the women from the suburbs. I say, 'I think we’re going to have a big resounding, "What the hell happened with women to the suburbs? They really like Trump a lot."' Only vote for me if you’re a woman from the suburbs....But it’s interesting because I really think that women from the suburbs are going to like Trump, because it is about safety. It is about safety. And when you see what happens in our cities, where they run and ransack. They’re anarchists. And you know what? They actually say the suburbs are next. And just so you know, it’s so important. These are Democrat-run states and cities.... Biden supports cutting police funding, abolishing cash bail. You’ve got a murder. Oh, let’s let them out. Oh, let’s let them walk the street. You see what’s happening in New York? What they’re doing to New York, our governor, what he’s doing to New York is horrible. And he called law enforcement, Sleepy Joey called law enforcement, recently, 'the enemy.' No, no. Law enforcement has done an incredible job."

Said Donald Trump in Carson City, Nevada yesterday. Transcript.

"Coming into the convention, I thought I would be making fun of the gun-wielding McCloskeys’ predictably lame speech at the Republican National Convention."

"Instead, I realized just how well their story would play to a lot of folks I know. Now, if you’re a liberal Democrat who lives in a cosmopolitan area, you probably won’t appreciate this. But if you’re a suburban college-educated mom who voted for Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, you probably found yourself nodding along more than you might have imagined."

Writes Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast. I can't read the whole thing because it's "members only." But, here, watch it yourself:



It's easy enough to imagine what Matt Lewis wrote. Harder, actually, to imagine why Lewis and his "cosmopolitan" Democrats just don't understand their fellow Americans who want to defend their homes with guns.

ADDED: Here's the transcript:

"My beautiful, beautiful fifth Avenue in New York has been looted in pillage. It was allowed to happen..."

"... by an incompetent mayor that doesn’t have a clue. Look at what’s happened to our diamond. New York was a diamond for the country. Look how far it’s gone down. And Chicago, the mayor literally raised up the drawbridges to prevent hordes of rioters from ransacking the city. Can you believe it? Can you believe it? 17 officers were injured in Chicago... during a weekend spree where 78 people were shot and 18 died. That’s worse than Afghanistan, which we’re getting out of. That’s worse than Iraq, which we’re almost out of. That’s worse than Syria, which we’re out of, except we kept the oil, but that’s okay. We don’t have to talk about that. But this is the future that Joe Biden plans to bring to every city, town, and suburb in our nation. And you know, for those suburbs, I keep hearing about suburban women. I made the … Oh. Well, in one speech recently, I called you suburban housewives and they all loved it, but what I got, they said, 'Sir, I don’t know if that’s politically correct.' I said, 'Don’t worry about it. They’ll get over it.' Right? But we saved the suburbs. The suburbs, and you know what I’m talking about. And they said about the rule, it’s a rule. Very strong. It’s like a law. They said, 'Sir, we can amend it.' I said, 'No, I don’t want it amended.' 'No, we can really amend it. Bring it down.' 'No, I don’t want it. I want it terminated.' And we terminated it. It’s gone. And it’ll be re-instituted if Joe Biden comes in."

Said Donald Trump in Oshkosh yesterday. Transcript. He was in Wisconsin, doing a speech, getting the jump on the Democrats, who were supposed to be in Wisconsin for the first day of their convention. Trump seemed to have something of a rally going. How did that happen? It grabs your attention, his rally style.

As for the Democrats' speech last night... well, I don't know. I don't listen to anything political in the evenings. It's not how I furnish my brain. But I did read enough of the transcript of Michelle Obama's speech to know she said "You know I hate politics."

Now, I understand that my message won't be heard by some people. We live in a nation that is deeply divided, and I am a Black woman speaking at the Democratic Convention. But enough of you know me by now. You know that I tell you exactly what I'm feeling. You know I hate politics. But you also know that I care about this nation. You know how much I care about all of our children....

You know I hate politics too!

"Want to Flee the City for Suburbia? Think Again/The 20th century is full of examples of the false promise of suburban living."

I clicked on that headline in the NYT. It's a column by Annalee Newitz, a science journalist and author of the "Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age."

The 20th century offers object lessons in why fleeing cities for suburban and exurban settings can backfire — even if it seems like a good idea at first. In the early 1900s, many large cities were suffering from the side-effects of rapid industrialization: they were polluted, full of high-density housing with bad sanitation. Crime flourished.... There were disease outbreaks, too... In response, a new wave of utopian thinkers proposed moving to... “the garden city”... As the craze for these British-style garden cities grew in the States, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote about building a uniquely American version. ... Wright argued that the Usonian city wouldn’t be a flight from modernity.... Brand-new inventions like telephones, radio and automobiles meant everyone’s work could be done remotely....

Great! What's the problem? Why isn't this the answer today, when the ability to work remotely is much more well-developed?

20th century suburbia was not "Utopia." There were racially exclusionary policies, the houses were more expensive in reality than in theory, and people needed cars. That's the basis of Newitz's warning about "the false promise of suburban living." She concludes:

Ultimately, the garden city future is a false Utopia. The answer to our current problems isn’t to run away from the metropolis. Instead, we need to build better social support systems for people in cities so that urban life becomes healthier, safer and more sustainable.

Some designers expressed Utopian ideas, but that doesn't mean it had to be Utopia to be worth doing at all. You have to live somewhere, and the alternative is also not Utopia. There's a lot that Newitz isn't saying here. Underlying her conclusions is, I think, a recognition that the cities are in decline — perhaps even approaching a death spiral. For the good of the city and all the people who don't have the means to leave, the more well-off people are encouraged to stay. If they go, the place will collapse. So please, city people with the means to relocate, stay here, keep paying taxes and give your  wealth to the noble cause of making "urban life... healthier, safer and more sustainable."

Neither the city nor suburbia is Utopia, but what happens when the city is virulently dystopian? How long are people supposed to tough it out? Perhaps Newitz's point is only a small one: Don't imagine suburbia to be any better than it is. You're always trading one set of benefits and problems for another.

But you're always taking your own selfish interests into account even as you want to support the good of the group. In a real disaster, of course, you will run. Is the disaster here yet... and when is it too late to run?

But don't you want to be optimistic? Ironically, if you're optimistic about the cities at this point, you're more like the theorists of suburbia, who dreamed of Utopia.

"So Trump’s Suburban Lifestyle Dream is basically a walled village that the government built for whites, whose gates were slammed shut when others tried to enter."

"What is Biden proposing to remedy at least some of these injustices? Reasonable, significant, but hardly revolutionary stuff — things like expanding rental vouchers while cracking down on redlining and exclusionary zoning. Trump may claim that such policies would 'destroy suburbia,' but that only makes sense if you believe that the only alternative to bloody anarchy is a community that looks exactly like Levittown in 1955....  [T]he big difference between the parties now is that Biden and Harris are trying to make things better, trying to make us more like the country we’re supposed to be. Trump and Mike Pence, by contrast, are basically trying to make open racism great again."

Writes Paul Krugman in "Trump’s Racist, Statist Suburban Dream/Racial inequality wasn’t an accident. It was an ugly political choice" (NYT).

The second-highest-rated comment is from Phyliss Dalmatian of Wichita, Kansas:

Trump has turned the usual GOP dog whistle in a Tornado Siren. Blaring, omnipresent and undeniable. The Party Of, by and for White Males, with their stepford wives and perfect blue eyed children. That’s the myth, and the aspiration. Join us !

Except Johnny starts fires, bullies younger kids and has started stealing pain pills from relatives homes. And Sally has dreams of a glamorous life as a FOX spokesmodel, the epitome of GOP womanhood, before aging out. At 30. But, she’ll find a rich Husband before that, no problem.

Professor, to the very, very large majority of the GOP, not white people are an afterthought, at best. Takers, Moochers, Lazy, irresponsible, criminal, blah, blah blah.

Dream on, GOP. Your time is nearly done. You won’t be able to WIN, irregardless of vast and inventive Cheating.

Trump is your Epitaph. You own Him.

A wild fever dream from Wichita — replete with random capitalization, "irregardless," and raging contempt for white people. What's up with Kansas? I love the inclusion of the "Tornado Siren." Makes me want to conjure up some "Wizard of Oz" jokes. Maybe something with Toto and a Dalmation....

Now that we're capitalizing "Black," why not capitalize "The Suburban Housewives of America"?

The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better! https://t.co/1NzbR57Oe6

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2020

The argument for capitalizing "Black" is that "For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community." Now, think about "The Suburban Housewives of America." Who are these people? Women in the home-based half of a single-earner household — suburban-home-based. Is this a very large group? Is it a group with "a shared sense of identity and community"? Does Trump want to stimulate a feeling of shared identity and community within this set of people? Apparently he wants them to see themselves as a specific and specifically endangered group: Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream.

Click through to the link and see how long it takes you to figure out Biden's plot to destroy the suburban housewife dream.

I grew up with the suburban housewife dream, and I think it was destroyed long ago. It might be a good dream, worth restimulating. Let's discuss it. I've discussed it for years under my "single-earner household" tag. But I don't think Biden's vague aspirations about racial diversity in the suburbs are what could destroy what's left of the suburban housewife dream. The dream is eroded and obscured by a culture that encourages everyone to get a job and undervalues the role of the home-based partner in a single-earner household. Ironically, the phrase "suburban housewife" is part of the culture that undermines the single-earner household. It sounds like it's assigned to the woman because of her sex, and it sounds subordinate and dull.

When you read "The Suburban Housewives of America," what was your mental image? Did you picture women living in the present? If you flashed back to some housewife of the past, did she look like a fuzzy-slippered frump in "The Far Side" or like Mary Tyler Moore on "The Dick Van Dyke Show"?

ADDED: Speaking of the grouping of women into a traditional stereotype for political exploitation, there are these "moms":

I recognize a lot of the so-called “moms” as the same antifa women who dressed in black as recent as a couple days ago. They just put on a yellow shirt now for optics. Most of these people aren’t mothers & many don’t even identify as female. #PortlandRiots pic.twitter.com/UPffcao0fv

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) July 22, 2020

Does everyone have a yellow T-shirt waiting to be pulled out of the laundry?

"For years, an unwavering certitude of industry, think tanks, demographers, policy-makers and city planners everywhere has been that humanity is moving to the city."

"We just needed to figure out how to house, employ and feed everyone in a condensed space. Yes, but... in a mea culpa at Brookings, William Frey, a demographer, said that, based on new census data, he has changed his mind on what he thought was a mass urbanization trend. He still thinks that cities will attract 'young people — especially well-off, affluent millennials and post-millennials. But this won't be most cities... And, for this younger generation, what I see is more clustered developments within the suburbs, and smaller metros, greater reliance on public transportation and perhaps ride-hailing and self-driving cars.'... Self-driving cars will also make people more likely to perceive places as closer together, since they won't have to become aggravated driving there...."

From "Millennials are moving to the exurbs in droves" (Axios).

"I'm a very special human being. Noble. And splendid."

Says Burt Lancaster to Joan Rivers in "The Swimmer."



The movie came out 50 years ago — in May 1968. I saw it at the time, when I was 17 and interested in figuring out what the adults viewed as high-class film art.

And I DVR'd it when I saw that it was on Turner Classic Movies this week, and Meade and I ended up watching it straight through last night.

We laughed at it a lot — the Marvin Hamlisch music, the nature photography, the endless observation of the torso of Lancaster, the taking seriously of a type of man no one today takes seriously — but we've been talking about it seriously for a long time this morning, and I took the trouble to read the 1964 John Cheever story and a contemporaneous Roger Ebert review:

As "the swimmer" has a drink with his friends, it occurs to him that a string of other backyard pools reaches all the way across the valley to his own home. Why not swim every one -- swim all the way home, as it were?....

The movement of the film is from morning to dusk, from sunshine to rain, from youth to age and from fantasy to truth. It would also appear that the swimmer's experiences are not meant to represent a single day, but a man's life.

What we really have here, then, is a sophisticated retelling of the oldest literary form of all: the epic. A hero sets off on a journey. He has many strange adventures along the way, during which he learns the tragic nature of life. At last he arrives at his goal, older and wiser and with many a tale to tell. The journey Cheever's swimmer makes has been made before in other times and lands by Ulysses, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn and Augie March.

Joan Rivers has only a very small part, and this was her first acting role. She wrote in her autobiography:

"Frank [the director, Frank Perry] wanted a happy girl who then got hurt. Lancaster was going to be Mr. Wonderful who came up against a mean bitch, and was right not to go off with her. Trying to please both men, I was going back and forth between line readings, and nothing made sense."

That's quoted in Wikipedia, which also says:

After the film's restoration and re-release by Grindhouse Releasing in 2014, Brian Orndorf of Blu-ray.com gave the Blu-ray release five stars, commenting that "It's a strange picture, but engrossingly so, taking the viewer on a journey of self-delusion and nostalgia that gradually exposes a richly tortured main character as he attempts to immerse himself in a life that's no longer available to him", commenting that Lancaster gives a "deeply felt, gut-rot performance ... and communicates every emotional beat with perfection". Commenting on the same release, Ain't It Cool News reviewer Harry Knowles commented "This is also Burt Lancaster's journey to ... The Twilight Zone ... it is friggin brilliant! ... It is fascinating! Spectacular film!”

The aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 100%, based on 22 critic reviews.

Amazing really, because it seems just as likely that everyone could say it's a ludicrous, terrible mess. Where's the line between reality and fantasy? It's never revealed. You'll have to puzzle over it, and reading the original story won't hand you the answer.

I am still working on the theory that "the swimmer" was a sperm cell (or salmon swimming upstream to mate). Don't you think a sperm cell — if it could think — would think, "I'm a very special human being. Noble. And splendid"?

Back in the 60s, it was understood that literary fiction revealed the complexities of the mind of wealthy suburban males. We the theater audience spent 2 hours gazing at the near-naked and naked body of a 54-year-old man. Nowadays, Harvey Weinstein/Louis C.K. begs an audience of one to please look at him naked, and the theater audience is captivated by a swimmer who isn't a very special human being. He's not a human being at all.



Noble and splendid!

"This article is sad to me. It looks like the patrons are mainly women desperate for something that can never be found."

"Also: Those 'cute' little quail eggs come from the most brutal factory farm warehouses filled with small, suffering birds forced to live in filth and being driven insane in tiny crammed cages - and all this misery and abuse to feed an empty, futile lifestyle."

That's the top-rated comment on "'You can never have too many mimosas’: How brunch became the day-wrecking meal that America loves to hate" (WaPo). In the article, there is such contempt:

Brunch is its own kind of religion. Or at least a pagan ritual, practiced each Sunday by urban elites who are known to pound so many mimosas that it’s easy to imagine a nationwide shortage of André on the horizon.

Brunch is a lifestyle. And friends, it is also a lewk, and that lewk is off-the-shoulder and frilly, and it hobbles up the sidewalk in flesh-toned stilettos. Brunch wears coral-colored khakis and pocket squares tucked into baby-blue slim-fit blazers, or sometimes it rolls out of bed and throws on a cleanish T-shirt that says “Resting brunch face” or “You can’t brunch with us.”

All of this — but especially the mimosas and the loud and leisurely ways of brunchers — is why every Sunday, brunch cleaves us into Two Americas.

Urban elites? Can they be the new deplorables? I can see that these people — these women — are urban (are they??) — though I don't see how what they are doing is different from women in the suburbs. Or is the geography just some sort of reverse Bible Belt?

“I don’t have time to get up at 7 or 8 to go to church. But I do have time to go to brunch,” confirmed Monica Zurita, 32, of Vienna.

Vienna. I figured that was the name of some Washington, D.C. suburb, and I was right. How ickily insular to just say "Vienna" like that. Vienna, Virginia is, apparently, one of those places where the people consider themselves "urban" when they are suburban and "elite" when they don't go to church. They do the theater of foodieism with crap food, and they daytime-drink bad champagne disguised by/disguising bad orange juice.

But are these women "desperate for something that can never be found"? They are at least making a show of the belief that whatever one might be looking for is not found in church. Maybe they think the meaning of life is what you see in the TV commercials — friends sitting around a table and talking and laughing. Is that an "empty, futile lifestyle"?

ADDED: A charming little poll to get you started this morning:

Is that an "empty, futile lifestyle"? (Multiple answers permitted)

Yes. Quit drinking and get off your ass and do something useful.

Yes, if it's a religion substitute.

Yes, if your friends are friends within the context of heavy drinking.

No, it's a lovely little fun break in the busy week.

Stop judging these women. You don't know who they are.

These people are too boring to think about long enough to judge.

You're just jealous because you don't have any friends to brunch with.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"This home on Plymouth Drive in Sunnyvale, Calif. recently set the highest price per square foot ever recorded by the Multiple Listing Service."

"The two bedroom, two bath home - 848 square feet in size - sold in two days for $2 million. It had been listed for $1.45 million. That means it sold for $2,358 per square foot, which is the highest price per square foot in Sunnyvale recorded by MLS Listings which has data going back to Jan. 1, 2000," Mercury News reports.

Here's your living room:



I Google street-viewed all of Plymouth Drive in Sunnyvale. It's the kind of boring suburban street anyone not knowing anything more about the location would probably consider nice but perfectly boring and nondescript. It's like neighborhoods in Madison where — we used to say — you could get your "starter house."

The amazing thing is I don't think it's intended as a tear down. Just a decent little place to live in Sunnyvale.

"A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape."

Wrote Wendell Berry, quoted by Etienne in last night's "Winter Road Café," after Bunk said "Hey, this photo..."



"... appears to be a bike path, not a road."

I love the Berry quote, and thanks to Etienne for bringing it to us. It perfectly explains why I, using that photograph and needing a title for the "café," could not bring myself to use the word "path," even though I knew for sure — what you were left guessing* — that it is the thing most people call a "bike path."**

___________________

* Danno observed that if it's not a bike path, it's got "a very wide stripe!"

** Actually, around here, the official term for a thing like that is "bike trail." So you may want to discuss the path/trail distinction or bring out evocative poetic quotes with "trail." There must be many, "trail" being an even more powerful word in the legend of America. The Chisholm Trail, the Appalachian Trail, etc. And yet "trail" refers to dragging something along behind you. The oldest meaning is the trail of a long robe. On the landscape, then, the "trail" is what those who've gone before have left behind. And "trail" has only meant "path" since the early 1800s. "Path" has referred to "A way or track formed by the continued treading of pedestrians or animals" for as long as we can find a language called English — the period the OED calls "early OE" (600-950). That's profound. And — here's where I change my mind and decide that "path" is more powerful than "trail" — the word "pathfinder" has special resonance (from the OED):

1840 J. F. Cooper (title) The pathfinder.
1860 W. Whitman Leaves of Grass (new ed.) 425 The path-finder, penetrating inland, weary and long....
1847 R. W. Emerson Poems 169 Sharpest-sighted god.., Path-finder, road-builder, Mediator, royal giver.
1898 W. James Coll. Ess. & Rev. (1920) 408 Philosophers are after all like poets. They are path-finders. What every one can feel, what every one can know in the bone and marrow of him, they sometimes can find words for and express.

4 great American names, clustered in the great English Dictionary.

There is no word "trailfinder," though there is — we must give "trail" its due — "trail-blazer." But "trail-blazer" only arrives on the scene in the 20th century, and its earilest recorded usage cannot compare to the quadrumvirate of James Fennimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James:

1908 Daily Chron. 19 May 3/2 Mrs. Hubbard's journey..with a small party of ‘trail blazers’ native to the ways of Labrador....
1957 V. Packard Hidden Persuaders xxi. 233 Tide, the merchandisers' journal, admonished America's merchandisers to pay attention to this trail-blazing development as it might be ‘tomorrow's marketing target.’

The "trail-blazing development" was a planned suburban community in Miramar, Florida:

What does it mean to buy a "packaged" home in a "packaged" community? For many (but apparently not all) of the Miramar families it means they simply had to bring their suitcases, nothing more. No fuss with moving vans, or shopping for food, or waiting for your new neighbors to make friendly overtures. The homes are completely furnished, even down to linens, china, silver, and a refrigerator full of food. And you pay for it all, even the refrigerator full of food, on the installment plan.

In WaPo's world, everything's dismal, including the loss of a depressing suburban shopping mall.

Look at this array of downer headlines on the front page right now. Even the Iran uprising gets portrayed in a negative light. Click to enlarge:



I'm used to MSM portraying suburban shopping malls as soul-sucking places for boring people who don't know how hopeless they are, but when a shopping mall dies, they don't say, good, these places were always a blight on American small-town life, they bemoan the loss, as if whatever happens in Trump's America must be bad. The challenge is just to figure out how to say why it's bad. Today's story — "First, this town lost its Macy’s. Then Sears. Now, all eyes were on J.C. Penney" — strains to make WaPo readers feel for this town's aching loss. It begins:

HERMITAGE, Pa. — Barbara Cake had made the sale. A man was hovering near the gold bracelets at the J.C. Penney jewelry counter when she said, “Hi, sir, how are you?” Before long, he was swiping his credit card for both a bracelet and a pair of diamond earrings for his wife. But Barbara wasn’t done.

“If she doesn’t like these,” she told the customer, “then tell her you know a lot of ladies who would.”

“I just want my husband to buy me a watch,” she continued. “She should be truly happy with these.”

Barbara ripped the receipt from the register, pointed at the flimsy paper and, in a tone that sounded as if she were revealing a sworn secret, she delivered her favorite line.

“Just wait till you see what you saved.”

There were four days until Christmas, and this customer had decided against shopping online to come to a real store and talk to real people. To Barbara, that meant she had to provide something he couldn’t get from clicking buttons on a computer. Could the Internet assure the customer that he was making the right choice? Could it praise him for being a thoughtful husband? Could it make sure that he was getting the best possible deal?

The internet would not have an in-the-flesh lady named Cake to lure the man into buying bad diamond jewelry for his wife. The internet would not have Cake creepily flirt with the man by telling him he could tell his wife that other women want him. The internet would not bitch about presents it's not getting from its husband. The internet would just show us other things that customers who looked at this thing also looked at and comments by people who bought it telling us what they actually think of it. The internet wouldn't burden us with a "flimsy paper" receipt and lean in and murmur about it.

Oh, but these deplorable people need a mall for human contact. A "hovering" man needs a real-life woman massaging him with sexual innuendo if he is to accomplish what for him is the formidable task of buying a Christmas present for his wife.

"Surban is the new suburban."

The National Association of Realtors would like to teach you a new word.

You'll sound like you've been spending a lot of time in pubs and microbreweries if — instead of "suburban" — you say "surban."

If you've ever dreamed of returning to the suburban lifestyles of the 1950s...

... take a look at Dallas, where — in some parts, at least — they've gone back to the old practice of letting the family dog run free:

On Thursday, the Boston Consulting Group, hired by the city, released a report that estimated there were 8,700 loose dogs in the area....

The biggest increase in dog bites came from dogs that were owned but not on a leash, the report said, and the groups involved in the issue agreed that educating dog owners was an important part of the solution....

In Dallas, the difference between the poverty-stricken south and the more affluent north is stark....

So it's those poor people, with their poor people ways. I remember when it was the middle class norm to let your dog out to roam around.

(Here's the Bob Dylan song.)

"The 2015 Man Booker prize winner Marlon James has slammed the publishing world, saying authors of colour too often 'pander to white women' to sell books..."

"... and that he could have been published more often if he had written 'middle-style prose and private ennui.'"

At a sold-out Guardian event on Friday night, James said publishers too often sought fiction that “panders to that archetype of the white woman, that long-suffering, astringent prose set in suburbia. You know, ‘older mother or wife sits down and thinks about her horrible life’.”...

You know, there are a lot of us white women who don't want to read that kind of crap either, but I guess we have the benefit of the feeling of being the nexus of pandering, even when we don't like what's served.

By the way, let me ask — in a long-suffering, astringent way — Is choosing an "author of colour" for the Man Booker prize another way of pandering to white women?

"Almost every time I’ve talked to a reporter has gone this way: they had already decided the narrative beforehand."

"I’m never being asked for information — I’m being used for quotes to back up their predetermined story, regardless of whether it’s true. (Consider this when you read the news.) Misquotes usually aren’t mistakes — they’re edited, consciously or not, to say what the reporter needs them to say."

Writes Marco Ament, with a vivid example of a NYT reporter working on a story about hipsters moving to Hastings on Hudson. The story became "Creating Hipsturbia." And Ament says: "The article, which was mostly bullshit, is slowly making itself more true. And our town is doing very well from it."

The town made the news ≈ the news made the town.

"Farms — complete with livestock, vegetables and fruit trees — are serving as the latest suburban amenity."

"It's called development-supported agriculture, a more intimate version of community-supported agriculture — a farm-share program commonly known as CSA."

In planning a new neighborhood, a developer includes some form of food production — a farm, community garden, orchard, livestock operation, edible park — that is meant to draw in new buyers, increase values and stitch neighbors together.

What about the noises and the smell?!

"I had decided that I would go to my grave never telling anyone what I had done."

"Recently, a friend became pregnant after a one-night stand. Everyone assumes that was an accident, but she confided in me that she had been seeking out sex with the purpose of getting pregnant. I was so relieved to meet someone else who planned an 'accidental' pregnancy that it made me wonder if I should open up about my secret."

From a letter to the advice columnist Prudie. I haven't yet read Prudie's answer. I just want to say that this woman imagines that she's found her counterpart in this other woman, but she hasn't. The letter-writer deceived a man with whom she had a serious relationship, letting him think she was still on contraceptive pills, and she's clung to her secret for many years, including from the man she married. She's kept the old boyfriend and the husband in the dark even as she's involved both of them in the upbringing of the child. That's years of hardcore deceit. This other lady is sleeping around with men she doesn't seem to care much about. And who knows what she told them about birth control? And she was apparently ready to blab about it as soon as the pregnancy happened. She's out and proud. It's way too late to emulate her. She's nothing like you.

Now I've read Prudie's answer. Excerpt: "There’s nothing to be gained by telling your husband and making him uneasy about your essential honesty." Essential honesty? The letter-writer's only indication of honesty (in everything but the central lie of her life) was "I'm mentally stable, and I have a pretty unremarkable suburban life." As if unremarkable suburbanites are honest.