I have no idea what kind of bubble one must exist within to have missed the vast, vast, staggering improvement in the quality and variety of food available in American supermarkets and restaurants over the past 40 years. Like half of the foodstuffs in my house right now would have been basically impossible to acquire in America in 1995.
I dont have any kids but I think its really sad if they are not allowed to go anywhere by themselves. Seems they are More safe now with their phones and cameras everywhere! Cant parents even track these kids' locations on their phones?
One big plus side of living in a neighborhood with a sizeable immigrant and/or second generation contingent is that I don't think they've gotten the memo on this yet. That gives cover for the rest of us.
The last few days of school closures in metro DC have not been fun but they were made much easier by virtue of the fact that my 7 year old son spent the whole day out sledding with other kids with no real adult supervision.
My brother and his wife lived in a low-income neighborhood a few years ago and I swear, it was like going into a time portal to the 80/90's. Kids played outside in groups, and organized their own games. Neighbors interacted constantly like it was Senfeld. And all of the teenagers seemed to be dating (teen pregnancy was actually still a problem there).
We actually started them home schooling but sadly had to send them to school this year because one salary just isn't enough to pay the bills.
My daughter was 9, and the youngest kid in her 5th grade class. Worse, she already knows almost all of it, really we should have put her in 6th grade. But then she would be 2-3 years younger than all the kids...
We started letting our kids walk to school on 4th grade and ride their bikes in our neighborhood in Denver but stay away from busy streets and we had other adults tell us that we were being irresponsible. It didn't stop us and both our boys started riding the city bus to middle school in 6th grade
No shit. I can still remember that glorious moment that NAFTA unleashed in the early 90s when avocados actually became abundant, let alone affordable, and how guacamole went from never in our meals to always. And there's so much more beyond that, of course.
And this has been an steady exponential rise ever since World War II. Everyone loves to trash 50s cuisine, and it is utterly terrible compared to today or even the 90s, but guess what was even worse? Famines. Those really, really sucked. All hail Norman Bourlaug, the Greatest Human Being Ever.
To buttress your and Matt’s point. We make fun of 50s cookbooks. But a big part of those cookbooks was built around the fact that so many ingredients we take for granted today weren’t available and that a food was a much bigger part of a family’s household budget back then. So many of those “gross” recipes is about maximizing every ingredient you do have in the house.
Heck you can see some of this with traditions that have lived on like thanksgiving. So many “favorite” things like stuffing or gravy is really about maximizing every ingredient and food we have in the house.
And the fact that we had built up a huge amount of industrial infrastructure to make spoil-free meals for soldiers abroad in WWII and then shifted that capacity to making shelf-stable food in the 1950s.
We had frozen orange juice in the 90s because of WWII,
“In 1945, still set on getting that Vitamin C to the troops, the army asked Morse to produce 500,000 of palatable orange juice concentrate, using both his business know-how and the new techniques developed by the USDA. Morse readily set up the Florida Foods Corporation to fulfill this massive order. Ironically, the war ended before the orange juice could ship out.”
When I was in elementary school, there were a couple kids whose parents could afford annual winter vacations in Florida. They'd drive, of course, because "could afford" usually meant something like shift lead at the mill whose wife worked the front office, or apple baron's grandson. Stuff like that. Netjets wasn't a thing, and even if it were, these weren't Netjets folks. More like popup camper trailer or suite at Holiday Inn whilst roadtripping folks. Baron's grandson had a Winnebago, maybe. And they'd come back with a couple bushels of really shitty-looking oranges. And give them as gifts. People were genuinely gracious the first time, but just go through the motions by the third season or whatever.
Also, those gross recipes were largely formulated by a Campbell's test kitchen as a way to market the new innovation of canned goods -- instead of slaving over dinner every night, housewives could throw a bunch of canned goods together and make a casserole in minutes.
Those recipes on the back of the can, or on the Tollhouse Chocolate Chips bag, are there for a REASON, not because Nestle/Campbells just loves you and your family so darned much.
I remember when you Sushi was some really gross shit that only a few weird people in California would eat. The first time I ate Indian food was in Germany of all places, because those didn't exist anywhere where I grew up. I'd never heard of Pho, and didn't know about Calamari or Teriyaki (another food you only got in California or Hawaii back then).
It was super hard to find a decent steak that was not a Sirloin, there were only a couple of kinds of apples (reds were always Delicious and greens were always Granny Smith, both nasty, for different reasons), you had to go to fancy expensive stores to find any cheese that wasn't cheddar, swiss, or Mozzeralla. And the bread... good god the bread was awful. What we called "sourdough" back then was basically wonder bread, and if you wanted good bread you had to go to an expensive "artisan" bakery. Just to get the kind of decent Ciabatta or Sourdough you could get every day in every supermarket now.
The Simpson's season one famously had an entire episode where the family went out to try sushi and it was treated as this weird gross exotic thing Lisa pushed for whereas homer wanted pork chops.
Thing is, I remember pork chops from the 90s being basically really tough and leathery, while also bland. Sushi has neither of those problems.
The plot was set up really well: Homer discovered that he actually loved it...until he thought that he ate poisoned fugu--but narrowly missed doing so.
In the 1990s people still had the folk memory of pork being infected with trichinosis and cooked it into leather. Now I think only the CDC still carries the torch.
FWIW, I discovered pho in Milwaukee in the 90's. The late 90's is when the Food Network really made inroads (back when it was actually about cooking before it became all games and competitions). Classic cocktails were first revitalized in NYC, Seattle and Cleveland in the late 90's by a few folks: Dale DeGroff, Sasha Petraske, Robert Hess, Audrey Saunders, Ted Haigh and a number of others...most of whom were active on the Drinkboy forums...similar stuff was happening in food. The late 90's were very very different than the early 90's....it took another 10-15 years for migration to the suburbs/small towns....
I suspect we're about to find out on January 20th. Like everyone else, I have not idea how much of Trump's tariff threats is bluster just like how much of everything is just bluster*. But it seems extremely likely that a pretty decent size tariffs are coming to goods made in Canada and Mexico.
Also why I don't expect these tariffs to last. I feel pretty confident that majority of Americans are aware of how much of their stuff has some component that comes from Canada or Mexico, including food. That there's basically no such thing as "made in America" if we're talking about a big enough company as there is often some sort of component built in Mexico.
*I'm with Seth Myers on this. Just do it you coward! Take Greenland! Let's call your very obvious bluff
I also wonder to what degree they actually would be targeted in a way that he didn’t bother mentioning on the campaign trail because average voters don’t know enough about how tariffs work to care. For example, why on earth would there be a tariff on coffee beans - there is no domestic coffee industry to protect because you can’t grow coffee beans here. He didn’t mention making that kind of exception in the campaign, but when push comes to shove maybe the technocrats writing the policies would, because they’re presumably not idiots.
I think what's most likely is the tariffs become basically a giant bribery scheme to line his own pockets. So initial new tariffs on China will likely have giant loopholes for all the goods that matter to making Teslas. And then once tariffs are in place on Canada and Mexico. And every CEO who depends on trade with either country starts coming hat in hand looking for carveouts. So Trump gets show dominance to a class of people he desperately wants to be seen part of AND he can just get all sorts bribes coming his way; sudden new contracts with Trump org, promises to buy 1 million trump bibles etc.
I truly think we underrate the possibility we're about to see cartoonish corruption going on all "legal" as Trump team argues its' allowed under Presidential immunity.
Spitballing, but wouldn't undocumented immigration be even higher? My impression was NAFTA was a boon to Mexico, thus disincentivizing emigration from Mexico.
That was when the tobacco companies would pay to have cigarettes merchandised on gas station counters to make them easy to steal by kids that would be future customers
I remember those all being coin-operated and they would only take pound coins and 50p pieces, so they'd adjust the number of cigs in the packet until they'd go back to 20 and put the price up 50p. So sometimes you'd get 20, sometimes 19 or 18 or even 17 in a pack.
They were mostly found in pubs - you weren't allowed to have them anywhere that kids were allowed.
I also remember the age for (buying) cigs being 16 and alcohol being 18 instead of both 18 as they are now.
As we've discussed before, we disagree on this aspect of the 90s (though the phaseout really was picking up in that decade), and I think most Slow Borers disagree with you.
I had Chinese food for the very first time* in 1977. It simply wasn't around before. I had no idea what to do with it. I spooned some from each box onto my plate and then mixed them together, to the bemusement of my dinner companions.
* Well, not quite. In the early 60s in north Florida my mother bought a prepackaged "Chinese" meal from the store. I still remember that horror vividly.
My parents are huge shipwreck enthusiasts. They recently got their hands on a menu from the dining room of the Andrea Doria, a luxury cruise liner that sank in the mid 1950s.
They wanted to make some of the recipes from the luxury liner to try them, only to find out that the menu was full of stuff like "roast beef with mayonnaise " that would be unpalatable to modern people, but was the height of cuisine in 1955.
It seems like food is pretty consistently getting better the further into the future we go.
One of the best meals I've ever eaten was hogget (for those that don't know: lamb is under a year old, mutton is over two years old; hogget is in-between). Hogget is rare and relatively expensive because the animal has to be specifically bred and raised for meat: lamb and mutton exist in considerable quantities as a side-effect of making wool, but hogget can only happen if you raise the animal specifically for meat.
[Most lambs that are slaughered are male, because flocks of sheep are much easier to control if they're mostly female; mutton comes from sheep when they're older and their wool quality drops - note that it's not normally legal to sell an animal for meat if it dies naturally]
At least you have the self-awareness to see this. A lot of people are in for a very rude awakening if big, broad tariffs happen, and a ton of shit that they've never really thought of before becomes unavailable or prohibitively expensive.
You could get them before NAFTA, they just came from California instead of Mexico. This is revisionist history / memory-holing. Ed.: although presumably they were somewhat more expensive. Although I believe restrictions on Mexican avocado import have generally been less a trade barrier issue and more about pest control concerns but defer to those more exposed to it than I.
California only produces a pretty limited quantity of avocados, Mexico had a massive surplus until NAFTA, decided to do a ton of marketing and US avocado consumption went up massively as a result (IIRC from a podcast I listened to on this last year, a factor of five, but I can't remember the date range)
My boomer parents have vivid memories of when Outback first opened — they would put their name in at 5 PM, drive home, and drive back for when their table was ready at 7.
I went to an Outback shortly before COVID and it was actually a great experience. It felt far more upscale and less "chain" than I would have guessed, and the food was excellent.
To be clear, I am not too good for Outback! It's just that it was the absolute pinnacle of fancy restaurant to me as a kid, and there was no way it was going to live up to that. I still dream of that blooming onion, though.
I recall that a lot of the mockery of that review by Very Online People took the form of ‘They don’t have any idea what good Italian food is. What a bunch of rubes!’
Olive Garden should do an annual homeless feed. Shut down the place for a day for anyone with money and just bring in whoever shows up. Increase the ventilation and other measures as necessary. Maybe do it the day before a major renovation is to begin. New booths, new lighting. But not yet! No! Tonight is Never-Ending Pasta Pass® for justice!
Not sure if my family was weird but I think dining out itself has undergone quite the revolution. Unless McDonalds counts that was just not something my family or anyone I know did much of. Not like it is now anyway.
Your family wasn't weird. Dining out has exploded.
When I met my southern born husband, the only place he had eaten out at was what was called a cafeteria. (basically what it sounds like - a counter service restaurant where you went down the counter and pointed out what you wanted on your plate). The county he grew up in is very rural and has lost population since he was a kid, but now his relatives who still live on the farm can go into "town" about 20 minutes away and visit pizza, Mexican, and Chinese restaurants. Heck, there is even a drive-through coffee kiosk with fancy coffee drinks. Whereas his family had to drive about 40 minutes to get to the cafeteria.
Every tiny town in the country has at least one Mexican restaurant now. In the 80s and 90s, that was unheard of. You had to go to an honest-to-goodness city to get Mexican food.
I grew up in the burbs between DC and Bmore so nothing nearly that remote! There were plenty of fast food chains and Chinese takeout sort of thing definitely existed. But nothing like the options now and I also don't think culturally the idea of a family going to a sit down restaurant outside of the most special of special occasions occurred, at least not in my demographic.
I remember the arrival of Don Pablo's (a sit down tex mex chain) in the later half of the decade being a big, big deal.
Thai restaurants basically didn't exist outside of large metropolises until 1985. Sushi was still being joked about as though raw fish wasn't something that normal people eat until about 1988.
And you're seeing the same dynamic now with middle eastern food. Restaurants with that seem to mainly exist around large metropolises today, but i predict middle eastern food will become a lot more standard a food option in greater parts of the country as time goes on.
I'm holding out hope for indonesian/malaysian/singaporean restaurants to break in the US. There's some amazing dishes in that cluster, but not enough diaspora here that you can expect to find a decent laksa or beef rendang anywhere but the largest US cities.
There's a UK mini-chain called Tampopo that has dishes from all of that area (plus Thai, though we have real Thai restaurants and I'd never eat Thai at Tampopo as a result). It's not as good as a proper specialised restaurant, but it's good enough that people can get the taste for the good stuff.
My parents always thought McDonald's was crap food and hated eating it, even when I was a kid in the 90s. The only reason we ever got it, was because my brother and i wanted it. But we liked it because we had immature juvenile palates, not because it was better quality then.
I remember when a Thai restaurant opened up in the mid-80s, in Cambridge, MA! There were lines out the door, and local residents and students all thought it was amazingly exotic and innovative. And this was in Cambridge.
Okay, yes. But also Chili's in the 90s was genuinely better than it is now, right? Or am I also nostalgia-ing? (Not claiming it was ever good). It is truly terrible now.
It was. I feel like it went from high end fast casual in the 90's (I would consider Fridays and Appleby's to have been on the low end) to barely a step above fast food today.
I distinctly remember my dad having to make a separate trip to the Indian grocery store in order to make family recipes at home. We were lucky that there was a large enough Indian population where I lived that a small Indian grocery was viable.
Every one of the ingredients that my dad had to get at the specialty store is available at any of the grocery stores near me; curry powder, mangoes, daal etc. Not to mention the fact that when I went to college I basically had to introduce my friends to Indian food. It’s not like they never heard of it but most basically never had it. And these were friends who grew up in fairly big metros.
So yeah, a big “personal experience” anecdote that availability of good food and a variety of food options and exploded since I was a teen in the 90s
These days we only go to the Indian grocer very rarely for a giant thing of garam masala. Pretty much everything else is available at the local premium supermarket's "international food" aisle.
Yeah there are plenty of Indian groceries near me given where I live in Long Island. But unless I'm getting something something pretty niche like parathas or want to get curry powder in bulk, I don't really go. And I can get curry powder in bulk at my regular grocery store.
I will say living in Long Island maybe makes my experience a bit more unique as there is a large enough Indian population that it makes sense to carry curry in bulk. My local grocery store has a ton of kosher options near me which isn't surprising since I live on the edge of the Five Towns.
IME Indian and Asian grocery stores have those ingredients at *much* better prices and in greater quantity though. Try getting a decent deal on cardamom in a generalist supermarket (really all non-Asian/Indian grocery prices on spices are exorbitant).
I remember the one Indian grocery store near us back then was a drab mess where the lighting never seemed to work. The new one near my parents now is so much better. And this also doesn't even get into how a lot of the more high-end East Asian grocery chains (like H-Mart) also carry a lot of Indian ingredients these days.
Yeah, I remember being introduced to Indian food in the home by a high school friend whose family was from Kashmir. I would glow over how much I loved it and her mom would be like (in her thick accent), “you need find yourself nice Indian girl to marry and cook for you. Not Lisa! She marry nice Indian boy”
For my part, I was only introduced to Indian cuisine by moving to Chicago in ‘95. It may have existed in some form in Central California, but if so, I was unaware. We only had Mexican, Thai and Fast.
Even in the same category, the quality is much higher. It's possible to get really good stone fruit (in the summer) at a regular grocery store. That was not something that was available several decades ago. And think about the difference between red delicious apples (hardly worth eating, perhaps a net negative for quality of life) and some of the really wonderful varieties you can get at the normal grocery store now.
Red delicious really are great, when they are ripe and fresh. The thing is, they go meally really fast. It is sort of like how everyone thinks honeydew mellon tastes like cardboard, but during that one week each year, it is amazing. Red delicious are still my favorite apple, and based on the proportion of shef space devoted to RD vs other varieties, I suspect it continues to be a market leader.
My experience in the grocery store (Kroger, not a fancy place) is that red delicious are there, but there are many more gala/fuji/honeycrisp. I associate red delicious more with the pieces of fruit wrapped in plastic next to the register at a coffee shop or a deli at this point.
I don't know, stone fruit is climacteric. If you said strawberries I'd be with you, but peaches don't have to ripen the whole way on the tree to be good. It's certainly possible to pick them so early that they won't ever ripen properly, but if you pick them fully mature they don't have to get soft on the tree. Same with tomatoes. There's a huge controversy about picking breaker-stage tomatoes vs. fully vine ripening them, but in my experience they ripen perfectly well off the plant. That's also the only way I can get my tomatoes before the squirrels do haha.
It may also be an issue of which varieties can be transported and stored successfully. I grew up in California, so I don't buy peaches unless they're recently picked and I can smell them. In Eastern Europe I ate plenty of vine-ripened tomatoes, so don't buy those here either (some of the heritage varieties still have a bit of flavor.)
One weird thing about grocery store apples is that their quality apparently changes over time for the varieties? I feel like apple discourse has been big on this.
Do you mean over the course of the season or over the years? I haven't noticed this myself in grocery store apples, but I recently learned about how there are "summer apples" and "winter apples". Summer apples are apparently best if eaten right after being picked, while winter apples were bred for storage and supposedly taste better after being stored for some period of time.
I assume grocery store apples are pretty much all winter apples, but I can't say that I've noticed that they taste better later in the season. I've only noticed that as you get into spring the quality declines.
During harvest season, some apples are picked ripe to be packed for immediate shipment, and some are picked just short of ripeness to be put into storage. The exact timing of this depends on zone, variety of apple, weather, and the vagaries of the orchard like whether the tree is on a relatively steeper slope or not or if it’s on the north side of the hill or the south side, etc.
Apples come in from the orchards in big open-top wood crates, and floated out, sprayed with liquid wax*, mechanically sorted by size and grade, boxed for store delivery, and put into cold storage. If they’re destined for immediate shipment the storage at the packing plant is only for a day or so - trucks arrive constantly to take the fruit to a distribution warehouse. I’d guess that with today’s logistics an apple can go from tree to grocery store in 3-4 days.
Apples destined for storage go into separate refrigerated rooms from the picked ripe and remain in the wood crates. When one of the rooms is full to the point that not a single additional stack of crates will fit, it is sealed and its refrigerated air circulated through an antechamber with bags of lime that serve to remove much of the oxygen from the air to retard spoilage. Throughout the time from the end of the harvest until the storage is depleted, the refrigerators are unsealed one at a time, fresh air blown in so that it’s safe for workers to enter with forklifts, and the crates are fed to the sorting/packing line.
Inevitably the storage apples are best immediately after harvest season, and decline in quality throughout the winter and spring. The worst apples are the ones in the stores late spring or early summer. I don’t even bother with apples after about January, though that’s solely about taste and texture and not wholesomeness.
* Note that I didn’t mention washing. The water used to float the apples out of the wood bins starts out clean, but gets dirtier and dirtier with each bin that was, after all, sitting on the ground in an orchard, picking up grass and soil and rotten apples that dropped off the tree and the occasional field mouse. Wash your apples.
During my time in Eastern Europe I got fresh apples off the tree in season, but also developed a taste for over-wintered apples cooked with honey and cinnamon. We also had apple cider. Natural apples have a wonderful flavor that gets bred out of most modern varieties.
> Most winter apples, right off the tree, are not remarkably flavored,” he adds. “It’s not that they’re bad, but they haven’t had their flavor come out yet. Most winter apples start to get really good sometime around Christmas, early December to Christmas, and then they stay really good in storage.
Do you not think that's right? I don't grow apples and so I haven't tasted these right after picking vs. after storage, and I also haven't personally noticed it in grocery store apples.
Interesting, I've never been a huge fan of honeycrisp but I have definitely noticed that they are worse recently. Good to know why, and it makes a lot of sense that something like that would happen.
I think there were some comments in end of year mailbag asking why there are not more female guest writers and female oriented material. I think the guest writer was really good at being slightly humorous but still serious, avoided making sweeping baseless claims and gave us some nice charts. She is probably a bit smarter than me which I am against, but otherwise great guest post IMO!
Food is definitely better in the US now, I'll grant that. Coffee and beer, too, by a mile.
But we also now eat mostly highly-processed food. So, you're looking at 75% of your average cart being a bunch of psuedo-food and the rest being the wider and more interesting variety of fresh ingredients.
Restaurant offerings are very good now. But most of us are still eating crap at restaurants. So, really, you're seeing a present food culture where you can, if you live in certain metro regions, access better food than anyone anywhere. And you can also cook more delicious and varied stuff at home. But, statistically, you probably don't.
I remember when Sam Adams was essentially the only microbrew available. Now, there's a half dozen independent breweries less than 15 minutes from my house.
This part of the article was attacking a strawman. Other than a few particular items I miss (Shark Bites were the best gunmy candy ever produced; fight me) I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone argue that the 90s were great because the food was better.
And the “magic chemicals” she derides seem likely to be microplastics, which is in fact a problem that’s getting monotonically worse.
Overall this article was not to my taste. The strongest part was the last section but the remainder seems kind of superficial and/or responsive to only the most superficial of pro-90s arguments.
> And the “magic chemicals” she derides seem likely to be microplastics, which is in fact a problem that’s getting monotonically worse.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here, but it definitely the case that the "low-fat" craze of the 90s meant a lot of us grew up eating extremely sugary foods without realizing it, and that made a lot of people, if not diabetic, insulin-resistant. It's a big factor in obesity.
I'm on board with "fat free" and "low-fat" being bad-faith marketing by bad people who should feel bad, but it takes a certain amount of willful ignorance to convert "Fat Free" into a claim of healthfulness when it appears prominently on a bag of Twizzlers. Nutrition labels (including sugars) did exist in the '90s.
The author refers to things like nutri-grain bars, which were marketed as health food, not candy, but had as much sugar as candy. I could be wrong, as I was a kid, but I do not believe people recognized the deleterious effects of too much sugar until it was added to everything.
The one thing I will concede to 90s food nostalgia: Some Fruity/Sugary children's breakfast cereals did change their formulas in the late 90s/early aughts in ways that made them less tasty. No one will convince me Trix didn't actually taste worse after they got rid of the fruit shapes.
Lucky Charms are so weird. The non-marshmallow parts are noticeably worse than a lot more adult-themed cereals and look and taste like cardboard, while the adult brands at least taste like grain. It's almost like a psyops to get kids to hate healthy eating and only like sugar.
We don’t know yet but when you ingest a lot of something that isn’t digestible and that no previous generation has ingested, you shouldn’t by default assume it’s no problem until proven otherwise.
Plastics aren't necessarily chemically inert; sperm counts and birth anogenital distance are secularly decreasing and colon cancer incidence is rising. "Things that are new to the environment and ubiquitously distributed and ingested" seems like the obvious causative agent here given that we have existing examples of endocrine disruption by polymers.
Could I be wrong about this and it's something else? Yeah, most certainly. But at present it seems like a plausible supposition.
Plastics are inert to a first approximation, but they aren’t as inert as a noble gas, or N2. The fact that there isn’t specific observed harm convincingly suggests it’s not causing acute problems. But when there are systematic changes to evolved systems, there are very often problems that emerge at a chronic scale, as we’ve seen with many other changes to diets and ecosystems. I don’t think it’s safe to assume the harms are zero - just that they’re likely small enough that they’re hard to identify (or perhaps that they might be some of the unexplained changes we’ve been seeing, even if we don’t understand the mechanism).
Also we know for a fact that (1) colon cancer incidence is rising (2) not just humans but wild animals are getting fatter (3) age of menarche is decreasing and (4) polymers can be very good at emulating the effects of hormones, most famously with BPA, and (5) they're ubiquitous and found in environments that would otherwise be expected to be pristine, like Antarctica.
I have no idea what they do beyond this article, but if you spend your time dunking on people, the algorithms will typically do their best to present you with people to dunk on.
True that. My kids have a WAY more diverse diet than I had at their age and even moreso than my wife did. I'm not sure I ever had Lebanese food as a kid, my kids love it. My wife says the average meal we have on any given weeknight is better than almost anything she had as a kid.
Well if her family was like mine her mom never knew how to make veggies but buying canned and then boiling them to death, which I still find disgusting. It was the early aughts and food network that taught people to cook things like green beans, asparagus, squash, sprouts, etc in the oven with olive oil which makes them actually good. Who knew?
It’s like my grad school adviser who grew up in the USSR. Because they never had a choice as to what cut of meat they would be able to buy, all they knew how to do was boil it for soups and stews. This guy became a connoisseur of barbecue while he was in Memphis!
My mom is s boomer, but she grew up with her greatest gen mom doing exactly what you describe: boiling canned veggies and meats to death making them bland and unpalatable. Mom was a bit ahead of her generational cohort in this sense, but she more or less did a complete 180 and decided to actually learn how to cook well to compensate for the awful food she got as a kid.
To this day she has an entire room whose bookshelf are lined with cookbooks, and it got to the point where as a kid in the 90s and 00s, we would constantly get kids wanting to stay over for dinner at our house, just as an excuse to have mom's cooking.
The latest flurry of Angry People Arguing With Will Stancil On The Internet featured exactly this subject. Jamelle Bouie got drawn into the fight as well, of course.
It ended exactly as you’d expect—a bunch of POed “coffee nostalgics” crapping on Starbucks. Because boy, howdy, do I miss the good old days of. . . relatively few coffeehouses.
Also, some kid from Manhattan or LA or something recalling that he ate sushi once in the Nineties. Checkmate, I guess. 🙄
I don't have any beef with Starbucks. If you want a decent cup of coffee or some kind of espresso drink they'll give you a fine version. But prior to Starbucks, coffee in America sucked far and wide. Today, I expect to get a decent cup of coffee at just about any gas station/convenience store. Growing up, my family drank instant, and most coffee everywhere was weak, tepid, terrible stuff.
There's a reason why the Harbucks episode of South Park hits so hard.
I remember in the early 90s when my grandpa got Starbucks shipped in from Seattle to give to my dad and uncle. Little did we know how quickly that would change from special to ubiquitous... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRz3vfRFfs4
To be clear, plenty of them do not suck! But I've just found them to be hit or miss on espresso drinks. I like a basic cappuccino without any flavoring, so a bad espresso technique ruins it.
I take my coffee black and that's not really viable at Starbucks. So if I need to load up my coffee with cream and sugar to drink it (like at Starbucks), I might as well go to Dunkin and save some money and not feel like a pretentious a-hole.
I unashamedly love Dunkins coffee and I’m not even much of a coffee drinker, never make any at home. Got converted when I lived in Boston and when it comes to Dunkins I may as well me the stereotypical Bostonian. Great coffee!
I sometimes (jokingly!) lament that my mom only learned to cook after I left home, but it's really not fair to her - what really changed is what's available!
My (white), born in Nebraska, mother took cooking lessons in SF's Chinatown in the 60's and cooked legitimate Chinese food at home. Some of the upside of growing up in the hippy (Marin) part of California.
My mom has always been a good cook. I vividly remember as kids my brother and I always had our friends looking for excuses to stay at our house for dinner, because moms cooking was better than at their house.
But she absolutely has learned more and honed her craft as she's gotten older too. She just last week found a new way of cooking steak that made the meat more tender, and she seasoned it with an herbal sauce with lemon and capers. You wouldn't think that would go well with beef, but it did. She also made lime jalapeno fajitas recently which she never would have when I was a kid.
Brussels sprouts were around, but people didn't used to know how to cook them back in the day. Used to be people just boiled them. Now people know better.
Brussel sprouts are a great example. In the 90s they were horrible and normally boiled. Then they got genetically engineered (via selective cross-breeding) to taste amazing roasted. Entirely different.
Kale is still gross, though. Kale isn't food, it's what food eats.
Douglas Adams described our relationship to technology (paraphrased) as anything created up to the age of 15 is normal; anything created between 15 and 35 is innovative; and anything created after 35 is against the natural order of things. It is not the most scientific analysis, but anecdotally, I think you can apply this framework to our perception of the state of things more generally. As millennials are currently passing the 35 threshold, any new development in society will start to be regarded with more suspicion.
Advancement often requires a tradeoff of some kind, but because of the endowment effect, we feel the things that we gave away (lower-cost housing in popular cities) more than what we get (better communication, public safety, etc.).
Same with music. Anything created up to age 13 or so is oldies, anything between 13 and 25 is THE BEST MUSIC EVER MADE, and everything after age 25 is "how can you listen to that noise?".
To be fair, kids have a warped sense of age and time because they havent lived very long. I remember being in kindergarten and thinking the third graders were so big and mature that they were practically adults.
And with music specifically, my fiance' works with kids. He had a high schooler call him old because he listened to Green Day and linkin park. He was 22 at the time, and not that much older than the kids.
It's a good point, but it is only one variable of many.
Sometimes thing really were better! And just because you're biased by nostalgia doesn't make that less true.
For example, houses were definitely built better pre-1950. I grew up in houses that were newer and that's "normal" for me, but it's just clear now that I've lived in both an old home and brand-new ones that the old ones were better quality, even accounting for deterioration and outmoded floor plans. You'd think we'd have gotten better at making houses since then. But what we got better at is building houses more cheaply and making them recently more energy-efficient. But they are less robust and you really notice that five years in.
Also, the media landscape of the 1990s was objectively healthier. There were more and better movies, both blockbuster and indie. You could subscribe to several newspapers in a city that all paid reporters to do actual reporting (my uneducated paternal grandparents had FIVE newspapers delivered to their little apartment and read them cover-to-cover!). More musicians were able to make a living off of their music. Etc. Now, is it convenient that I can now stream movies and music and read the digital edition of the NYT, WaPo, FT, et al? Sure. But I now have more convenient access to a much shallower pool. And I'm in the distinct minority for even consuming "hard news" at all, anymore, as it now costs a lot. I can count on a single hand the number of American media outlets who have the resources to pay reporters to report in the far corners of the globe. So, ironically, I am now less informed about the world than I was, and I'm a news junkie! Has the rise of bloggers, social media, YouTube, podcasts, Substack, et al made up for that? No, because "citizen journalists" just don't do the same thing. And even independent Opinion writers making good money writing for Substack newsletters aren't doing the same thing (as much as I love and enjoy them). They don't do that same rigorous reporting. So journalistic reporting is just this expensive, inefficient, non-scalable thing that is hardly done anymore. In another decade it may no longer exist. That's objectively bad.
A related knock-on effect of this is that politics wasn't as harmonious as it maybe once seemed, but it was relatively higher-quality. More voters were more informed about the issues and voted in a more informed, less negatively-partisan way. Now elections are like sports. Now a majority of American voters get their political news from "influencers." Before that change, Congress was never crowned in glory, but fewer Congressmen were total clowns like Matt Gaetz. Certainly, a Donald Trump would never have been elected president in the 1990s. At least Ronald Reagan, the last celebrity president, had been a governor of California between his White House runs and his career as a B-grade movie star. And even when the politicians were craven or stupid, they had more institutional support! Their staffs were even much larger back then, before Republicans slashed Congressional office budgets. There were non-partisan Committee staffs, too. So, as unbelievable as it seems, an average Member of Congress in 1994 had at their disposal far more resources to make better policy than now in 2024, despite us living and legislating in a far more complex world!
Are you _sure_ we built houses better before or are you experiencing survivorship bias where the houses from the 50s that you look at _now_ were the really well-built ones?
The shoddy ones got replaced and aren't still around.
With the houses, there were a lot of developments in the immediate postwar era that made cheap housing possible, and a lot of those really were a reduction in quality of the build in exchange for quantity. Even with survivorship bias, houses from the 1950s and 1960s on average have worse bones than houses from the 1920s and 1930s.
But it’s not that high quality houses stopped being built - just that they’re a lot smaller fraction of the houses that were built (and people suddenly had cheap housing available as a result).
my 1948 house is a POS! But yeah most *pre-war* houses for the middle and upper middle class are better. For what it’s worth, it’s pretty fucked I can’t tear it down and replace it with a brick Craftsman (with frames made out of straight timber from cleared *old forest*) out of the sears catalog for less than $10k like god intended
Yeah, I lived in a house built in the I think 40's and now live in a house built in the 80's and in terms of overall structural quality they seem similar to me, but the wiring in the older house was kind of a catastrophe.
Probably the same with music. We still listen to and enjoy the really good music from earlier times and the rest of it (80%?) has been thrown in the trashcan and never heard again.
As for movies, possibly true. Movies now are big blockbusters or small budget indie projects. We definitely have a missing middle (not too many "Lawrence of Arabia"s out there*). On the other hand, series on TV (including streaming) are far far superior to what we used to have. Industries change and products change; it's not clear that overall quality has changed that much.
Looking at a list of top songs by year is... interesting. There are some that are clearly hits, like George Michael's "Faith" (1988) and Drake's “God’s Plan” (2018). But then stuff like “My Sharona” (1979) and Kesha's "Tik Tok" (2010) also makes the list.
Nah, Tik Tok is a banger and My Sharona is also good (if lowkey a little creepy). God's Plan is a snoozer, though—I'm flabbergasted that's Drake's biggest hit, he has so much better
Yeah, Sturgeon's Law is very solid: when Theodore Sturgeon (sf author) was being interviewed in the early 1950s, the interviewer put it to him that 90% of sf is crud, and he replied "yes, but 90% of everything is crud".
An expanded version from a speech in 1957: "Ninety-percent of everything is crud. All things - cars, books, cheeses, hairstyles, people, and pins are, to the expert and discerning eye, crud, except for the acceptable tithe which we happen to like"
Lawrence of Arabia was an "epic" - a hugely expensive production, which aligns much more with the modern big blockbuster. It just doesn't seem like a blockbuster because it's not got tons of VFX, which is what we have expected from a blockbuster since Star Wars. But it belongs with Ben-Hur or Cleopatra or, for that matter, A Bridge Too Far.
I think the specific problem is that the best way to make a good movie that is on a middling-budget is to have a good script, an interesting plot, snappy dialogue, a good cast and concentrate on people rather than VFX. And that creates a film which relies on the audience to understand what people are saying, which makes it harder to export to countries where people don't speak English (if you dub exposition, then it works fine; dubbing a powerful emotionally-resonant performance is much harder). Indies don't need exports, Spectacle-heavy blockbusters work even if you don't really understand what is going on (which is why their plots increasingly don't make sense even if you do speak the language).
The result is that the main mid-budget films are Oscar-bait - fundamentally, if the film isn't good enough to get an Oscar nomination, then it probably isn't going to sell enough tickets to make money. And there are only ten Best Film nominations per year.
Correct that I misidentified LoA as "middling." It was definitely big budget, although it was far from a cartoon movie which is where all the big bucks go now. I should know this, living very close to Century City, which got its name when 20th Century Fox bet the farm (literally) on "Cleopatra", saw it fail at the box office, and then was forced to sell all of its backlots to developers who turned the property into the future title of a Tom Petty song.
I think the middle range movies are increasingly just (or primarily) going to streaming and so what we define as "movies" (or the theater experience) is changing. "Hit Man" is a case of that as one with "a good script, an interesting plot, snappy dialogue, a good cast and concentrate on people rather than VFX." I think it did well on streaming; I doubt it would have in a big theater. Something like "The Fall Guy" (which I loved despite its ridiculous plot) failed (despite $180M in global revenue) because it was best seen in the theater due to its spectacular stunts. It fell in between movie types and so couldn't succeed in the theater or (because it needed a really big screen) on streaming.
Star Wars completely redefined the blockbuster in 1977, and the more adult-oriented (in the AOR sense, not in the NSFW sense) blockbusters of the earlier years have become much rarer since.
It’s easy to forget that big budget blockbuster used to mean location shots of spectacular landscapes and hordes of extras rather than CGI, as there hasn’t been an epic of that type in at least 20 years.
Skimming the list of “most expensive movies by year”, the last I can spot is Pearl Harbor (2001) and then Titanic (1997). If you go back to ‘77, then A Bridge Too Far had a higher budget than Star Wars, and before that in the seventies there’s a mix of pure spectacle (Jaws, Towering Inferno), musicals (Fiddler on the Roof) and more sophisticated movies (The Godfather, Tora! Tora! Tora!). I think the first giant-budget spectacle where the spectacle was FX rather than masses of extras or expensive location shooting was probably 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), though that was also aimed at a much more sophisticated audience than Star Wars (more along the lines of the more thoughtful sf movies of recent years like Interstellar).
That's part of it. But the other part is that the cost of labor is so much more now, and that makes robust construction less attractive.
Admittedly, I've got a more nuanced impression of this outside of the United States, in Sweden where I live and have owned homes. Here there are three main eras of existing housing stock: Pre-WWII, Post-War, and Contemporary. The Pre-WWII houses, even cheap, working-class or peasant-farmer homes, were built better because, to a certain degree, there just wasn't another option. You build them out of wood, stone, or brick. And the wood available was often old-growth, robust wood. The only options for a roof back then were hay, terracotta tile, or slate. And the latter two options were pricey, but that's all you could use. They also last at least a century. Construction was very labor-intensive, but labor was cheap because people were mostly poor.
People could even build their own houses, and often did. There's a whole neighborhood in Stockholm of traditional wooden houses originally designed for poor-to-working-class people to take a blueprint and readily available natural materials and build their own house cheaply. (For reference, think about the American Craftsman homes that people ordered from the Sears catalogue). Now the homes cost $1+ million, so the spirit has been a bit lost. But they're in-demand because they're so much better than the shitty villas a construction firm will build for you today.
Now, you can make houses out of much more capital-intensive, but marginally-inexpensive materials. Thankfully, Swedes haven't adopted the crappy, asphalt tiles that abound on roofs in the United States and last a few years only. But they have adopted the fake stucco, aluminum panels, vinyl flooring, et al that you see in even very large and expensive American homes today. And for the same reason: labor is expensive now, and it's hard to do traditional construction without it.
I’m surprised to see all of these comments and no one referencing the classic Works in Progress essay showing that, yes, in fact, older architecture was generally much more aesthetically pleasing, and that this is completely robust to survivorship bias.
I work in a construction-adjacent field now and I asked around recently to some of the architects, designers, const. engineers, and const. PMs that I work with. Most of them agreed that new residential construction is generally of significantly worse quality than older construction.
The way politics is now, though, is in part due to trends already festering in the 90s. The seeds of our current polarization were in part laid by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich.
Yep, absolutely. The "When the Clock Broke" thesis by John Ganz is on-point.
But that process was somewhat arrested by the bulwark of a more-informed electorate, healthier media ecosystem, more funded public institutions (including the aforementioned Congressional staffs), historical precedent, etc. So, it was always *contingent* that it should get as bad as it has. There were ALWAYS ghouls who wanted to derail everything for selfish reasons, but the social system had an immune system to reject them. Newt Gingrich triumphed, but his victory was definitely frustrated and incomplete. And even he took governance somewhat seriously, in a way that no Republican in the Trump Era can even toy with.
I mean this very simply. More Americans consumed real news back then. Not always top-quality or objective, but they had a more vibrant and diverse actual news ecosystem to chose from at that time and still subscribed to or tuned into it. You've probably seen the Pew research that news influencers (skewing Conservative) have overtaken traditional media as the main news source for American voters. That's bad!
And not just because of the Conservative bias. But more because most news influencers are just people with opinions! They do no actual reporting or research. Which is to say that what they are selling isn't news at all.
True, but it wasn't just Rush and Newt. They were one side of the phenomenon.
The other side of the coin was people like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair who insisted that globalisation, and the marginalisation of organised labour would have no downsides. And, perhaps more importantly, they made that point from their leadership of parties of the ostensible left.
That meant that positions to the left of that (capital-friendly) position were left with no respectable or viable electoral vehicle.
Politicians like Clinton and Blair would wring their hands and claim that they'd like to go further and be more economically progressive but say that, sadly, they were unable to do so because it wasn't where the electorate were.
In fact, of course they simply despised the left - as the experience of Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK showed.
What has happened since the 90s has been a progressive narrowing of the field of political respectability on both the left and the right. (Rush Limbaugh and Arthur Scargill were BOTH rendered illegitimate). That opened up a longish period of supposed centrism. Which worked while it worked. However, the economic ideas of that paradigm (globalisation and economic liberalism) are now exhausted and what we are now seeing is the return of the sort of politics that were, until recently, disreputable.
I genuinely don't think anything in this comment is correct. There were not "more movies" in the 1990s, are you fucking kidding me? Netflix alone releases several new movies a *day*. If anything there are way too *many* movies, and you couldn't possibly keep up with them.
There were also plenty of disposable made-for-TV or straight-to-video movies in the 1990s, too, and they quality level and budget is equivalent to most disposable Netflix offerings today. I'm talking about "real movies" with a theatrical release: even a short one. In other words, movies that have met the eligibility bar for Oscar awards, et al. Is that an arbitrary distinction? Maybe, since the shift-to-streaming has definitely changed the movies distribution landscape. In 2022, there were about half the theater tickets sold in theaters as in 2002 (and that's in a country that was then only 288 million people vs. today's 330 million).
In 1995, when the US population was only 266 million (or 80% of today's), we had 136 movies in wide release. In 2022, there were only 109. Of course that number was far lower at the peak of COVID in 2020-21. There was a delayed rebound effect in 2024, after four years of way below historical average numbers of releases. So, strictly speaking, 2024 witnessed an all-time high number of releases: 178. But the box office take of all those movies was again only about half the inflation-adjusted sales in 1995. And if you do a running average, the trend is still that a larger population of potential theater-goers had fewer mainstream movies to choose from in the 2020s. Did all the disposable streaming offerings and the COVID-era cresting of the "Peak TV" wave make up for it? That's subjective.
In the 90s my family lived in a brick house built in the early 20th century. It was kinda garbage. My dad said he was gonna fix it up and never did. It was too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer and I'm pretty sure we had raccoons living in the attic.
How old was that brick house? As you say, your dad deferred maintenance on it. But even so, it was still standing after many decades. Would an average home built in the 2000s last until the 2050s without any maintenance?
Because I can tell you that my new-build co-op building I purchased a unit in in 2017 was looking *rough* after only 5 years of ownership. And this is the same kind of mid-rise building you see all over, with identical materials and design, which are easy for construction firms to erect. They look great in the promotional pictures and may cut a striking image when freshly constructed. But then... The issue isn't just the pressed-wood laminated cabinets and greige vinyl flooring, which sustained water-damage, scratches, etc. after normal use and proved impossible to repair and expensive to replace. But also even the exterior of the building, with slipshod concrete betraying water-damage, dent-able aluminum paneling, pre-manufactured doors sitting ever-so-slightly ajar their shifted frames, etc.
Now, contrast this with my century-old wooden house. When we bought it off a recently-deceased old lady, it was a 1960s time-capsule. She hadn't fixed a thing in decades after her husbands untimely death. So there was updating to be done, painting, etc. But the "bones" of the place were robust enough to withstand even a long period of neglect. And everything is natural materials, and easy to sand/scrape/paint to original shape. Unlike with vinyl flooring, we could buff out all the scratched on the wooden floors and re-oil them. The wood exterior could be scraped and re-painted, with the occasional rotten board replaced. We removed a few layers of wallpaper and put up new patterns. The terracotta tile roof was covered in moss and just needed a good pressure wash to be good as new. We even dug up around the original concrete foundation to improve drainage, and, to our amazement, there wasn't a single crack! This required a lot of elbow grease, but most of the work was renovating the materials rather than replacing them entirely. With out contemporary co-op, you'd just literally have to rip-and-replace anything that was worn or broken.
This extends even to the appliances: We're still using the same chest freezer and oven/stove that were almost as old as the old lady who died in this house. We replaced the old boiler only because it was too expensive to keep feeding it with diesel/fuel oil. But it was as old as the house and still working. We kept fixing her old washing machine until it proved too small for our growing family, but the thing was so simple and solidly-built that we could have kept it going indefinitely. Today, appliances, like the homes that house them, are much less robust and have designed obsolescence built-in. The heat-pump that we replaced the ancient wood-turned-fuel boiler with is extremely efficient and far less smelly, so no complaints. But it is only rated to last 15-20 years. The new refrigerator we bought should last about 7 years. Etc.
This is exactly the kind of cliche designed to forbid critical thinking about technology that LM Sacasas always criticizes. Do you really think it's clever to suggest that any criticism about technology can be dismissed on the grounds that it's just old people who criticize it? Some of the most passionate critics of smartphones I know are in their teens.
I don't get the impression that Lewis intended this as a dismissal of critical thinking about technology, but instead the general pattern we've seen across numerous technology adoption cycles. Just because older people are predisposed to being uncomfortable with technology developed in their adulthood doesn't mean they're wrong in any specific criticism. Yet we should expect some degree of discomfort from older cohorts relative to younger users, and moreover we should expect the younger cohorts to more easily accept these technologies as the "natural state of things".
In terms of working through any specific criticism the devil is always in the details. Are the youth foolishly adopting a negative technology or cultural change because they don't know any better? Or are the older generations yet again failing to get with the times? It'll certainly come down the nuances of the critique as well as the possibility for an alternative.
As discussed in this article, adults would struggle to go without a smartphones despite the fact that was totally natural to not have a cell phone in the 90's. Just because there are some downsides to smartphones doesn't mean there's a straightforward alternative for most people. Although I do think we are increasingly learning the value of keeping phones and other digital distractions out of the classrooms.
Twitter and TikTok are a net negative on society though. And a lot of the pathways for consuming cultural content have watered it down. Pop music has definitely gotten more homogenous in just about 5 years.
Glad to help. I normally ignore typos (this is a Matt publication, after all), but that one seemed to imply the opposite of what I guessed you were saying.
Normal: Landline phones, dialup internet, AOL Instant Messenger, desktop computers that include a command line (sometimes without a GUI).
Innovative: Cell phones, smartphones, desktop Linux, blogging, GPS navigation, Facebook being full of 18-25 year olds, gmail, texting.
Against the natural order: TikTok, parents/grandparents on Facebook, computers are all touchscreen tablets, Instagram, QR code menus, apps for everything.
After a horrible experience trying to set up a Vizio TV over Christmas, I'm literally in support of a federal law that requires certain devices to be fully operable without internet access or at least without an app.
For appliances like TVs, EV chargers, and stoves I would honestly support requiring a physical switch that just disables all smart features.
You joke, but I honestly think that the level of communications teens had with one another in the 2001-2003 timeframe was close to ideal. We had stuff like AOL Instant Messenger, which wasn't always-on and didn't really allow for cyberbullying. Some people had cell phones, but they weren't a problem. There was no social media, maybe you had a blog but that was it.
I completely agree with you. I had to pay for my own pager my senior year of high school and was the better for it - only a couple of my friends had cell phones then (and this was before smartphones)
I’m so excited to see CHH guest posting on Slow Boring!
One thing I’m bringing back into my life from the 90’s is physical media. My mom sent me all my Disney DVDs from my childhood and I’ve been picking them up for so cheap at yard sales. There are free DVDs at the library! I’ve been getting frustrated with streaming services, and the experience of taking my kids to pick out a movie for movie night made me realize how much I miss the ritual we all used to have of going to Blockbuster on Friday.
The key catch to this transition is that you could say that you owned a copy of something back in the physical media days. Copyright holders always want you to only rent on a recurring monthly basis if they can.
I've written about this, but my girlfriend has a bunch of DVDs. I thought this was weird as hell when we started dating but she has made me a total convert. DVDs are the way to go: no internet connection woes, no random ads, and they're surprisingly cheap. It's easy to find entire shrink-wrapped box sets of high-quality shows like The Sopranos and Parks & Rec for ~$20 on eBay. We actually just bought the contents of an old Redbox machine (200 DVDs) for $200.
I'm working on a solution to rip all of the DVDs to some kind of RAID hard drive array for long-term storage.
PLEX. It takes a long time to rip them one by one, but its worth it. I now have my own server of about 1000 movies. There's some hangups (foreign movies tend to be a pain to get the subtitles right, organizing TV shows is a Project, Blue Rays take several hours), but all in all, its pretty great.
I'm not that tech savvy. Just enough to do damage, but I was able to rip all my DVD's to an external hard drive that I keep for a desktop, devoted entirely to media. PLEX helps me organize all of the movies and I can stream them on any TV in the house through the app.
And the app is pretty good! I can search by director or actor or genre or whatever. So if I was in a Hitchcock mood, I could search for him under directors and bring up just his movies I have on the app without massive scrolling.
I could share with other people and allow access externally, but I'm not comfortable with that. So it's a closed network, but the option to watch anywhere is out there.
Yes, although I remember my parents complaining about the ever-changing mediums throughout their lives: records → cassettes → CDs → MP3s. In particular, they felt they should’ve been able to trade in the old medium for the new one and only pay the physical manufacturing cost. Similarly, they bet on Betamax over VHS initially, so we still had that old piece of hardware and some movies in the early ’90s.
By contrast, I was an early adopter of Amazon Video on Demand and still have digital purchases from the early 2010s. I happily ditched my old DVDs when moving cross-country in 2013, figuring I could always digitally buy or rent as needed. I haven’t regretted that decision and am glad I’m no longer lugging around DVDs and an antiquated disk reader, analogous to my parents’ old Betamax.
It's totally bananas the prices that OOP Disney-exclusive blu-rays go for these days. And I've even paid the scalper prices for a few nostalgic gems like "Honey I Shrunk The Kids." I wish they would republish them!
The audio/video quality and selection vs. streaming are so much better when you start to make your own physical media library, but it's also just far easier to pick something to watch when you see them all there like books on a bookshelf. Laying out 3-5 discs for my son to choose from is so much better than scroll-scroll-scrolling through endless thumbnails on streaming platforms. And I love being able to curate little "movie festivals" with certain genres, directors, or themes. We watched every single Ghostbusters movie last weekend, which you literally can't do on streaming.
> The audio/video quality and selection vs. streaming are so much better when you start to make your own physical media library
Unless you are investing in super high end equipment this is not true at all. Streaming video is better quality than normal blu-ray, and most content is never released on 4K blu-ray, even if you had the player, which is unlikely since basically no one makes them anyway.
Audio quality differences are also nonexistent unless you own a super-high-end system with the ability to decode Dolby TrueHD, and have enough speakers, configured correctly, to play Dolby Atmos content, which you almost certainly don't.
> Unless you are investing in super high end equipment this is not true at all. Streaming video is better quality than normal blu-ray, and most content is never released on 4K blu-ray, even if you had the player, which is unlikely since basically no one makes them anyway.
Second point: "Most content is never released on 4K blu-ray." Correct, but most content on streaming is also not mastered in 4K UHD, either. Most content ever published anywhere is found in SD on DVD. HD Blu-ray has a huge back-catalogue. And those discs are superior in both audio/video fidelity to even a 4K stream in almost all case (as per the link above). The differences are much more noticeable on a larger (65"+) OLED screen than on a cheaper LED, but you'll still be able to visibly tell the difference with a 4K disc, especially with fast-action and dark scenes.
Third point: "...even if you had the player, which is unlikely since basically no one makes them anyway." False. Bluray players are still manufactured by dozens of companies and you can find dedicated 4K players from many manufacturers, including Sony and Panasonic. The Panasonic UB420 is excellent and retails for $200. Now LG did just announced in December that they're bowing out of the disc-player market, following Samsung and Oppo. But there are dozens of Chinese manufacturers who make cheaper players, including the portable ones that are popular with parents wanting to distract their kids on long car-trips. That's not even including perhaps the most popular platform that people have long used to play movie discs: video game consoles! Both Xbox and PS play 4K and Bluray discs.
Fourth point: "Audio quality differences are also nonexistent unless you own a super-high-end system with the ability to decode Dolby TrueHD, and have enough speakers, configured correctly, to play Dolby Atmos content, which you almost certainly don't." This is making the perfect the enemy of the good. There's the signal and then the speaker. It's absolutely true that you're not getting the maximum audio fidelity from TV speakers or even from a soundbar setup, the likes of which are in most households. But a better fidelity sound played through an inferior speaker is still going to come out better than a lower-fidelity sound. Just as you're going to be able to hear the difference between an MP3 or standard Spotify stream vs. a CD, even on an inferior speaker. I only have a 2.1 soundbar and subwoofer combo in my house and I can definitely tell the difference when I play a disc vs. streaming the same movie.
Kids still love physical media, love to put their hands on things. And as a movie collector, no matter how good your internet is, 4K discs look better than 4K streaming.
My son and his friends love going through our movies, albums, reading liner notes, etc. Even old cassettes and VHS tapes, at which point I think they’ve lost their minds, but that’s fine!
> And as a movie collector, no matter how good your internet is, 4K discs look better than 4K streaming.
Eh, I'd quibble with that. The newest codecs that Apple uses are really, really good. I personally can't tell the difference on my TV. And unless you've got a TV that can show Dolby Vision content, or you're exclusively watching stuff that's filmed in 60FPS, there's not really a huge difference between Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray for most things anyway.
I like physical media too, but I won't oversell the benefits.
"To illustrate the differences between streaming and Blu-ray, let’s consider a real-world example. Suppose we’re watching a movie like “The Matrix” (1999) on Netflix and on Blu-ray disc.
"Netflix: The movie is streamed in 4K resolution with HDR, but the bitrate is limited to around 50 Mbps. The audio is compressed using Dolby Digital 5.1, with a bitrate of 640 kbps.
"Blu-ray: The movie is stored on a Blu-ray disc in 1080p resolution, with a bitrate of around 30 Mbps. The audio is encoded in Dolby TrueHD 5.1, with a bitrate of 1.5 Mbps."
Apple and Amazon Prime are better than the more popular Netflix, yes, but much depends on actual bandwidth performance in practice. I notice a difference between the same movie on 4K and on Amazon Prime in my household, which has relatively fast internet, but where my TV is still connecting to it via wifi.
There aren't very many that were released, relative to what's on streaming. And finding a player now is tough. There's basically only one still for sale so you'd have to go to the secondary market.
I don’t think the players are hard to find at all. Even a PS5 (and I think one of the Xbox models) will play 4K discs.
I have a couple hundred 4K discs; my copies of Seven and The Usual Suspects showed up yesterday! Snowpiercer, both Kill Bill movies and Jackie Brown are dropping next week (among others). Last week I went through a 4K David Lynch binge; Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, all remastered and gorgeous. Paris, Texas had a recent release and it’s almost like experiencing the movie for the first time.
No, it’s not the selection you can get on streaming, but tons of older movies are getting releases and almost all new movies are getting 4K disc releases.
Yes, this is a hobby of mine and I’m way too into it :). I didn’t think I would care all that much for 4K relative to Blu Ray and didn’t upgrade for a long time but a good 4K remaster does a lot for things like depth of field, along with the expected pop in colors and level of detail. And part of it is absolutely that a lot of these releases are movies that I originally watched on a 35” Trinitron back in the day and seeing them in 4K on a large, widescreen TV makes them feel revelatory (Lost Highway is in this category for certain).
Sorry to go on at length, love movies and we’re in a great era for watching them at home. Clean, widescreen movies from other eras that probably look better than they did in the theater upon their initial release (we’re getting transfers directly from the negative whereas theaters were getting reels three generations removed from the negative).
I still go to the theater a decent amount and certainly watch a lot of streaming (especially for series), but for feature-length movies there is no comparison with discs. Even blu-ray is better audio/video fidelity, generally. And I like the subjective, tactile aspect of having a physical library, just like I like to have paper books. It makes picking something easier and curating a joy.
Seeing favorites from my childhood that were originally projected in SD on the big screen (or, yeah, on the then-top-of-the-line, small Trinitron CRT) is SO different from seeing them on a 75" OLED on 4K. I want to upgrade my sound system, too, and I'm sure that will make for an even more mind-blowing impression.
There's also just this thing in our era of scroll-scroll-scrolling and infinite distraction pathways wherein you find it refreshing to have a media format that is singular and self-contained. You open and book and just read it. You chose a disc and watch it. You put a vinyl record or CD on and play it. It's such a different and more engaged way of enjoying art than how the Internet has trained our brains to half-watch/listen/read everything.
There are a few high-quality players available from Sony and Panasonic. I have two Sony players (one for US and the other for UK/EU discs) and plan to get a Panasonic as a back-up in case they do discontinue them.
As Randall said, most people end up just using their Xbox or PS5 to play discs, though, even if they're not perfect players. I assume that will likely continue through at least the next generation of consoles.
I have 1000+ blu-rays or 4Ks and at least half my collection are 4K discs. As you can see here (https://thedigitalbits.com/columns/the-4k-uhd-release-list/4k-uhd-list-01), the 4K title back-catalogue is very significant (though it's true it hasn't and likely never will exceed the blu-ray catalogue, just like blu-ray never bested DVDs). There's a flourishing ecosystem of boutique labels publishing everything from classic films (Kino Lorber, Warner Archive) to arty/prestige movies (Criterion Collection) to cult/exploitation (Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow, Shout Factory, Indicator, 101 Films, Fun City) to horror (Scream Factory, Severin). And then there's also a large offering from the major studios. In many ways, it's the best of times to be a film buff or physical media collector. Building up my own library has definitely been extremely expensive (and it takes up a lot of space), but it gives me so much greater access to quality films than I find on streaming via Netflix, Prime, Disney+, HBO Max, and Apple+ (which, between them, have a surprising dearth of actual third-party films!). It's also so much easier to curate a "theme" or double-feature that you want to just grab off the shelf without searching in vain for the platforms that may have it or where (maybe) you can buy/rent a digital copy.
And I'm really enjoying sharing previous decades of movies (back when the industry was thriving and produced truly classic stuff) with my 4YO son, who is extremely passionate about "Ghostbusters," "Back to the Future," "The Sandlot" and other kids and family entertainment from my youth (all of which is now newly-available in 4K and looks better than it ever did in the theater or on TVs of the time). Frankly, that kind of movie just isn't made any more, and that's not from blinkered nostalgia or my lack of searching for it. Hollywood still makes pretty great animated movies, but not so much live-action movies geared at kids and families together.
All this 4K renaissance might be a "it's brightest before the dawn" situation, though, as streaming definitely has the mass-audience and disc-watching is for sure a niche, especially in the higher-definition media (you'd be shocked how dominant DVDs still remain). And it's no longer profitable for a dozen manufacturers to produce dedicated 4K players. Maybe in a few years there will be none. But even when 4K is a "dead medium," there will still be people publishing and buying new discs to play on old or deadstock players, just as you can actually still find publishers of VHS titles and that's become a bit of a flourishing niche, too!
My son just insisted we watch the four (actually good) Ghostbusters movies in a row last Saturday. Have them all on 4K and it's glorious.
And, like, I got them for about $10/per, which isn't bad at all, considering how the kid spins them constantly. Back in the day, VHS tapes cost $50-90 in the 1980s! And even when they were more mainstream and cheap, they were still running $20+ in 1990s money.
I can't find any of them on any of the streaming platforms I currently subscribe to, much less all of them in the same place. Nor can I find most of the movies in my 1000+ disc collection on streaming at any given time. Almost all of the streamer platforms have recently transitioned mostly to in-house series and forgettable straight-to-streaming movies that disappear off the thumbnail carousel after a week or two from audience disinterest. Disney+ doesn't even offer many Disney movies! HBO Max is a shell of its former self. Prime is great for many older movies from the 1980s, but leans heavily into the male-geek-coded genre world of horror/sci-fi, and with fewer general-interest movies. Netflix offers a ton of in-house content, but most of it is bad, and they aren't investing in non-Netflix movies much anymore like they use to. Apple+ has some great in-house series, but hardly any movies. So where should people go to see most movies? Rent them from Prime or YouTube for the same cost as owning them on a disc?
Not physical media, but similar...I discovered my receiver has an FM radio built in, found an ad-free jazz & blues station.
I've found it's much more fun listening to a program of music I don't control (so I don't have to make choices) and which was selected by a human being & is being listened to simultaneously by (thousands of?) other human beings. It makes me feel connected in a way Spotify doesn't, and makes the music a lot more fun.
Gonna try some online simulcasts of terrestrial stations next to see if the effect holds.
I listen to NPR on FM radio in my cars pretty frequently. The content isn't always exactly to my taste, but I just get into my car and it starts playing without anything being plugged in or linked up.
"Many of the people talking about how their parents were able to afford a much better quality of life would never want to live where their parents did."
As a someone born in 1977 (HS grad in 1995) I can attest to this. In my childhood on Long Island, NO ONE wanted to live in NYC (in the '80s). My older siblings are all firmly Gen Xer's (and one cusp boomer) and none of then even considered it when they moved out. By the time it was my turn, large swathes of Manhattan were trending as the return-to-urban trend had just begun. I recall my father freaking out thought when I old him I was looking at places in the (gasp!) EAST VILLAGE. Brooklyn was a non-starter back then unless MAYBE it was Brooklyn Heights.
A close friend of mine ended up buying an apartment from an elderly neighbor who insisted he maker her an offer. Granted it was a tiny tiny tiny 1 BR (bed barely fit in the BR) but I remember thinking "almost $200K?? How will you DO that?!" This was probably ~2003.
Slowly and almost imperceptibly, our aesthetic and preferences began to take over: farm-to-table, mason jars, white subway tiles, ceramic sinks... the snowball rolled and it became more attractive to Millenials and moving into "the city" went from a bold choice just before us to a rare choice (us) to practically the default choice as wave after wave of gentrification pushed into every corner of Manhattan and half of Brooklyn and parts of Queens and Northern NJ. A desire t be urban by default post-college was NOT true in the 90s but it was true by 2010.
The trend spread from NYC to every major city and pretty soon chefs and bakers and brewers priced out the major cities set up shop in Albany and Rochester and every other second-tier city, attracting local urban gentrification.
Suburban sprawl (which could not continue indefinitely) was traded for urban concentration without an adequate expansion of housing. NYC has some of the first housing affordability issues in the country, and those followed as well to every corner. The housing bubble was boomer-fueled so built homes not where out generation wanted to live, but then after 2008 building practically stopped anywhere for 5-10 years, yet we were all piled on top of each other in urban centers.
If it were the 1990s we would mostly be back in or near our childhood suburban communities, probably moving a little further OUT from the urban core than our parents to take advantage of new home building.
On a separate note: my generation brought cool, crisp, clean aesthetics that probably DO make the light look different in photos compared to the 90s vibe of warm woods and runner rugs and the types of things that we would consider "clutter". That, plus film vs. digital (and the "filter" of nostalgia!)
Forget "color-changing" smart stuff, just buy the color temperature you want! I definitely have a few 2700K LEDs in floor lamps in the bedroom for cooldown-the-brain evening reading (doomscrolling is strictly verboten)
True, though I think the people on social media the author mentions who believe the sun was different in the 90s are whatever aren't thinking through the logistics of why the lighting in some older photos are warmer than in some current digital photos.
Don't sleep on the "Great Beige-ification" of the late 1990s early 2000s, too! That, paired with the legacy 1970s/80s trend of traditional-style wood fixtures, wall-to-wall carpet, and incandescent lighting definitely diffused the light inside differently. Already, then, we were moving toward everything being built like shit out of artificial materials, but it takes a whole for the generational refresh of homes and interiors to be complete.
Now everything's glossy/shiny laminate or vinyl grey or griege and the lighting is UV and there's not a natural building material to be found.
Google "flooring" right now and you'll see what I mean. You'll see among the top hits an aspirational HGTV American interior with "geige" vinyl flooring and some white-on-white drywall walls and some furniture with artificial fabric upholstery and laminated pressed-wood product. A LOT of grey abounds. We're still in the Modern Farmhouse era, so you'll maybe see some faux-antique "barn doors" floating within door-frames, excluding nothing, not even the chronic din of TV noise and echoes that such a ticky-tacky home lets through its thin surfaces.
And the impeccability of the shiny, plasticine flooring gives away how easily scratched/scuffed/torn/peeled is all is. And how would you repair any of it? How long will that couch last? Or that hollow door? Or even the faux marble or non-ceramic tiles on the walls or kitchen surfaces?
Well, of course you raise a good point: most people live in homes from previous eras. And that's highly regional: New England homes are way older than your average homes in the Southwest.
But we were originally discussing the contemporary, new-built home vs. old housing stock.
I'm not a real estate developer/agent so I don't go into that many new homes. But most of the ones I see are the ones for sale where people are choosing bland inoffensive colors to sell their house. Beige, White, Grey, etc. A lot of people then move in and change up the color scheme to fit their preference.
And is anyone else tired of “farmhouse” style with the stark white board and batten siding and black trim windows? It was ok occasionally but it’s like oppressively stark. A bourgeois khrushyovka!
I don't think it's *as bad* as the khrushyovka or International Style of constructed Postwar housing in the rest of Europe. We have tons of these "Stalin Blocks" in Sweden and they are very unlovely, even as I appreciate their practicality, durability, and affordability as part of the "Million Homes" initiative of the 1950s-70s.
My issue with Modern Farmhouse is that, like with the McMansion style that preceded it, it's just built like shit. You emulate the *aesthetics* of a farmhouse, but without any of the robust, natural materials that actual farmhouses had. Give me the most tumble-down, 19th Century farmhouse in America and I can fix it with widely-available materials. The primitive, knob-and-tube wiring and rusted-through cast-iron plumbing can be a nightmare and you'll just have to give up if there's water damage from a decayed roof or burst pipes. But otherwise, you can repair anything.
Modern Farmhouse McMansions built in the 2010s will not be standing in the 2060s or beyond, and not just because the style will have been considered incredibly dated and cringe decades before that.
Yeah, I mean, I support tearing down a lot more old forest to build American housing (especially other countries’ old forest). It takes a long time for decent wood to grow, as a casual trip to the Home Depot lumber section would indicate.
That's very true and is a good argument against robust housing built out of natural materials. But, what's the alternative, similar environmental despoliation to make all the more artificial building materials, only to have them be landfilled and replaced in 20 years or so to suit their fragility and the HGTV trend cycle? The construction sector is a HUGE contributor to carbon emissions, as well as general resource overshoot from harvesting of all manner of feedstuffs, including things as prosaic as the sand, gravel, and cement that make up so much of a modern house.
At least when you build a good house, it lasts a century or more and you only have to replace some of the material every generation or so. Even lower-quality, new-growth pine and other softwoods harvested sustainably can last a very long time.
Also, another underrated aspect of contemporary construction is how much it skips over the more traditional focus on building setting/orientation and passive structural elements like porches, verandas, overhangs to keep a comfortable interior climate and instead relies upon mechanical HVAC to blunt-force your way to a comfortable temperature and ventilation. This makes a contemporary house very difficult to heat/cool and keep from getting moldy or stuffy without those mechanized systems constantly running (even if they are efficient). It also makes such homes very vulnerable to disruptions in electricity or natural gas supply, especially in the summertime. My old house is very easy to ventilate, since the windows are build to advantage cross-winds and there's plenty of focus on shade. But, in the winter, since it's not an open-concept and the walls are thick, it's easier to keep warm with less mechanical heating, despite the leaky, older windows.
Late Gen X / early Millennials set the trend of urban life being desirable.
Boomers still disproportionally own the housing stock and resist building based on various combinations of property value, traffic, neighborhood "character", historical concerns, parks and public spaces, etc.
Then late Millennials / Gen Z got involved to "act locally" circa 2016 and built on this by adding everything bagel demands on social justice to many developments.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit this but the movie Big had a, um, big impact on my desire to live in a city when I grew up. I’m the same age as you, but from the Midwest and had never been to New York.
You are accurately describing an East Coast and probably West Coast phenomenon. In places like Texas, Phoenix and Florida they are still sprawling. For better or worse, that's why their housing costs are not as daunting.
Though Dallas and Houston are filling up all the center city parking craters with four story townhomes and five over one apartment complexes too (though it’s still a small fraction of the number of homes being built in the suburbs).
b.1971, lived Upper East Side between 2nd and 3rd Aves. I’m always bemused how horrified suburbanites were about NYC back in the day. Then again, I’m horrified how suburbanites their kids managed to make it.
At what point is “safety” for another .2% of babies/children/adults no longer worth it for the unrelenting watchful eye that “protects us”? I grant that I may be looking back with nostalgia (Violet Hour sky is what was more vivid to me back then; and the new SNL movie didn’t have nearly enough dirt and grime in the outdoor scenes, go take a look at Downtown ‘81 to get it right), but the resulting isolation, or not even letting your kids go down to the store on their own (an early Sesame Street cartoon had a girl remember what her mother asked her to get), is soul crushing.
One thing that drives '90s were better' discourse is that the ever increasing percentage of people going to college means that the path into a stable career is, on average, longer and more stressful than it was in the 90s when it was easier to make a good career without going to college.
And kids these days can't really opt out of this as everyone else is going to college, so it's harder to find employment as a non-graduate compared to the 90s, so many kids see that they need to go to college to get similar jobs as their non-college parents had, and assume society is declining.
I found Matt on twitter and mostly just mainlined his tweets for a while but I’d say I’ve been reading SB for maybe a year? I stupidly subscribed on my personal email and it just occurred to me that’s why I never see the posts on the Substack app.
Thanks. Good to have you here, I know you'll be busy with your own publication but it'd be good to see you comment some more in the future here--you're already well outpacing Matt on comments per article by a writer!
I discovered Jeff Mauer ("I Might Be Wrong") via SB and read the cross posting the two of you did on lying about Santa Claus (which was great!) And now here you are on SB.
Real Marvel Cinematic Universe vibes starting to build here.
I mean, yes and no? I went to the U. of California from 1978 to 1982 and the tuition (pardon me, "fees") went from $400 a year to $600 a year in that time. Yes I've read the essay that City of Trees posted several hours ago. My point still stands. The costs at any UC campus have expanded much faster than inflation.
I think the observation is really that for someone that had a desire to send two kids to college they probably had a stay at home wife and it was pretty easy to pull off.
Not sure that's what's going on. Some of the causality runs the other way - it's easy to have a stay-at-home wife when you make enough money to pay for the necessities.
The other is that those that were most likely to send their kids to college were the parents at the top end of the income distribution and were in careers that required college degrees.
IMO the big break was that starting in the late 2000s, the tech revolution had spread to the job market, and fundamentally changed how companies hired.
- There were now too many resumes to manually review, so now we have keyword searches and automated review engines. This made it harder to just walk in the door somewhere and get a job.
- HR had mostly finished its long march through corporate America, so now HR schoolmarms were in charge of ALL hiring decisions, if they hadn't been already.
- Credential inflation and job description creep -- exacerbated by HR departments -- forced a lot of young Millennials to go back for grad school.
- Tuition inflation and student loans meant that once you graduated and GOT the job, you got to keep less of your take-home pay.
- Ditto for the then-burgeoning housing crisis. Entry-level salaries didn't feel like they went as far as they used to.
- Entry-level salaries were also just SHIT for most of the ensuing decade because duh the Great Recession happened.
I agree with you. What frustrates me is the people who graduated into the recovery (2015 onwards) who act like they were they were dealt the worst hand ever when they actually missed the worst of it. Even Covid didn't have that much of an effect on the employment of educated people.
I graduated in the post Covid years. I don’t think it’s the lack of a job that people are concerned about. But rather the lack of social connection in both their community and place of work.
A lot of the discourse seems to be about the hellscape of capitalism though. And a lot of the lack of social connections is driven by the very platforms Zoomers use to complain about their lack of social connections. No one is forcing people to be on TikTok all night and rot their own brain instead of just actually hanging out with friends.
And they all seem like fans of WFH, which I think is awful for businesses (there are studies that show nearly everything being done more effectively with in person interaction) and for the people doing it. Even if it feels good! Lots of things that are awful for you in the long term actually feel great in the short term.
I shall once again reiterate my take that WFH is basically a tacitly-accepted false equilibrium that most professional jobs don't actually require 8 straight hours of 9-5 work, 5 days a week. This was largely masked by the internet massively increasing both productivity and distractions, but if the game isn't quite "up" yet, it's at least becoming increasingly untenable.
As it stands, the labor laws can't be changed without the PMC basically tipping off the working class that we're all getting paid a 3-5x markup OVER the existing pay advantage PMCers have, because PMCers are working 3-5x fewer real hours. So the PMC, including even the HR schoolmarms, have just collectively decided to continue the legal fiction that everyone's still working 40-hour weeks, and WFH is part of the bargain to allow PMCers to go do errands and shit when they would've been sitting at a screen reading internet articles 10 years ago, or dozing off in front of a typewriter 30-40 years ago.
I think the ideal synthesis with your point about WIO being more effective is that most PMC jobs -- which are already at a "3 days in office, 2 days WFH" equilibrium -- should reduce to 4-day work weeks under 3-in/1-out, and then eventually just to a 3-day all-in work week.
As it stands, though, that'll never happen with our current political dysfunction, so there'll probably just have to be a revolution where PMCers like us just have to hope we don't get lined up against a wall ;-).
As someone who graduated in 2007 (lol) I do of course agree on some level, but I think it's worth saying younger people can still have been victims of the financial crisis (maybe one or both parents lost a job, maybe there wasn't much money due to defaulting on something, maybe they were just stressed and then not very nice at home, etc etc).
Yup. I have a kid who was recently looking for a non-professional job. The amount of crap ads - old, places not really hiring, places that never got back to him - at that level was shocking. Plus the places that required you to interact with an AI bot, where you really didn't know where your info was going. I keep hearing about places having trouble hiring people. Son is reliable, hard-working, drug free, and it was difficult for him to find a job due to this morass. He ended up at an appliance parts warehouse two miles from our house so all is good now. There had to be a better way than this for both job seekers and those looking to hire.
I think it's just the email spam problem replicating in another sector: When you reduce transaction costs to near-zero (IE filing an application or job opening with a bot), you get a flood of crap.
We need new authentication methods to verify quality again. That's what I think LinkedIn is somewhat banking on -- that it can provide social proof where algorithmic proof is lacking.
I have nothing against Linkedin as a concept, but it has made professional hiring absolutely miserable. As yet I am still able to keep up with a "to complete your application, please submit XYZ materials..." email to each lazy click-to-send-your-resume applicant, but I'm not sure how much longer that will be possible.
I'm pretty far from a luddite but it's very clear to me that in some areas, transaction costs are a very good thing. Job applications and job postings are such an area.
In a sane world jobs would apply for people rather than the other way around. But in the absence of such a world there should only be paper applications, turned in in-person.
After air conditioning it’s all been downhill though unless you’re talking about the medical sector.
Over 60% of Americans today still lack a college degree. People with college degrees are still badly outnumbered! Yet most of the people who are having these conversations online, it seems to me, don’t even know any of those people. Any idea how many people work for Walmart, Amazon warehouses, etc in the year of our lord 2025? The Very Online contingent seems to have none of those people in their lives.
CHH mentions this:
“These kids might have grown up considering themselves “middle class” when they were actually safely upper middle class. Their parents, not wanting to be unseemly, probably told them they were middle class.”
I grew up up broke, in the 80s and early 90s. All of these people talking about how life was back then, whether they realized it or not, were rich kids. I look at what they’re pointing to in the past, and I didn’t grow up that way nor did anyone around me. And there were lots and lots of us, all over the country.
Excellent comment. Having grown up in an unfashionable suburb of Detroit, raised by parents who didn’t go to college (and whose own parents were immigrants), for quite a long time I thought of my origins as kind of lower middle class. When I got a mid career graduate degree at a CUNY school, I realized how actually middle class and extremely fortunate I was.
A good rule of thumb is that on the internet (reddit and twitter especially) middle class = upper middle class. And very firmly upper middle class at that.
I do wonder about sorting mechanisms here, though. I know lots of Boomers who did not graduate from college, including my own mother. I think I know...two maybe?...people my age (elder millennial, like lots of folks here) who didn't graduate from college. And I believe the college graduation rate for my cohort is higher, but it's not *so* much higher as to account for that drastic of a difference.
This means fundamentally the quality of college graduates has gone down (and this selection effect is exacerbated by certain pedagogical reforms like non-zero grading, passing everyone forward, cueing theory of learning, and ubiquitous cellphones in class.)
One small silver lining for Gens Alpha and Beta might be something like a return to normality in this regard for no reason other than that there are fewer of them.
or from my perspective, college still did the simple thing we asked of it - I went to college and I easily got a decent job, even though my grades weren't grade
Great post, and in one of my favorite genres, the ‘nostalgia reality check’. It’s all basically true but i won’t give up: the 90s were still the best! Politics was still pretty normal, Bill Clinton was awesome, America was saving people from genocide, there were no powerful foreign enemies hacking our government every other week, and gas was $0.95 per gallon.
All that said, air-travel is way safer now—which is super nice. You’re right to focus on motor vehicle accidents but I’m crazy like everyone else and am just more scared to fly than drive my car to the airport.
As someone who helps cars get built, people have no idea how much safer cars are today, because you don’t see most of the improvements. If you hit something hard, head on, in the 20th century, the engine was probably going to be forced into the cabin of the car, for instance.
Today, crash test standards require front rails that break away and drop the engine to make sure that doesn’t happen. Just as one example. I see cars mangled all to hell that people came out of virtually unscathed.
Exactly. And I bet the outer body panels on the Bel Air are made of steel that’s almost twice as thick as what’s on the outside of the Malibu. You might instinctively think that would be helpful, but not so much. It’s the stuff under it that has been almost revolutionized that saves your life.
Not to mention, technological advancement was always good (or at least felt like it was good). It was search engines and 3d video games and non-addictive dumb cellphones. Whereas these days we have smartphones and social media and generative AI, which all have complicated pros and cons and lots of worrying aspects.
I suspect (though am too lazy to do the math) that if you control for the gas efficiency of modern cars, gas prices are the same to lower today than in 1990.
For me, that is not the case. My high-school car was a 1987 Toyota Tercel, which got about 27 miles/gallon in the city. My car now is a pretty similar looking Subaru Forester, which gets 20 mpg or so.
If you just look at gasoline-powered vehicles, “theeleaticstranger” actually makes a great point. Average fuel economy stagnated for a while as more efficient engine technology was counterbalanced by increasingly heavy vehicles.
I feel like you made a post by putting two years of my comments on this substack, throwing it all in ChatGPT and then putting into MattY speak; because this has basically been my argument on a variety of topics no matter which topic you talk about. No, things were not actually better in the good ole days.
And yet as soon as you mentioned dunkaroos, my brain immediately went to remembering eating roll ups, gushers, pixie sticks, nutter butters and found myself instinctively smiling inside. Which led to me remembering watching Seinfeld, Simpsons, Michael Jordan Bulls, listening to Green Day and Rage Against the Machine…and then I had to snap out of it. I’m probably the most “don’t over romanticize the good ole days” person there is and here I had 5 minutes where my brain just over romanticized the good ole days.
It really tells me this instinct is genuinely an instinct you need to try to fight against.
One thing you didn’t bring up that is worth mentioning is that we are an aging society. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t think we can talk about the seductive nature of MAGA without talking about the fact that median America age is rising. It was 30 in 1980 and is now closer to 39. Which means “back in the good ole days” thinking carries more heft politically then it did 30-40 years ago. I’ve noted that you can look to UK for an area where median age is even higher and see how especially damaging this can be. One of the many things I worry about next four years (how much is anti green sentiment just pure nostalgia good ole days thinking to a time when green tech was extremely cringy).
I was a teenager when those devil's food cakes came out, and as such I wasn't thinking about weight loss at all, and instead just plowing through a whole box to sate a typical appetite of that age.
David Foster Wallace has an essay called "Mister Squishy" in the book "Oblivion" which is probably the world's most prolific meditation on the snackable dessert cake.
A request: Could you make the posts you linked to on your substack "free" for a few days? I clicked on two of them -- the one about toys and the one about men's fashion -- and they seemed interesting but then I was stopped from getting to the end of them. Not sure if I want to subscribe, but maybe. Either way, I'd like to be able to read a linked post where possible.
This is a basic problem of Substack, you can't pick and chose what to read, only whom to read.
The platform really ought to allow people to buy access to individual posts. Newsstands were never a treat to newspaper subscriptions, why is Substack different? Would too many of Matt's subscribers desert to buying only a few per month? At the very least the platform should let the writer chose to include that option. Is this a problem for Substack's business model? Why?
Pay-per-view is a bad business model. Publishers don’t want sporadic purchases, but instead the more consistent revenue from subscriptions (and ads). That entails creating a product that is a regular, consistent, novel point of view. Select free articles, as well as publicly on other venues like twitter can convince potential subscribers to consider the product. Customers need to be compelled to commit to a paid subscription.
The tech analyst Ben Thompson has written extensively on the subscription business model for news and opinion publications. He has first hand experience as he’s been running an amazing paid newsletter since 2013. (Substack founders cited him as their inspiration). Notably, see his 2017 article, “The Local News Business Model” [1]
> It is very important to clearly define what a subscriptions means. First, it’s not a donation: it is asking a customer to pay money for a product. What, then, is the product? It is not, in fact, any one article (a point that is missed by the misguided focus on micro-transactions). Rather, a subscriber is paying for the regular delivery of well-defined value.
> Each of those words is meaningful:
> Paying: A subscription is an ongoing commitment to the production of content, not a one-off payment for one piece of content that catches the eye.
> Regular Delivery: A subscriber does not need to depend on the random discovery of content; said content can be delivered to the subscriber directly, whether that be email, a bookmark, or an app.
> Well-defined Value: A subscriber needs to know what they are paying for, and it needs to be worth it.
He has a lot of free articles that cover news and more generally the media industry, particularly how the internet disrupted it. If you find this topic interesting, I bet that you’ll find reading a few convinces you to commit to a paid subscription for $120/yr.
And *I* am also going to even lazier copy and paste my reply to you from December 2023, verbatim:
"How about not strictly pay per view, but where you buy essentially a gift card for # number of views? Like, if you want to charge a dollar per article, and the minimum purchase is something like $20? As John alludes to, I just utterly despite monthly recurring subscriptions, because they want to suck you into set it and forget it mode and add friction to stopping the sucking of money away from you. I would be more eager to purchase articles without that being demanded so damn often."
And I also remain firmly in the ¿por qué no los? category on this, even if standalone article purchases are considerably more expensive than monthly subscriptions would be on a per article basis. That's my understanding on how the old newsstand model that TLH describes work, and if it worked then I don't see why it can't work now. It just seems like publishers are leaving money on the table here.
I would be interested to listen to actual publishers like Matt or CHH on what their thoughts would be.
One thing I will add is that places that have comments almost always have a better comment section if its restricted to subscribers. I subscribe to SB because I enjoy the conversation in the comments as much as I enjoy Matt's writing. That isn't to say that subscriber comment sections can't be trash, so there is definitely a link between author/moderation policy/commenter quality.
Nevertheless, if you are trying to build an engaged community, I think allowing one off articles to be purchased is very counterproductive.
This is a discussion of media strategy in general. I am asking about Substack. Matt was just an example of one kind of posting. Is there no one that could not garner a little more cash by allowing single or small lot purchases in addition to subscribers? Even more puzzling would be the sites that let anyone read, but would charge for commenting on a single or small lot of posts! Obviously everyone thinks their views are correct, but do their subscribers need to be protected from other points of view?
Seconded. I subscribe to a few stacks and would continue to do so but I'd also totally be willing to spend a few bucks for single posts here and there without full subscription.
It is well-written, witty and accessible. Uses a good mix of data and anecdotes to argue against a 1990's nostalgia that glosses over the profound improvements in US life over the past 30 years.
I like CHH, but she is stronger on dating/relationships/marriage than on social trends. Matt would have done this post better, especially because he is older and has a better lived memory of the 90s.
Same. Largely because of school: “Wake up two hours before you wanted to and sit at attention all day having to focus on a topic you may or may not be interested in.”
I want my young adult body back but enjoy my life as a settled middle-aged adult better. And I am certainly glad I am out of the dating scene, although I understand that that sucks for all ages now.
>>They don’t feel like their children are safer than children in the ‘90s, and their proof is mostly “all the stuff I’m hearing” and “how things were when I was as kid.”
This jibes with a LOT of what I was saying the last two years about inflation. People genuinely don't know how the fuck to interpret an inflation graph, let alone look one up from the Fed. People have simply just been bitching about grocery prices for their entire lives, and if they look up at the news in the DMV and it says "Inflation reaching record highs", they free-associate that with whatever ambient bitching they've been doing, and maybe they say something to the person sitting next to them, who mindlessly agrees, and then soon enough you've got a South Park-style pitchfork mob ready to oust a president because of "inflation".
I think most people don't know what the fuck a price level is, but you're nevertheless mostly on the mark.
And yet, I think this is also why people are ALWAYS bitching about the price level: because the Cost Disease is ALWAYS ramping it up beyond inflation.
Side note: I can't wait until econ textbooks 100 years from now talk about how noble economists like Matthew Yglesias taught everyone about the Cost Disease and YIMBY, in the same hallowed terms as they now talk about Keynes.
That must be why Reagan won 49 states in 1984 and why, according to Gallup, the percentage of people dissatisfied with the way things were going went from 84% in 1979 to 40% in late 1984.
It should be noted that even when inflation is only hitting the Feds target of 2% that's still a LOT of inflation.
at 2% inflation you've lost 18% of the value of your money within 10 years and 1/3 of it within 20 years. That's fricken huge.
Not to mention the CPI is deliberately massaged to make the number lower than it should be. These use technological improvement to reduce inflation numbers. For example, if a new iPhone is released at the same price as the old one these pretend that's a reduction in the price level. But it's not. Technology is supposed to get better. But that doesn't lower actual price inflation.
And of course CPI is used to set all types of cost of living increases. So technological improvements in electronics is used to make it look like say housing isn't causing the CPI to increase as much as it otherwise would have. Which means less COLA for everyone.
And of course because housing is so a large part of our expenses each month the WAY above average home price inflation really hits people's pocket book hard.
Anecdotal data, in the late 90's you could get a track home in my town for $100k. Now they are $600k. Incomes sure didn't go up 6x.
I think this article is overall solid. The main thing I will give 90's nostalgia is that the US definitely had a vibe that the world was getting better overall. There's been a lot written about how the movies of 1999 were all about how having a good job was boring. 9/11 killed a lot of that and we let ourselves become an angry country for a while. We started to get that optimistic vibe again during Obama, but we then let ourselves become an angry country again since 2016. The Trump era is one of self-imposed anger at everyone for no reason.
I don't think first-term Obama was a very optimistic time, due to the long hangover from the Great Recession. (And I have a lot of nostalgia for that time, anyway, because I was in my 20s and my life was good - nostalgia is really about your own personal circumstances rather than the state of the world!) There was a brief moment late in Obama's term when it felt like optimism might return, then...well...
Also, I think you're contradicting yourself when you dismiss 2020s stranger danger and also nostalgia for kids just getting to wander. It really was safe for kids to just wander because stranger danger isn't based on statistical reality. (Kidnapping is very close to exclusively a crime committed by family members, usually as part of a custody dispute.) Which is another genuinely bad thing about now: the ossification of a worldview that prioritizes safety over other human values to a toxic degree.
I have relatives who were born in the late 30's and early 40's in the deep South. They aren't nostalgic for that time at all. It was unpleasant for them and they are glad to escape it.
hmm, I quite liked the 90s, though of course partly it's just fun to be in your 20s. But I'll give some specifics.
- Dot com jobs were AWESOME in that we got raises quickly and none of use really knew what we were doing
- Since we had just come out of the dangerous 80s, the 90s seemed super safe. Especially in NYC.
- I bought a 1 BR apt in NYC (ok Queens) for less than $100k, with some of that dotcom money
- Even though I had taken out max public student loans, the payments were really manageable and it was all cleared up before I turned 30
- maybe it's nostalgia, but the politics seemed a lot more chill.
- global events: it was a sweet spot between the end of the USSR but before 9/11, and it just seemed like the world was a nice safe stable place
- drugs: pot was technically illegal, sure. but it was a sweet spot between crack and the opioid crises, at least for casual partiers. you could get a little high and not worry you were risking your life.
While Americans experienced the world as a nice safe stable place, the Russian economy collapsed, the Bosnian Genocide happened, and the Middle East turned away from peace and development to give us today's wars.
Fantastic piece. People always underrate the latent progress of prosperity in the moment. I wonder how much of the 90’s nostalgia is just reverence for the lasting cultural production of the era? The music of that decade was simply unbelievable, who could imagine bands like Oasis arising organically today, and the nostalgia is so strong they are coming back on tour this year. Fantastic movies like A Few Good Men and The Fugitive may not even get made today in Hollywood’s IP/sequel driven era. Not to mentioned indelible sports icons like the Jordan Bulls and the last time the Dallas Cowboys were worth a damn. Everything here is correct but I wonder if it’s more easily explained by huge lasting cultural signifiers instead, some that were genuinely better than today’s.
It is very good to read one of your articles here, many people have been praising your work for quite some time now, and I'm glad I got an opportunity to see why. Thanks for stopping by!
I wonder how much of the cultural nostalgia is driven by the atomization and asynchronization of modern shows/movies/etc. I’ve read about how we have fewer viewers per any given show today, and we never have to watch exactly when anything airs. I miss the idea that we all were super into the exact same thing all at once because if you missed it, you missed it.
I think it is a fool's errand to guess at what people in 2050+ might think of today's music. It is, itself, a form of nostalgia to say things like "they just don't make them like that anymore"
Also, I remember pretty clearly in the 90s that everyone bitched about how no one was making original movies and that every thing was a sequel. And let's not gloss over the fact that The Fugitive itself was "IP driven" -- it was a remake of a 60s TV show. As was Mission: Impossible (yes, you are old, the first one was in 1996), another banger from that era.
To look at modern stuff: Into the Spiderverse is obviously "IP driven" but is probably the best superhero movie ever made, Paddington 2 is one of the best movies ever made (no, it's not just a meme, seriously, go watch Paddington and Paddington 2 *right now*, you will thank me later), Dunkirk can compete with Saving Private Ryan for best war movie ever made, and Tarantino is still making great movies, Pulp Fiction was not just a flash in the pan.
Yes, there are lots of sequels and franchises, and it IS bad now, but... remember Batman Forever and (cringes) Batman & Robin? How about Alien: Resurrection? My Girl 2 (really, what the hell, did they even watch the first one?) How about Home Alone 3 (yes, they made three)?
The movies of the 90s were very good. The music was a mixed bag: definitely better in the first half than the second.
A lot of this has structural explanations, and I think that's a really underrated aspect of why/when art is good. Art needs a commercial basis or else it doesn't happen and/or you never hear about it.
I cannot emphasize enough how much of this is personal preference. Imagine someone walking up to you in the 90s and telling you how much modern movies sucked and were better in the 60-70s. That's you now.
I have no idea what kind of bubble one must exist within to have missed the vast, vast, staggering improvement in the quality and variety of food available in American supermarkets and restaurants over the past 40 years. Like half of the foodstuffs in my house right now would have been basically impossible to acquire in America in 1995.
It’s the most delicious time to be alive.
Author here and yeah I literally have no idea how people think this! But somehow they do?
I dont have any kids but I think its really sad if they are not allowed to go anywhere by themselves. Seems they are More safe now with their phones and cameras everywhere! Cant parents even track these kids' locations on their phones?
You’d think! I think it’s different for older kids, but I’ve also seen parents have CPS called on them for letting pre-teens walk to school alone.
The middle class panopticon is crazy and an underrated factor in the "overparenting" phenomenon. Poor people still let their kids walk to school!
One big plus side of living in a neighborhood with a sizeable immigrant and/or second generation contingent is that I don't think they've gotten the memo on this yet. That gives cover for the rest of us.
The last few days of school closures in metro DC have not been fun but they were made much easier by virtue of the fact that my 7 year old son spent the whole day out sledding with other kids with no real adult supervision.
My brother and his wife lived in a low-income neighborhood a few years ago and I swear, it was like going into a time portal to the 80/90's. Kids played outside in groups, and organized their own games. Neighbors interacted constantly like it was Senfeld. And all of the teenagers seemed to be dating (teen pregnancy was actually still a problem there).
Ugh. And it’s offensive that parents would know where their teens are too!
I always want to know who these people are that are calling the police.
You’ve personally seen this? Or do you mean you heard about it online?
My kids don't have phones, and they won't be getting one for quite a while, especially a smart phone will be at 18, same with social media
If I had kids I’d want to homeschool and raise them off the grid, largely to prevent them from knowing smartphones exist.
We actually started them home schooling but sadly had to send them to school this year because one salary just isn't enough to pay the bills.
My daughter was 9, and the youngest kid in her 5th grade class. Worse, she already knows almost all of it, really we should have put her in 6th grade. But then she would be 2-3 years younger than all the kids...
We started letting our kids walk to school on 4th grade and ride their bikes in our neighborhood in Denver but stay away from busy streets and we had other adults tell us that we were being irresponsible. It didn't stop us and both our boys started riding the city bus to middle school in 6th grade
Great article thank u for the guest post!
No shit. I can still remember that glorious moment that NAFTA unleashed in the early 90s when avocados actually became abundant, let alone affordable, and how guacamole went from never in our meals to always. And there's so much more beyond that, of course.
And this has been an steady exponential rise ever since World War II. Everyone loves to trash 50s cuisine, and it is utterly terrible compared to today or even the 90s, but guess what was even worse? Famines. Those really, really sucked. All hail Norman Bourlaug, the Greatest Human Being Ever.
To buttress your and Matt’s point. We make fun of 50s cookbooks. But a big part of those cookbooks was built around the fact that so many ingredients we take for granted today weren’t available and that a food was a much bigger part of a family’s household budget back then. So many of those “gross” recipes is about maximizing every ingredient you do have in the house.
Heck you can see some of this with traditions that have lived on like thanksgiving. So many “favorite” things like stuffing or gravy is really about maximizing every ingredient and food we have in the house.
And the fact that we had built up a huge amount of industrial infrastructure to make spoil-free meals for soldiers abroad in WWII and then shifted that capacity to making shelf-stable food in the 1950s.
We had frozen orange juice in the 90s because of WWII,
“In 1945, still set on getting that Vitamin C to the troops, the army asked Morse to produce 500,000 of palatable orange juice concentrate, using both his business know-how and the new techniques developed by the USDA. Morse readily set up the Florida Foods Corporation to fulfill this massive order. Ironically, the war ended before the orange juice could ship out.”
https://time.com/4922457/wwii-orange-juice-history/
I guess they still sell frozen, but fresh bottled is a lot more available today than in the 90s.
I remember in the 90's, you could tell when visiting friend's houses which families were richer based on fresh vs. frozen orange juice.
In the 80s, it was more about when they got a microwave.
Frozen orange juice hit its peak in the early 80s before the market got cornered.
What ever happened to Clarence Beeks?
I don’t think I had fresh OJ until I went off to college in FL
When I was in elementary school, there were a couple kids whose parents could afford annual winter vacations in Florida. They'd drive, of course, because "could afford" usually meant something like shift lead at the mill whose wife worked the front office, or apple baron's grandson. Stuff like that. Netjets wasn't a thing, and even if it were, these weren't Netjets folks. More like popup camper trailer or suite at Holiday Inn whilst roadtripping folks. Baron's grandson had a Winnebago, maybe. And they'd come back with a couple bushels of really shitty-looking oranges. And give them as gifts. People were genuinely gracious the first time, but just go through the motions by the third season or whatever.
And...uh...what were we talking about?
Also, those gross recipes were largely formulated by a Campbell's test kitchen as a way to market the new innovation of canned goods -- instead of slaving over dinner every night, housewives could throw a bunch of canned goods together and make a casserole in minutes.
Those recipes on the back of the can, or on the Tollhouse Chocolate Chips bag, are there for a REASON, not because Nestle/Campbells just loves you and your family so darned much.
My mother's Rombauer "Joy of Cooking" from 1947 or so told you how to cook a squirrel.
Yes, you have to eat every part of the pig including the head and drag it out over months.
"There are no two finer words in the English language than 'encased meats.'" -- Hot Dougs Chicago
I remember when you Sushi was some really gross shit that only a few weird people in California would eat. The first time I ate Indian food was in Germany of all places, because those didn't exist anywhere where I grew up. I'd never heard of Pho, and didn't know about Calamari or Teriyaki (another food you only got in California or Hawaii back then).
It was super hard to find a decent steak that was not a Sirloin, there were only a couple of kinds of apples (reds were always Delicious and greens were always Granny Smith, both nasty, for different reasons), you had to go to fancy expensive stores to find any cheese that wasn't cheddar, swiss, or Mozzeralla. And the bread... good god the bread was awful. What we called "sourdough" back then was basically wonder bread, and if you wanted good bread you had to go to an expensive "artisan" bakery. Just to get the kind of decent Ciabatta or Sourdough you could get every day in every supermarket now.
We could go on for a while on this...
The Simpson's season one famously had an entire episode where the family went out to try sushi and it was treated as this weird gross exotic thing Lisa pushed for whereas homer wanted pork chops.
Thing is, I remember pork chops from the 90s being basically really tough and leathery, while also bland. Sushi has neither of those problems.
The plot was set up really well: Homer discovered that he actually loved it...until he thought that he ate poisoned fugu--but narrowly missed doing so.
In the 1990s people still had the folk memory of pork being infected with trichinosis and cooked it into leather. Now I think only the CDC still carries the torch.
FWIW, I discovered pho in Milwaukee in the 90's. The late 90's is when the Food Network really made inroads (back when it was actually about cooking before it became all games and competitions). Classic cocktails were first revitalized in NYC, Seattle and Cleveland in the late 90's by a few folks: Dale DeGroff, Sasha Petraske, Robert Hess, Audrey Saunders, Ted Haigh and a number of others...most of whom were active on the Drinkboy forums...similar stuff was happening in food. The late 90's were very very different than the early 90's....it took another 10-15 years for migration to the suburbs/small towns....
Alternate history on if we didn’t have NAFTA?
I suspect we're about to find out on January 20th. Like everyone else, I have not idea how much of Trump's tariff threats is bluster just like how much of everything is just bluster*. But it seems extremely likely that a pretty decent size tariffs are coming to goods made in Canada and Mexico.
Also why I don't expect these tariffs to last. I feel pretty confident that majority of Americans are aware of how much of their stuff has some component that comes from Canada or Mexico, including food. That there's basically no such thing as "made in America" if we're talking about a big enough company as there is often some sort of component built in Mexico.
*I'm with Seth Myers on this. Just do it you coward! Take Greenland! Let's call your very obvious bluff
Yeah, I kind of want him to follow-through on some of his bad ideas so everyone can see them fail in real time and we can move past this ideology.
I also wonder to what degree they actually would be targeted in a way that he didn’t bother mentioning on the campaign trail because average voters don’t know enough about how tariffs work to care. For example, why on earth would there be a tariff on coffee beans - there is no domestic coffee industry to protect because you can’t grow coffee beans here. He didn’t mention making that kind of exception in the campaign, but when push comes to shove maybe the technocrats writing the policies would, because they’re presumably not idiots.
I think what's most likely is the tariffs become basically a giant bribery scheme to line his own pockets. So initial new tariffs on China will likely have giant loopholes for all the goods that matter to making Teslas. And then once tariffs are in place on Canada and Mexico. And every CEO who depends on trade with either country starts coming hat in hand looking for carveouts. So Trump gets show dominance to a class of people he desperately wants to be seen part of AND he can just get all sorts bribes coming his way; sudden new contracts with Trump org, promises to buy 1 million trump bibles etc.
I truly think we underrate the possibility we're about to see cartoonish corruption going on all "legal" as Trump team argues its' allowed under Presidential immunity.
President Cyborg Ross Perot is entering his 11th term
Spitballing, but wouldn't undocumented immigration be even higher? My impression was NAFTA was a boon to Mexico, thus disincentivizing emigration from Mexico.
IIRC NAFTA was blamed for putting some Mexican agricultural workers out of work by exposing Mexican buyers to extremely cheap corn from the USA.
I'm a bit surprised that hasn't come up in a mailbag yet--you should ask him that next Sunday!
At least you could smoke in restaurants then! Waffle House has never been the same experience.
Hell, you could buy cigarettes from vending machines.
That was when the tobacco companies would pay to have cigarettes merchandised on gas station counters to make them easy to steal by kids that would be future customers
I remember those all being coin-operated and they would only take pound coins and 50p pieces, so they'd adjust the number of cigs in the packet until they'd go back to 20 and put the price up 50p. So sometimes you'd get 20, sometimes 19 or 18 or even 17 in a pack.
They were mostly found in pubs - you weren't allowed to have them anywhere that kids were allowed.
I also remember the age for (buying) cigs being 16 and alcohol being 18 instead of both 18 as they are now.
As we've discussed before, we disagree on this aspect of the 90s (though the phaseout really was picking up in that decade), and I think most Slow Borers disagree with you.
I had Chinese food for the very first time* in 1977. It simply wasn't around before. I had no idea what to do with it. I spooned some from each box onto my plate and then mixed them together, to the bemusement of my dinner companions.
* Well, not quite. In the early 60s in north Florida my mother bought a prepackaged "Chinese" meal from the store. I still remember that horror vividly.
My parents are huge shipwreck enthusiasts. They recently got their hands on a menu from the dining room of the Andrea Doria, a luxury cruise liner that sank in the mid 1950s.
They wanted to make some of the recipes from the luxury liner to try them, only to find out that the menu was full of stuff like "roast beef with mayonnaise " that would be unpalatable to modern people, but was the height of cuisine in 1955.
It seems like food is pretty consistently getting better the further into the future we go.
And take a look at the first class menu from the Titanic (https://titanicfacts.net/titanic-menu/).
Maybe hitting that iceberg was a mercy. I’d rather be dumped in the water than face that breakfast menu ever again.
Ugh so much mutton.
One of the best meals I've ever eaten was hogget (for those that don't know: lamb is under a year old, mutton is over two years old; hogget is in-between). Hogget is rare and relatively expensive because the animal has to be specifically bred and raised for meat: lamb and mutton exist in considerable quantities as a side-effect of making wool, but hogget can only happen if you raise the animal specifically for meat.
[Most lambs that are slaughered are male, because flocks of sheep are much easier to control if they're mostly female; mutton comes from sheep when they're older and their wool quality drops - note that it's not normally legal to sell an animal for meat if it dies naturally]
Herring and prunes, yum yum.
Wait, we have Avocados because of NAFTA? Great trade deal ever!
I never really thought about this before.
"I never really thought about this before."
At least you have the self-awareness to see this. A lot of people are in for a very rude awakening if big, broad tariffs happen, and a ton of shit that they've never really thought of before becomes unavailable or prohibitively expensive.
Agreed. I’m generally opposed to tariffs. I just never thought about why I never had guacamole until like 1998.
You could get them before NAFTA, they just came from California instead of Mexico. This is revisionist history / memory-holing. Ed.: although presumably they were somewhat more expensive. Although I believe restrictions on Mexican avocado import have generally been less a trade barrier issue and more about pest control concerns but defer to those more exposed to it than I.
California only produces a pretty limited quantity of avocados, Mexico had a massive surplus until NAFTA, decided to do a ton of marketing and US avocado consumption went up massively as a result (IIRC from a podcast I listened to on this last year, a factor of five, but I can't remember the date range)
The California avocado groves got developed as housing.
I remember when you couldn’t get avocados much less avocados year round at grocery stores.
Now the DoorDash class spends all there time complaining about how “capitalism” has ruined everything as they pay $30 for cold fast food.
They sucked everywhere but the west coast for a long while, too. But now even in Memphis you can buy a fair avocado at the store.
In 1995 the peak of dining out was like... Chili's
Outback was what we thought a steakhouse was.
My boomer parents have vivid memories of when Outback first opened — they would put their name in at 5 PM, drive home, and drive back for when their table was ready at 7.
I took an Outback menu with me to Australia in 2002. The Aussies had a lot of fun laughing their asses off in reading that.
Deep frying an entire onion was considered innovative
And it still is.
Sizzler! I never went to Ruth’s Chris until the aughts, sadly, though richer friends did.
We goin’ Sizzler … We goin’ Sizzler…
(White Men Can’t Jump)
Maybe if you lived in a fancy place. Otherwise you had Bonanza.
Or Ponderosa. No one had Bonanza AND Ponderosa, you got one or the other in your midsized American town.
Either way, 80s-90s dining was a lot more likely to feature sneeze shields than today.
Outback was one of our birthday/special occasion restaurants! Going as an adult was jarring.
I went to an Outback shortly before COVID and it was actually a great experience. It felt far more upscale and less "chain" than I would have guessed, and the food was excellent.
Outback is easily the best chain restaurant. It holds up reasonably well as an adult if you go in with appropriate expectations.
Applebee’s was cool until it stopped doing dollar drink days during COVID. The dollar drinks were a crazy good deal!
To be clear, I am not too good for Outback! It's just that it was the absolute pinnacle of fancy restaurant to me as a kid, and there was no way it was going to live up to that. I still dream of that blooming onion, though.
I've been meaning to go back there at some time.
I loved Outback as a kid! I called the free bread they brought 'chocolate bread' because it's brown... in hindsight probably pumpernickel?
And Benihana's was Japanese and california rolls were sushi.
I remember when the Olive Garden opened in my town. It quickly became a go to location for prom/homecoming dinner.
I'll never forget the famous Grand Forks Herald review of Olive Garden.
https://www.grandforksherald.com/lifestyle/the-eatbeat-long-awaited-olive-garden-receives-warm-welcome
I recall that a lot of the mockery of that review by Very Online People took the form of ‘They don’t have any idea what good Italian food is. What a bunch of rubes!’
Which is weird because if I had no knowledge of Olive Garden and randomly ended up in one, I would probably like it for what it is.
Olive Garden should do an annual homeless feed. Shut down the place for a day for anyone with money and just bring in whoever shows up. Increase the ventilation and other measures as necessary. Maybe do it the day before a major renovation is to begin. New booths, new lighting. But not yet! No! Tonight is Never-Ending Pasta Pass® for justice!
Not sure if my family was weird but I think dining out itself has undergone quite the revolution. Unless McDonalds counts that was just not something my family or anyone I know did much of. Not like it is now anyway.
Your family wasn't weird. Dining out has exploded.
When I met my southern born husband, the only place he had eaten out at was what was called a cafeteria. (basically what it sounds like - a counter service restaurant where you went down the counter and pointed out what you wanted on your plate). The county he grew up in is very rural and has lost population since he was a kid, but now his relatives who still live on the farm can go into "town" about 20 minutes away and visit pizza, Mexican, and Chinese restaurants. Heck, there is even a drive-through coffee kiosk with fancy coffee drinks. Whereas his family had to drive about 40 minutes to get to the cafeteria.
Every tiny town in the country has at least one Mexican restaurant now. In the 80s and 90s, that was unheard of. You had to go to an honest-to-goodness city to get Mexican food.
Was it Luby's?
I couldn't remember until Marc Robbins mentioned Morrison's below - that was it!
I grew up in the burbs between DC and Bmore so nothing nearly that remote! There were plenty of fast food chains and Chinese takeout sort of thing definitely existed. But nothing like the options now and I also don't think culturally the idea of a family going to a sit down restaurant outside of the most special of special occasions occurred, at least not in my demographic.
I remember the arrival of Don Pablo's (a sit down tex mex chain) in the later half of the decade being a big, big deal.
Absolutely. In north Florida in the 1960s, the treat was going to Morrison's Cafeteria. Ummmmm. . . Salisbury steak. Good times.
Like him, we would drive 40 miles to Ocala for that treat until, hooray, they opened one in Gainesville a mere ten minutes away!
Thai restaurants basically didn't exist outside of large metropolises until 1985. Sushi was still being joked about as though raw fish wasn't something that normal people eat until about 1988.
And you're seeing the same dynamic now with middle eastern food. Restaurants with that seem to mainly exist around large metropolises today, but i predict middle eastern food will become a lot more standard a food option in greater parts of the country as time goes on.
I'm holding out hope for indonesian/malaysian/singaporean restaurants to break in the US. There's some amazing dishes in that cluster, but not enough diaspora here that you can expect to find a decent laksa or beef rendang anywhere but the largest US cities.
There's a UK mini-chain called Tampopo that has dishes from all of that area (plus Thai, though we have real Thai restaurants and I'd never eat Thai at Tampopo as a result). It's not as good as a proper specialised restaurant, but it's good enough that people can get the taste for the good stuff.
Minus durian! Eww
Yeah, I remember Boise getting both around some time in the late 80s.
My parents always thought McDonald's was crap food and hated eating it, even when I was a kid in the 90s. The only reason we ever got it, was because my brother and i wanted it. But we liked it because we had immature juvenile palates, not because it was better quality then.
I remember when a Thai restaurant opened up in the mid-80s, in Cambridge, MA! There were lines out the door, and local residents and students all thought it was amazingly exotic and innovative. And this was in Cambridge.
El Torito: chimichangas and fried ice cream.
Olive Garden was my go-to for dates with my future wife. Red Lobster was for special occasions. (I was a teenager)
RL was the go-to special occasion. Until TGI Friday’s opened!
Somehow Applebee's has made its way back around.
Okay, yes. But also Chili's in the 90s was genuinely better than it is now, right? Or am I also nostalgia-ing? (Not claiming it was ever good). It is truly terrible now.
It was. I feel like it went from high end fast casual in the 90's (I would consider Fridays and Appleby's to have been on the low end) to barely a step above fast food today.
Put some respect on Fridays back in the day! LOL jk :)
And nothing has changed... ;)
I distinctly remember my dad having to make a separate trip to the Indian grocery store in order to make family recipes at home. We were lucky that there was a large enough Indian population where I lived that a small Indian grocery was viable.
Every one of the ingredients that my dad had to get at the specialty store is available at any of the grocery stores near me; curry powder, mangoes, daal etc. Not to mention the fact that when I went to college I basically had to introduce my friends to Indian food. It’s not like they never heard of it but most basically never had it. And these were friends who grew up in fairly big metros.
So yeah, a big “personal experience” anecdote that availability of good food and a variety of food options and exploded since I was a teen in the 90s
These days we only go to the Indian grocer very rarely for a giant thing of garam masala. Pretty much everything else is available at the local premium supermarket's "international food" aisle.
Yeah there are plenty of Indian groceries near me given where I live in Long Island. But unless I'm getting something something pretty niche like parathas or want to get curry powder in bulk, I don't really go. And I can get curry powder in bulk at my regular grocery store.
I will say living in Long Island maybe makes my experience a bit more unique as there is a large enough Indian population that it makes sense to carry curry in bulk. My local grocery store has a ton of kosher options near me which isn't surprising since I live on the edge of the Five Towns.
IME Indian and Asian grocery stores have those ingredients at *much* better prices and in greater quantity though. Try getting a decent deal on cardamom in a generalist supermarket (really all non-Asian/Indian grocery prices on spices are exorbitant).
I remember the one Indian grocery store near us back then was a drab mess where the lighting never seemed to work. The new one near my parents now is so much better. And this also doesn't even get into how a lot of the more high-end East Asian grocery chains (like H-Mart) also carry a lot of Indian ingredients these days.
Yeah, I remember being introduced to Indian food in the home by a high school friend whose family was from Kashmir. I would glow over how much I loved it and her mom would be like (in her thick accent), “you need find yourself nice Indian girl to marry and cook for you. Not Lisa! She marry nice Indian boy”
For my part, I was only introduced to Indian cuisine by moving to Chicago in ‘95. It may have existed in some form in Central California, but if so, I was unaware. We only had Mexican, Thai and Fast.
Indian food has specifically exploded at Costco my parents are floored I am worried about our Indian grocery owners now though.
Apparently even garlic was a bit niche in terms of how much was sold in the US until about 1994.
Shallots are only now starting to take off
Shallots are a great cooking ingredient.
I've recently switched over to using shallots in most cases where recipes call for onions. They taste better and cook faster
Lynne Rossetto Kasper said when in doubt, add shallots on an episode of the Splendid Table years ago and I’ve found she was right.
Even in the same category, the quality is much higher. It's possible to get really good stone fruit (in the summer) at a regular grocery store. That was not something that was available several decades ago. And think about the difference between red delicious apples (hardly worth eating, perhaps a net negative for quality of life) and some of the really wonderful varieties you can get at the normal grocery store now.
The words "red delicious" are how four-year-old me learned that marketing words can be pernicious lies.
see, as a kid, I liked red delicious. As an adult though, I much prefer stuff like Fuji or Gala.
Honeycrisps weren’t even shipped until 1997 and definitely were not widely available. 90s apples sucked.
Red delicious really are great, when they are ripe and fresh. The thing is, they go meally really fast. It is sort of like how everyone thinks honeydew mellon tastes like cardboard, but during that one week each year, it is amazing. Red delicious are still my favorite apple, and based on the proportion of shef space devoted to RD vs other varieties, I suspect it continues to be a market leader.
Well, now I would like to try a fresh picked red delicious apple!
They were absolutely dominant for decades, but it looks like they are slipping and will perhaps start declining more quickly. They appear to have lost the top spot in 2018 (https://archive.is/v1qDy) and are going to be out of the top five according to some guy on linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-longer-can-red-delicious-hold-its-top-5-status-williams-oi8qe).
My experience in the grocery store (Kroger, not a fancy place) is that red delicious are there, but there are many more gala/fuji/honeycrisp. I associate red delicious more with the pieces of fruit wrapped in plastic next to the register at a coffee shop or a deli at this point.
Sorry, the stone fruit (at least the peaches and apricots) was picked before it was ripe and is just softening in the store.
I don't know, stone fruit is climacteric. If you said strawberries I'd be with you, but peaches don't have to ripen the whole way on the tree to be good. It's certainly possible to pick them so early that they won't ever ripen properly, but if you pick them fully mature they don't have to get soft on the tree. Same with tomatoes. There's a huge controversy about picking breaker-stage tomatoes vs. fully vine ripening them, but in my experience they ripen perfectly well off the plant. That's also the only way I can get my tomatoes before the squirrels do haha.
It may also be an issue of which varieties can be transported and stored successfully. I grew up in California, so I don't buy peaches unless they're recently picked and I can smell them. In Eastern Europe I ate plenty of vine-ripened tomatoes, so don't buy those here either (some of the heritage varieties still have a bit of flavor.)
One weird thing about grocery store apples is that their quality apparently changes over time for the varieties? I feel like apple discourse has been big on this.
Do you mean over the course of the season or over the years? I haven't noticed this myself in grocery store apples, but I recently learned about how there are "summer apples" and "winter apples". Summer apples are apparently best if eaten right after being picked, while winter apples were bred for storage and supposedly taste better after being stored for some period of time.
I assume grocery store apples are pretty much all winter apples, but I can't say that I've noticed that they taste better later in the season. I've only noticed that as you get into spring the quality declines.
During harvest season, some apples are picked ripe to be packed for immediate shipment, and some are picked just short of ripeness to be put into storage. The exact timing of this depends on zone, variety of apple, weather, and the vagaries of the orchard like whether the tree is on a relatively steeper slope or not or if it’s on the north side of the hill or the south side, etc.
Apples come in from the orchards in big open-top wood crates, and floated out, sprayed with liquid wax*, mechanically sorted by size and grade, boxed for store delivery, and put into cold storage. If they’re destined for immediate shipment the storage at the packing plant is only for a day or so - trucks arrive constantly to take the fruit to a distribution warehouse. I’d guess that with today’s logistics an apple can go from tree to grocery store in 3-4 days.
Apples destined for storage go into separate refrigerated rooms from the picked ripe and remain in the wood crates. When one of the rooms is full to the point that not a single additional stack of crates will fit, it is sealed and its refrigerated air circulated through an antechamber with bags of lime that serve to remove much of the oxygen from the air to retard spoilage. Throughout the time from the end of the harvest until the storage is depleted, the refrigerators are unsealed one at a time, fresh air blown in so that it’s safe for workers to enter with forklifts, and the crates are fed to the sorting/packing line.
Inevitably the storage apples are best immediately after harvest season, and decline in quality throughout the winter and spring. The worst apples are the ones in the stores late spring or early summer. I don’t even bother with apples after about January, though that’s solely about taste and texture and not wholesomeness.
* Note that I didn’t mention washing. The water used to float the apples out of the wood bins starts out clean, but gets dirtier and dirtier with each bin that was, after all, sitting on the ground in an orchard, picking up grass and soil and rotten apples that dropped off the tree and the occasional field mouse. Wash your apples.
During my time in Eastern Europe I got fresh apples off the tree in season, but also developed a taste for over-wintered apples cooked with honey and cinnamon. We also had apple cider. Natural apples have a wonderful flavor that gets bred out of most modern varieties.
The place I heard about summer vs. winter apples was here: https://joegardener.com/podcast/apple-hunters-rediscover-colorado-orange-apple/, in particular:
> Most winter apples, right off the tree, are not remarkably flavored,” he adds. “It’s not that they’re bad, but they haven’t had their flavor come out yet. Most winter apples start to get really good sometime around Christmas, early December to Christmas, and then they stay really good in storage.
Some discussion of flavor/texture improving over time in the comments on envy apples (my favorite) here: https://applerankings.com/envy-apple-review/
Do you not think that's right? I don't grow apples and so I haven't tasted these right after picking vs. after storage, and I also haven't personally noticed it in grocery store apples.
This is referencing changes over years, but on a scale of maybe 10ish years? This is an example of the apple discourse:
https://www.seriouseats.com/how-honeycrisp-apples-went-from-marvel-to-mediocre-8753117
Interesting, I've never been a huge fan of honeycrisp but I have definitely noticed that they are worse recently. Good to know why, and it makes a lot of sense that something like that would happen.
Terroir is real, and not just for grapes.
I think there were some comments in end of year mailbag asking why there are not more female guest writers and female oriented material. I think the guest writer was really good at being slightly humorous but still serious, avoided making sweeping baseless claims and gave us some nice charts. She is probably a bit smarter than me which I am against, but otherwise great guest post IMO!
Food is definitely better in the US now, I'll grant that. Coffee and beer, too, by a mile.
But we also now eat mostly highly-processed food. So, you're looking at 75% of your average cart being a bunch of psuedo-food and the rest being the wider and more interesting variety of fresh ingredients.
Restaurant offerings are very good now. But most of us are still eating crap at restaurants. So, really, you're seeing a present food culture where you can, if you live in certain metro regions, access better food than anyone anywhere. And you can also cook more delicious and varied stuff at home. But, statistically, you probably don't.
Beer now is so much better than the 90s. Although I do miss Pete's Wicked Ale.
I remember when Sam Adams was essentially the only microbrew available. Now, there's a half dozen independent breweries less than 15 minutes from my house.
This part of the article was attacking a strawman. Other than a few particular items I miss (Shark Bites were the best gunmy candy ever produced; fight me) I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone argue that the 90s were great because the food was better.
And the “magic chemicals” she derides seem likely to be microplastics, which is in fact a problem that’s getting monotonically worse.
Overall this article was not to my taste. The strongest part was the last section but the remainder seems kind of superficial and/or responsive to only the most superficial of pro-90s arguments.
> And the “magic chemicals” she derides seem likely to be microplastics, which is in fact a problem that’s getting monotonically worse.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here, but it definitely the case that the "low-fat" craze of the 90s meant a lot of us grew up eating extremely sugary foods without realizing it, and that made a lot of people, if not diabetic, insulin-resistant. It's a big factor in obesity.
I'm on board with "fat free" and "low-fat" being bad-faith marketing by bad people who should feel bad, but it takes a certain amount of willful ignorance to convert "Fat Free" into a claim of healthfulness when it appears prominently on a bag of Twizzlers. Nutrition labels (including sugars) did exist in the '90s.
The author refers to things like nutri-grain bars, which were marketed as health food, not candy, but had as much sugar as candy. I could be wrong, as I was a kid, but I do not believe people recognized the deleterious effects of too much sugar until it was added to everything.
The one thing I will concede to 90s food nostalgia: Some Fruity/Sugary children's breakfast cereals did change their formulas in the late 90s/early aughts in ways that made them less tasty. No one will convince me Trix didn't actually taste worse after they got rid of the fruit shapes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOZqPXGSx9I
Lucky Charms are so weird. The non-marshmallow parts are noticeably worse than a lot more adult-themed cereals and look and taste like cardboard, while the adult brands at least taste like grain. It's almost like a psyops to get kids to hate healthy eating and only like sugar.
Chex’s mildly-sweetened-but-decidely-grain-flavored approach definitely seems superior.
Why are microplastics 'a problem'?
We don’t know yet but when you ingest a lot of something that isn’t digestible and that no previous generation has ingested, you shouldn’t by default assume it’s no problem until proven otherwise.
Observations rather than a fully coherent thought:
Humans have a very long history of ingesting undigestible things. The new thing is that they are plastic.
Given that these are 'microplastics' I'm not sure how you get to the conclusion that humans have digested 'a lot' of them.
Plastics are chemically inert - to think that there is some harm to ingesting them you need a theory around the mechanism in which they cause harm.
Supposedly the extent to which this is occurring without any observed harm pretty convincingly suggests that there isn't a problem.
Plastics aren't necessarily chemically inert; sperm counts and birth anogenital distance are secularly decreasing and colon cancer incidence is rising. "Things that are new to the environment and ubiquitously distributed and ingested" seems like the obvious causative agent here given that we have existing examples of endocrine disruption by polymers.
Could I be wrong about this and it's something else? Yeah, most certainly. But at present it seems like a plausible supposition.
The overwhelming majority of plastics are both biologically and chemically inert.
Incidence of stomach cancer and coronary disease have both declined clearly due to the presence of microplastics.
Plastics are inert to a first approximation, but they aren’t as inert as a noble gas, or N2. The fact that there isn’t specific observed harm convincingly suggests it’s not causing acute problems. But when there are systematic changes to evolved systems, there are very often problems that emerge at a chronic scale, as we’ve seen with many other changes to diets and ecosystems. I don’t think it’s safe to assume the harms are zero - just that they’re likely small enough that they’re hard to identify (or perhaps that they might be some of the unexplained changes we’ve been seeing, even if we don’t understand the mechanism).
Also we know for a fact that (1) colon cancer incidence is rising (2) not just humans but wild animals are getting fatter (3) age of menarche is decreasing and (4) polymers can be very good at emulating the effects of hormones, most famously with BPA, and (5) they're ubiquitous and found in environments that would otherwise be expected to be pristine, like Antarctica.
Seems like he fell for a meme
Well… it could also just be the author’s bubble.
I have no idea what they do beyond this article, but if you spend your time dunking on people, the algorithms will typically do their best to present you with people to dunk on.
I read this as intended to be at least somewhat lighthearted not a rigorous scientific analysis.
True that. My kids have a WAY more diverse diet than I had at their age and even moreso than my wife did. I'm not sure I ever had Lebanese food as a kid, my kids love it. My wife says the average meal we have on any given weeknight is better than almost anything she had as a kid.
Well if her family was like mine her mom never knew how to make veggies but buying canned and then boiling them to death, which I still find disgusting. It was the early aughts and food network that taught people to cook things like green beans, asparagus, squash, sprouts, etc in the oven with olive oil which makes them actually good. Who knew?
It’s like my grad school adviser who grew up in the USSR. Because they never had a choice as to what cut of meat they would be able to buy, all they knew how to do was boil it for soups and stews. This guy became a connoisseur of barbecue while he was in Memphis!
My mom is s boomer, but she grew up with her greatest gen mom doing exactly what you describe: boiling canned veggies and meats to death making them bland and unpalatable. Mom was a bit ahead of her generational cohort in this sense, but she more or less did a complete 180 and decided to actually learn how to cook well to compensate for the awful food she got as a kid.
To this day she has an entire room whose bookshelf are lined with cookbooks, and it got to the point where as a kid in the 90s and 00s, we would constantly get kids wanting to stay over for dinner at our house, just as an excuse to have mom's cooking.
You were lucky! I hated all vegetables but potatoes and carrots until I went off to college in the early aughts and dated someone who could cook.
At least, being a Memphian, I did learn how to make killer ribs at home
The latest flurry of Angry People Arguing With Will Stancil On The Internet featured exactly this subject. Jamelle Bouie got drawn into the fight as well, of course.
It ended exactly as you’d expect—a bunch of POed “coffee nostalgics” crapping on Starbucks. Because boy, howdy, do I miss the good old days of. . . relatively few coffeehouses.
Also, some kid from Manhattan or LA or something recalling that he ate sushi once in the Nineties. Checkmate, I guess. 🙄
I don't have any beef with Starbucks. If you want a decent cup of coffee or some kind of espresso drink they'll give you a fine version. But prior to Starbucks, coffee in America sucked far and wide. Today, I expect to get a decent cup of coffee at just about any gas station/convenience store. Growing up, my family drank instant, and most coffee everywhere was weak, tepid, terrible stuff.
There's a reason why the Harbucks episode of South Park hits so hard.
I remember in the early 90s when my grandpa got Starbucks shipped in from Seattle to give to my dad and uncle. Little did we know how quickly that would change from special to ubiquitous... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRz3vfRFfs4
“You call this coffee?” “No, I call this America”
—French characters in “Godzilla”, 1997
Indie coffee shop coffee is often terrible, and has been forever.
I’m glad someone said it.
Which places are you going to that suck?
To be clear, plenty of them do not suck! But I've just found them to be hit or miss on espresso drinks. I like a basic cappuccino without any flavoring, so a bad espresso technique ruins it.
Starbucks is too unless you spring for espresso or chai based drinks, their drip coffee SUCKS. Heartburn in a glass.
I take my coffee black and that's not really viable at Starbucks. So if I need to load up my coffee with cream and sugar to drink it (like at Starbucks), I might as well go to Dunkin and save some money and not feel like a pretentious a-hole.
I unashamedly love Dunkins coffee and I’m not even much of a coffee drinker, never make any at home. Got converted when I lived in Boston and when it comes to Dunkins I may as well me the stereotypical Bostonian. Great coffee!
Dunkin has better breakfast sandwiches, too, imo
Indie coffee shops usually require the customer to have some knowledge of coffee to be able to order correctly.
Even London had crappy coffee in the Oughts since before Starbucks, places like Cafe Nero tried to make it like tea.
I sometimes (jokingly!) lament that my mom only learned to cook after I left home, but it's really not fair to her - what really changed is what's available!
My (white), born in Nebraska, mother took cooking lessons in SF's Chinatown in the 60's and cooked legitimate Chinese food at home. Some of the upside of growing up in the hippy (Marin) part of California.
My mom has always been a good cook. I vividly remember as kids my brother and I always had our friends looking for excuses to stay at our house for dinner, because moms cooking was better than at their house.
But she absolutely has learned more and honed her craft as she's gotten older too. She just last week found a new way of cooking steak that made the meat more tender, and she seasoned it with an herbal sauce with lemon and capers. You wouldn't think that would go well with beef, but it did. She also made lime jalapeno fajitas recently which she never would have when I was a kid.
Brussels sprouts! Kale! Quinoa! What did we millennials eat before these things?
Brussels sprouts were around, but people didn't used to know how to cook them back in the day. Used to be people just boiled them. Now people know better.
Brussel sprouts are a great example. In the 90s they were horrible and normally boiled. Then they got genetically engineered (via selective cross-breeding) to taste amazing roasted. Entirely different.
Kale is still gross, though. Kale isn't food, it's what food eats.
Douglas Adams described our relationship to technology (paraphrased) as anything created up to the age of 15 is normal; anything created between 15 and 35 is innovative; and anything created after 35 is against the natural order of things. It is not the most scientific analysis, but anecdotally, I think you can apply this framework to our perception of the state of things more generally. As millennials are currently passing the 35 threshold, any new development in society will start to be regarded with more suspicion.
Advancement often requires a tradeoff of some kind, but because of the endowment effect, we feel the things that we gave away (lower-cost housing in popular cities) more than what we get (better communication, public safety, etc.).
Same with music. Anything created up to age 13 or so is oldies, anything between 13 and 25 is THE BEST MUSIC EVER MADE, and everything after age 25 is "how can you listen to that noise?".
My kids elementary school friends call 90s and 80s music “the oldies.” Was a gut punch
Get ahead of the game: refer to Taylor Swift as "classic rock."
To be fair, kids have a warped sense of age and time because they havent lived very long. I remember being in kindergarten and thinking the third graders were so big and mature that they were practically adults.
And with music specifically, my fiance' works with kids. He had a high schooler call him old because he listened to Green Day and linkin park. He was 22 at the time, and not that much older than the kids.
Reminds me of this classic chart that I came across from a Washington Post article --- people tend to report the “best times” as when they were 10-15 years old https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:lcwkkzq4fykhvp5cfgf4qdcn/bafkreifd5vaqxwqpsmoroszqr3ls2f3kndhqem55h5zbedifebvpmhyufu@jpeg
I’m only slowly getting used to Green Day on my local classic rock station.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLqfXlIq6RE
I only like the music up until when I was 13ish (aka around 2000)
It's a good point, but it is only one variable of many.
Sometimes thing really were better! And just because you're biased by nostalgia doesn't make that less true.
For example, houses were definitely built better pre-1950. I grew up in houses that were newer and that's "normal" for me, but it's just clear now that I've lived in both an old home and brand-new ones that the old ones were better quality, even accounting for deterioration and outmoded floor plans. You'd think we'd have gotten better at making houses since then. But what we got better at is building houses more cheaply and making them recently more energy-efficient. But they are less robust and you really notice that five years in.
Also, the media landscape of the 1990s was objectively healthier. There were more and better movies, both blockbuster and indie. You could subscribe to several newspapers in a city that all paid reporters to do actual reporting (my uneducated paternal grandparents had FIVE newspapers delivered to their little apartment and read them cover-to-cover!). More musicians were able to make a living off of their music. Etc. Now, is it convenient that I can now stream movies and music and read the digital edition of the NYT, WaPo, FT, et al? Sure. But I now have more convenient access to a much shallower pool. And I'm in the distinct minority for even consuming "hard news" at all, anymore, as it now costs a lot. I can count on a single hand the number of American media outlets who have the resources to pay reporters to report in the far corners of the globe. So, ironically, I am now less informed about the world than I was, and I'm a news junkie! Has the rise of bloggers, social media, YouTube, podcasts, Substack, et al made up for that? No, because "citizen journalists" just don't do the same thing. And even independent Opinion writers making good money writing for Substack newsletters aren't doing the same thing (as much as I love and enjoy them). They don't do that same rigorous reporting. So journalistic reporting is just this expensive, inefficient, non-scalable thing that is hardly done anymore. In another decade it may no longer exist. That's objectively bad.
A related knock-on effect of this is that politics wasn't as harmonious as it maybe once seemed, but it was relatively higher-quality. More voters were more informed about the issues and voted in a more informed, less negatively-partisan way. Now elections are like sports. Now a majority of American voters get their political news from "influencers." Before that change, Congress was never crowned in glory, but fewer Congressmen were total clowns like Matt Gaetz. Certainly, a Donald Trump would never have been elected president in the 1990s. At least Ronald Reagan, the last celebrity president, had been a governor of California between his White House runs and his career as a B-grade movie star. And even when the politicians were craven or stupid, they had more institutional support! Their staffs were even much larger back then, before Republicans slashed Congressional office budgets. There were non-partisan Committee staffs, too. So, as unbelievable as it seems, an average Member of Congress in 1994 had at their disposal far more resources to make better policy than now in 2024, despite us living and legislating in a far more complex world!
Are you _sure_ we built houses better before or are you experiencing survivorship bias where the houses from the 50s that you look at _now_ were the really well-built ones?
The shoddy ones got replaced and aren't still around.
With the houses, there were a lot of developments in the immediate postwar era that made cheap housing possible, and a lot of those really were a reduction in quality of the build in exchange for quantity. Even with survivorship bias, houses from the 1950s and 1960s on average have worse bones than houses from the 1920s and 1930s.
But it’s not that high quality houses stopped being built - just that they’re a lot smaller fraction of the houses that were built (and people suddenly had cheap housing available as a result).
my 1948 house is a POS! But yeah most *pre-war* houses for the middle and upper middle class are better. For what it’s worth, it’s pretty fucked I can’t tear it down and replace it with a brick Craftsman (with frames made out of straight timber from cleared *old forest*) out of the sears catalog for less than $10k like god intended
Yeah, I lived in a house built in the I think 40's and now live in a house built in the 80's and in terms of overall structural quality they seem similar to me, but the wiring in the older house was kind of a catastrophe.
Probably the same with music. We still listen to and enjoy the really good music from earlier times and the rest of it (80%?) has been thrown in the trashcan and never heard again.
As for movies, possibly true. Movies now are big blockbusters or small budget indie projects. We definitely have a missing middle (not too many "Lawrence of Arabia"s out there*). On the other hand, series on TV (including streaming) are far far superior to what we used to have. Industries change and products change; it's not clear that overall quality has changed that much.
*https://www.today.com/popculture/complete-list-every-best-picture-oscar-winner-ever-t107617
Looking at a list of top songs by year is... interesting. There are some that are clearly hits, like George Michael's "Faith" (1988) and Drake's “God’s Plan” (2018). But then stuff like “My Sharona” (1979) and Kesha's "Tik Tok" (2010) also makes the list.
https://www.billboard.com/lists/year-end-hot-100-number-one-songs/2002-8/
Ben is sleeping on the job for not banning you for your drive-by insult to "My Sharona."
Nah, Tik Tok is a banger and My Sharona is also good (if lowkey a little creepy). God's Plan is a snoozer, though—I'm flabbergasted that's Drake's biggest hit, he has so much better
Yeah, Sturgeon's Law is very solid: when Theodore Sturgeon (sf author) was being interviewed in the early 1950s, the interviewer put it to him that 90% of sf is crud, and he replied "yes, but 90% of everything is crud".
An expanded version from a speech in 1957: "Ninety-percent of everything is crud. All things - cars, books, cheeses, hairstyles, people, and pins are, to the expert and discerning eye, crud, except for the acceptable tithe which we happen to like"
Lawrence of Arabia was an "epic" - a hugely expensive production, which aligns much more with the modern big blockbuster. It just doesn't seem like a blockbuster because it's not got tons of VFX, which is what we have expected from a blockbuster since Star Wars. But it belongs with Ben-Hur or Cleopatra or, for that matter, A Bridge Too Far.
I think the specific problem is that the best way to make a good movie that is on a middling-budget is to have a good script, an interesting plot, snappy dialogue, a good cast and concentrate on people rather than VFX. And that creates a film which relies on the audience to understand what people are saying, which makes it harder to export to countries where people don't speak English (if you dub exposition, then it works fine; dubbing a powerful emotionally-resonant performance is much harder). Indies don't need exports, Spectacle-heavy blockbusters work even if you don't really understand what is going on (which is why their plots increasingly don't make sense even if you do speak the language).
The result is that the main mid-budget films are Oscar-bait - fundamentally, if the film isn't good enough to get an Oscar nomination, then it probably isn't going to sell enough tickets to make money. And there are only ten Best Film nominations per year.
Correct that I misidentified LoA as "middling." It was definitely big budget, although it was far from a cartoon movie which is where all the big bucks go now. I should know this, living very close to Century City, which got its name when 20th Century Fox bet the farm (literally) on "Cleopatra", saw it fail at the box office, and then was forced to sell all of its backlots to developers who turned the property into the future title of a Tom Petty song.
I think the middle range movies are increasingly just (or primarily) going to streaming and so what we define as "movies" (or the theater experience) is changing. "Hit Man" is a case of that as one with "a good script, an interesting plot, snappy dialogue, a good cast and concentrate on people rather than VFX." I think it did well on streaming; I doubt it would have in a big theater. Something like "The Fall Guy" (which I loved despite its ridiculous plot) failed (despite $180M in global revenue) because it was best seen in the theater due to its spectacular stunts. It fell in between movie types and so couldn't succeed in the theater or (because it needed a really big screen) on streaming.
Star Wars completely redefined the blockbuster in 1977, and the more adult-oriented (in the AOR sense, not in the NSFW sense) blockbusters of the earlier years have become much rarer since.
It’s easy to forget that big budget blockbuster used to mean location shots of spectacular landscapes and hordes of extras rather than CGI, as there hasn’t been an epic of that type in at least 20 years.
Skimming the list of “most expensive movies by year”, the last I can spot is Pearl Harbor (2001) and then Titanic (1997). If you go back to ‘77, then A Bridge Too Far had a higher budget than Star Wars, and before that in the seventies there’s a mix of pure spectacle (Jaws, Towering Inferno), musicals (Fiddler on the Roof) and more sophisticated movies (The Godfather, Tora! Tora! Tora!). I think the first giant-budget spectacle where the spectacle was FX rather than masses of extras or expensive location shooting was probably 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), though that was also aimed at a much more sophisticated audience than Star Wars (more along the lines of the more thoughtful sf movies of recent years like Interstellar).
That's part of it. But the other part is that the cost of labor is so much more now, and that makes robust construction less attractive.
Admittedly, I've got a more nuanced impression of this outside of the United States, in Sweden where I live and have owned homes. Here there are three main eras of existing housing stock: Pre-WWII, Post-War, and Contemporary. The Pre-WWII houses, even cheap, working-class or peasant-farmer homes, were built better because, to a certain degree, there just wasn't another option. You build them out of wood, stone, or brick. And the wood available was often old-growth, robust wood. The only options for a roof back then were hay, terracotta tile, or slate. And the latter two options were pricey, but that's all you could use. They also last at least a century. Construction was very labor-intensive, but labor was cheap because people were mostly poor.
People could even build their own houses, and often did. There's a whole neighborhood in Stockholm of traditional wooden houses originally designed for poor-to-working-class people to take a blueprint and readily available natural materials and build their own house cheaply. (For reference, think about the American Craftsman homes that people ordered from the Sears catalogue). Now the homes cost $1+ million, so the spirit has been a bit lost. But they're in-demand because they're so much better than the shitty villas a construction firm will build for you today.
Now, you can make houses out of much more capital-intensive, but marginally-inexpensive materials. Thankfully, Swedes haven't adopted the crappy, asphalt tiles that abound on roofs in the United States and last a few years only. But they have adopted the fake stucco, aluminum panels, vinyl flooring, et al that you see in even very large and expensive American homes today. And for the same reason: labor is expensive now, and it's hard to do traditional construction without it.
I’m surprised to see all of these comments and no one referencing the classic Works in Progress essay showing that, yes, in fact, older architecture was generally much more aesthetically pleasing, and that this is completely robust to survivorship bias.
I work in a construction-adjacent field now and I asked around recently to some of the architects, designers, const. engineers, and const. PMs that I work with. Most of them agreed that new residential construction is generally of significantly worse quality than older construction.
The way politics is now, though, is in part due to trends already festering in the 90s. The seeds of our current polarization were in part laid by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich.
Yep, absolutely. The "When the Clock Broke" thesis by John Ganz is on-point.
But that process was somewhat arrested by the bulwark of a more-informed electorate, healthier media ecosystem, more funded public institutions (including the aforementioned Congressional staffs), historical precedent, etc. So, it was always *contingent* that it should get as bad as it has. There were ALWAYS ghouls who wanted to derail everything for selfish reasons, but the social system had an immune system to reject them. Newt Gingrich triumphed, but his victory was definitely frustrated and incomplete. And even he took governance somewhat seriously, in a way that no Republican in the Trump Era can even toy with.
More informed electorate? No. We’re more informed now, just by our echo chambers. We had stronger institutions and social trust then.
I mean this very simply. More Americans consumed real news back then. Not always top-quality or objective, but they had a more vibrant and diverse actual news ecosystem to chose from at that time and still subscribed to or tuned into it. You've probably seen the Pew research that news influencers (skewing Conservative) have overtaken traditional media as the main news source for American voters. That's bad!
And not just because of the Conservative bias. But more because most news influencers are just people with opinions! They do no actual reporting or research. Which is to say that what they are selling isn't news at all.
I see what you’re saying here. Yeah, there’s a dearth of investigative reporting and overseas bureaus these days
True, but it wasn't just Rush and Newt. They were one side of the phenomenon.
The other side of the coin was people like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair who insisted that globalisation, and the marginalisation of organised labour would have no downsides. And, perhaps more importantly, they made that point from their leadership of parties of the ostensible left.
That meant that positions to the left of that (capital-friendly) position were left with no respectable or viable electoral vehicle.
Politicians like Clinton and Blair would wring their hands and claim that they'd like to go further and be more economically progressive but say that, sadly, they were unable to do so because it wasn't where the electorate were.
In fact, of course they simply despised the left - as the experience of Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK showed.
What has happened since the 90s has been a progressive narrowing of the field of political respectability on both the left and the right. (Rush Limbaugh and Arthur Scargill were BOTH rendered illegitimate). That opened up a longish period of supposed centrism. Which worked while it worked. However, the economic ideas of that paradigm (globalisation and economic liberalism) are now exhausted and what we are now seeing is the return of the sort of politics that were, until recently, disreputable.
I genuinely don't think anything in this comment is correct. There were not "more movies" in the 1990s, are you fucking kidding me? Netflix alone releases several new movies a *day*. If anything there are way too *many* movies, and you couldn't possibly keep up with them.
There were also plenty of disposable made-for-TV or straight-to-video movies in the 1990s, too, and they quality level and budget is equivalent to most disposable Netflix offerings today. I'm talking about "real movies" with a theatrical release: even a short one. In other words, movies that have met the eligibility bar for Oscar awards, et al. Is that an arbitrary distinction? Maybe, since the shift-to-streaming has definitely changed the movies distribution landscape. In 2022, there were about half the theater tickets sold in theaters as in 2002 (and that's in a country that was then only 288 million people vs. today's 330 million).
In 1995, when the US population was only 266 million (or 80% of today's), we had 136 movies in wide release. In 2022, there were only 109. Of course that number was far lower at the peak of COVID in 2020-21. There was a delayed rebound effect in 2024, after four years of way below historical average numbers of releases. So, strictly speaking, 2024 witnessed an all-time high number of releases: 178. But the box office take of all those movies was again only about half the inflation-adjusted sales in 1995. And if you do a running average, the trend is still that a larger population of potential theater-goers had fewer mainstream movies to choose from in the 2020s. Did all the disposable streaming offerings and the COVID-era cresting of the "Peak TV" wave make up for it? That's subjective.
But, as for the quality, there's a lot of proxy data there suggesting no, such as this study of IMDb scores of Top 100 movies by year, which puts 1994 as the peak of standout titles: https://medium.com/@jetpickering/imdbs-top-100-movies-by-year-and-ranking-bd24586af83c
Maybe that's biased by the cohort who is ranking IMDb titles, but it's hard to argue that 2024 has the same quality of movies as 1994 did.
In the 90s my family lived in a brick house built in the early 20th century. It was kinda garbage. My dad said he was gonna fix it up and never did. It was too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer and I'm pretty sure we had raccoons living in the attic.
How old was that brick house? As you say, your dad deferred maintenance on it. But even so, it was still standing after many decades. Would an average home built in the 2000s last until the 2050s without any maintenance?
Because I can tell you that my new-build co-op building I purchased a unit in in 2017 was looking *rough* after only 5 years of ownership. And this is the same kind of mid-rise building you see all over, with identical materials and design, which are easy for construction firms to erect. They look great in the promotional pictures and may cut a striking image when freshly constructed. But then... The issue isn't just the pressed-wood laminated cabinets and greige vinyl flooring, which sustained water-damage, scratches, etc. after normal use and proved impossible to repair and expensive to replace. But also even the exterior of the building, with slipshod concrete betraying water-damage, dent-able aluminum paneling, pre-manufactured doors sitting ever-so-slightly ajar their shifted frames, etc.
Now, contrast this with my century-old wooden house. When we bought it off a recently-deceased old lady, it was a 1960s time-capsule. She hadn't fixed a thing in decades after her husbands untimely death. So there was updating to be done, painting, etc. But the "bones" of the place were robust enough to withstand even a long period of neglect. And everything is natural materials, and easy to sand/scrape/paint to original shape. Unlike with vinyl flooring, we could buff out all the scratched on the wooden floors and re-oil them. The wood exterior could be scraped and re-painted, with the occasional rotten board replaced. We removed a few layers of wallpaper and put up new patterns. The terracotta tile roof was covered in moss and just needed a good pressure wash to be good as new. We even dug up around the original concrete foundation to improve drainage, and, to our amazement, there wasn't a single crack! This required a lot of elbow grease, but most of the work was renovating the materials rather than replacing them entirely. With out contemporary co-op, you'd just literally have to rip-and-replace anything that was worn or broken.
This extends even to the appliances: We're still using the same chest freezer and oven/stove that were almost as old as the old lady who died in this house. We replaced the old boiler only because it was too expensive to keep feeding it with diesel/fuel oil. But it was as old as the house and still working. We kept fixing her old washing machine until it proved too small for our growing family, but the thing was so simple and solidly-built that we could have kept it going indefinitely. Today, appliances, like the homes that house them, are much less robust and have designed obsolescence built-in. The heat-pump that we replaced the ancient wood-turned-fuel boiler with is extremely efficient and far less smelly, so no complaints. But it is only rated to last 15-20 years. The new refrigerator we bought should last about 7 years. Etc.
This is exactly the kind of cliche designed to forbid critical thinking about technology that LM Sacasas always criticizes. Do you really think it's clever to suggest that any criticism about technology can be dismissed on the grounds that it's just old people who criticize it? Some of the most passionate critics of smartphones I know are in their teens.
It wasn't "designed to forbid critical thinking about technology." It's an observation about how people tend to feel about technology.
I don't get the impression that Lewis intended this as a dismissal of critical thinking about technology, but instead the general pattern we've seen across numerous technology adoption cycles. Just because older people are predisposed to being uncomfortable with technology developed in their adulthood doesn't mean they're wrong in any specific criticism. Yet we should expect some degree of discomfort from older cohorts relative to younger users, and moreover we should expect the younger cohorts to more easily accept these technologies as the "natural state of things".
In terms of working through any specific criticism the devil is always in the details. Are the youth foolishly adopting a negative technology or cultural change because they don't know any better? Or are the older generations yet again failing to get with the times? It'll certainly come down the nuances of the critique as well as the possibility for an alternative.
As discussed in this article, adults would struggle to go without a smartphones despite the fact that was totally natural to not have a cell phone in the 90's. Just because there are some downsides to smartphones doesn't mean there's a straightforward alternative for most people. Although I do think we are increasingly learning the value of keeping phones and other digital distractions out of the classrooms.
Since you’re clearly unfamiliar with his work, I’ll point out that Douglas Adams was a satirist.
I mean, satire wouldn’t be funny if there weren’t a lot of truth to it!
Twitter and TikTok are a net negative on society though. And a lot of the pathways for consuming cultural content have watered it down. Pop music has definitely gotten more homogenous in just about 5 years.
I'm long past knowing much about pop music, but however homogenous it is today cannot compare to the 50s and 60s.
Yeah, this is definitely one for the "Always was" astronaut meme.
I'm guessing the "not" should be "net", so that doesn't read as a double negative?
Yes, you're right. I've edited it now.
Glad to help. I normally ignore typos (this is a Matt publication, after all), but that one seemed to imply the opposite of what I guessed you were saying.
(elder millennial)
Normal: Landline phones, dialup internet, AOL Instant Messenger, desktop computers that include a command line (sometimes without a GUI).
Innovative: Cell phones, smartphones, desktop Linux, blogging, GPS navigation, Facebook being full of 18-25 year olds, gmail, texting.
Against the natural order: TikTok, parents/grandparents on Facebook, computers are all touchscreen tablets, Instagram, QR code menus, apps for everything.
That last item is the most important. Always Use The Web.
After a horrible experience trying to set up a Vizio TV over Christmas, I'm literally in support of a federal law that requires certain devices to be fully operable without internet access or at least without an app.
For appliances like TVs, EV chargers, and stoves I would honestly support requiring a physical switch that just disables all smart features.
All of this is objectively correct.
We just need a draft to get the youngs in line. Perhaps to invade Greenland!
You joke, but I honestly think that the level of communications teens had with one another in the 2001-2003 timeframe was close to ideal. We had stuff like AOL Instant Messenger, which wasn't always-on and didn't really allow for cyberbullying. Some people had cell phones, but they weren't a problem. There was no social media, maybe you had a blog but that was it.
Facebook was mostly okay so long as it required a .edu email.
Alas, then it was Eternal September Part II: The Eternalling
I remember getting an alumni email account just so I could join Facebook.
I completely agree with you. I had to pay for my own pager my senior year of high school and was the better for it - only a couple of my friends had cell phones then (and this was before smartphones)
I’m so excited to see CHH guest posting on Slow Boring!
One thing I’m bringing back into my life from the 90’s is physical media. My mom sent me all my Disney DVDs from my childhood and I’ve been picking them up for so cheap at yard sales. There are free DVDs at the library! I’ve been getting frustrated with streaming services, and the experience of taking my kids to pick out a movie for movie night made me realize how much I miss the ritual we all used to have of going to Blockbuster on Friday.
Two favorite substacks combine!!!
OMG 🥺🥺🥺
Many such cases!
Yep, I only subscribe to two for most of the year and it's Slowboring and CHH!
The key catch to this transition is that you could say that you owned a copy of something back in the physical media days. Copyright holders always want you to only rent on a recurring monthly basis if they can.
I've written about this, but my girlfriend has a bunch of DVDs. I thought this was weird as hell when we started dating but she has made me a total convert. DVDs are the way to go: no internet connection woes, no random ads, and they're surprisingly cheap. It's easy to find entire shrink-wrapped box sets of high-quality shows like The Sopranos and Parks & Rec for ~$20 on eBay. We actually just bought the contents of an old Redbox machine (200 DVDs) for $200.
I'm working on a solution to rip all of the DVDs to some kind of RAID hard drive array for long-term storage.
PLEX. It takes a long time to rip them one by one, but its worth it. I now have my own server of about 1000 movies. There's some hangups (foreign movies tend to be a pain to get the subtitles right, organizing TV shows is a Project, Blue Rays take several hours), but all in all, its pretty great.
We have a couple thousand hours of media content on our family’s Plex server as well. Excellent.
Love it. Have built a server with a group of friends and we all have access to an enormous collection of movies, easily searchable.
Thanks! I hope PLEX can be virtualized-- I run a Proxmox server right now.
I've been meaning to build a physical bare-metal NAS server (probably TrueNAS) for storage.
I'm not that tech savvy. Just enough to do damage, but I was able to rip all my DVD's to an external hard drive that I keep for a desktop, devoted entirely to media. PLEX helps me organize all of the movies and I can stream them on any TV in the house through the app.
And the app is pretty good! I can search by director or actor or genre or whatever. So if I was in a Hitchcock mood, I could search for him under directors and bring up just his movies I have on the app without massive scrolling.
I could share with other people and allow access externally, but I'm not comfortable with that. So it's a closed network, but the option to watch anywhere is out there.
On the flip side, I've only got so much space, and I hate having to dig into cabinets to find things.
We still have our old DVD's and bluerays, but new stuff we just purchase on Amazon
Yes, although I remember my parents complaining about the ever-changing mediums throughout their lives: records → cassettes → CDs → MP3s. In particular, they felt they should’ve been able to trade in the old medium for the new one and only pay the physical manufacturing cost. Similarly, they bet on Betamax over VHS initially, so we still had that old piece of hardware and some movies in the early ’90s.
By contrast, I was an early adopter of Amazon Video on Demand and still have digital purchases from the early 2010s. I happily ditched my old DVDs when moving cross-country in 2013, figuring I could always digitally buy or rent as needed. I haven’t regretted that decision and am glad I’m no longer lugging around DVDs and an antiquated disk reader, analogous to my parents’ old Betamax.
I am a stickler for getting a digital copy of what media I consume on a hard drive in some manner, just in case.
It's totally bananas the prices that OOP Disney-exclusive blu-rays go for these days. And I've even paid the scalper prices for a few nostalgic gems like "Honey I Shrunk The Kids." I wish they would republish them!
The audio/video quality and selection vs. streaming are so much better when you start to make your own physical media library, but it's also just far easier to pick something to watch when you see them all there like books on a bookshelf. Laying out 3-5 discs for my son to choose from is so much better than scroll-scroll-scrolling through endless thumbnails on streaming platforms. And I love being able to curate little "movie festivals" with certain genres, directors, or themes. We watched every single Ghostbusters movie last weekend, which you literally can't do on streaming.
> The audio/video quality and selection vs. streaming are so much better when you start to make your own physical media library
Unless you are investing in super high end equipment this is not true at all. Streaming video is better quality than normal blu-ray, and most content is never released on 4K blu-ray, even if you had the player, which is unlikely since basically no one makes them anyway.
Audio quality differences are also nonexistent unless you own a super-high-end system with the ability to decode Dolby TrueHD, and have enough speakers, configured correctly, to play Dolby Atmos content, which you almost certainly don't.
Au contraire, THIS is not true at all:
> Unless you are investing in super high end equipment this is not true at all. Streaming video is better quality than normal blu-ray, and most content is never released on 4K blu-ray, even if you had the player, which is unlikely since basically no one makes them anyway.
First point: "Streaming video is better quality than normal blu-ray." False, for two reasons: compression and bandwidth. See more here: https://thetechylife.com/is-streaming-quality-as-good-as-blu-ray/
Second point: "Most content is never released on 4K blu-ray." Correct, but most content on streaming is also not mastered in 4K UHD, either. Most content ever published anywhere is found in SD on DVD. HD Blu-ray has a huge back-catalogue. And those discs are superior in both audio/video fidelity to even a 4K stream in almost all case (as per the link above). The differences are much more noticeable on a larger (65"+) OLED screen than on a cheaper LED, but you'll still be able to visibly tell the difference with a 4K disc, especially with fast-action and dark scenes.
Third point: "...even if you had the player, which is unlikely since basically no one makes them anyway." False. Bluray players are still manufactured by dozens of companies and you can find dedicated 4K players from many manufacturers, including Sony and Panasonic. The Panasonic UB420 is excellent and retails for $200. Now LG did just announced in December that they're bowing out of the disc-player market, following Samsung and Oppo. But there are dozens of Chinese manufacturers who make cheaper players, including the portable ones that are popular with parents wanting to distract their kids on long car-trips. That's not even including perhaps the most popular platform that people have long used to play movie discs: video game consoles! Both Xbox and PS play 4K and Bluray discs.
Fourth point: "Audio quality differences are also nonexistent unless you own a super-high-end system with the ability to decode Dolby TrueHD, and have enough speakers, configured correctly, to play Dolby Atmos content, which you almost certainly don't." This is making the perfect the enemy of the good. There's the signal and then the speaker. It's absolutely true that you're not getting the maximum audio fidelity from TV speakers or even from a soundbar setup, the likes of which are in most households. But a better fidelity sound played through an inferior speaker is still going to come out better than a lower-fidelity sound. Just as you're going to be able to hear the difference between an MP3 or standard Spotify stream vs. a CD, even on an inferior speaker. I only have a 2.1 soundbar and subwoofer combo in my house and I can definitely tell the difference when I play a disc vs. streaming the same movie.
Kids still love physical media, love to put their hands on things. And as a movie collector, no matter how good your internet is, 4K discs look better than 4K streaming.
My son and his friends love going through our movies, albums, reading liner notes, etc. Even old cassettes and VHS tapes, at which point I think they’ve lost their minds, but that’s fine!
> And as a movie collector, no matter how good your internet is, 4K discs look better than 4K streaming.
Eh, I'd quibble with that. The newest codecs that Apple uses are really, really good. I personally can't tell the difference on my TV. And unless you've got a TV that can show Dolby Vision content, or you're exclusively watching stuff that's filmed in 60FPS, there's not really a huge difference between Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray for most things anyway.
I like physical media too, but I won't oversell the benefits.
4K streaming in practice is still inferior even to blu-ray (see excellent deep-dive here: https://thetechylife.com/is-streaming-quality-as-good-as-blu-ray/):
"To illustrate the differences between streaming and Blu-ray, let’s consider a real-world example. Suppose we’re watching a movie like “The Matrix” (1999) on Netflix and on Blu-ray disc.
"Netflix: The movie is streamed in 4K resolution with HDR, but the bitrate is limited to around 50 Mbps. The audio is compressed using Dolby Digital 5.1, with a bitrate of 640 kbps.
"Blu-ray: The movie is stored on a Blu-ray disc in 1080p resolution, with a bitrate of around 30 Mbps. The audio is encoded in Dolby TrueHD 5.1, with a bitrate of 1.5 Mbps."
Apple and Amazon Prime are better than the more popular Netflix, yes, but much depends on actual bandwidth performance in practice. I notice a difference between the same movie on 4K and on Amazon Prime in my household, which has relatively fast internet, but where my TV is still connecting to it via wifi.
I didn’t even think they had 4k discs. We switched to streaming before that was a thing
There aren't very many that were released, relative to what's on streaming. And finding a player now is tough. There's basically only one still for sale so you'd have to go to the secondary market.
I don’t think the players are hard to find at all. Even a PS5 (and I think one of the Xbox models) will play 4K discs.
I have a couple hundred 4K discs; my copies of Seven and The Usual Suspects showed up yesterday! Snowpiercer, both Kill Bill movies and Jackie Brown are dropping next week (among others). Last week I went through a 4K David Lynch binge; Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, all remastered and gorgeous. Paris, Texas had a recent release and it’s almost like experiencing the movie for the first time.
No, it’s not the selection you can get on streaming, but tons of older movies are getting releases and almost all new movies are getting 4K disc releases.
Yes, this is a hobby of mine and I’m way too into it :). I didn’t think I would care all that much for 4K relative to Blu Ray and didn’t upgrade for a long time but a good 4K remaster does a lot for things like depth of field, along with the expected pop in colors and level of detail. And part of it is absolutely that a lot of these releases are movies that I originally watched on a 35” Trinitron back in the day and seeing them in 4K on a large, widescreen TV makes them feel revelatory (Lost Highway is in this category for certain).
Sorry to go on at length, love movies and we’re in a great era for watching them at home. Clean, widescreen movies from other eras that probably look better than they did in the theater upon their initial release (we’re getting transfers directly from the negative whereas theaters were getting reels three generations removed from the negative).
I still go to the theater a decent amount and certainly watch a lot of streaming (especially for series), but for feature-length movies there is no comparison with discs. Even blu-ray is better audio/video fidelity, generally. And I like the subjective, tactile aspect of having a physical library, just like I like to have paper books. It makes picking something easier and curating a joy.
Seeing favorites from my childhood that were originally projected in SD on the big screen (or, yeah, on the then-top-of-the-line, small Trinitron CRT) is SO different from seeing them on a 75" OLED on 4K. I want to upgrade my sound system, too, and I'm sure that will make for an even more mind-blowing impression.
There's also just this thing in our era of scroll-scroll-scrolling and infinite distraction pathways wherein you find it refreshing to have a media format that is singular and self-contained. You open and book and just read it. You chose a disc and watch it. You put a vinyl record or CD on and play it. It's such a different and more engaged way of enjoying art than how the Internet has trained our brains to half-watch/listen/read everything.
> I don’t think the players are hard to find at all. Even a PS5 (and I think one of the Xbox models) will play 4K discs.
those models cost a lost more than just a 4k bluray player (and a lot more than the drive-less versions). what if you don't want a game console?
Like I said, there's only one model (by panasonic) still in production.
Just FYI, a list of movies available on 4K disc, at least fairly recently updated (I don’t see Seven, which released this week, on there):
https://hd-report.com/list-of-4k-ultra-hd-blu-ray-disc-titles/
There are a few high-quality players available from Sony and Panasonic. I have two Sony players (one for US and the other for UK/EU discs) and plan to get a Panasonic as a back-up in case they do discontinue them.
As Randall said, most people end up just using their Xbox or PS5 to play discs, though, even if they're not perfect players. I assume that will likely continue through at least the next generation of consoles.
I have 1000+ blu-rays or 4Ks and at least half my collection are 4K discs. As you can see here (https://thedigitalbits.com/columns/the-4k-uhd-release-list/4k-uhd-list-01), the 4K title back-catalogue is very significant (though it's true it hasn't and likely never will exceed the blu-ray catalogue, just like blu-ray never bested DVDs). There's a flourishing ecosystem of boutique labels publishing everything from classic films (Kino Lorber, Warner Archive) to arty/prestige movies (Criterion Collection) to cult/exploitation (Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow, Shout Factory, Indicator, 101 Films, Fun City) to horror (Scream Factory, Severin). And then there's also a large offering from the major studios. In many ways, it's the best of times to be a film buff or physical media collector. Building up my own library has definitely been extremely expensive (and it takes up a lot of space), but it gives me so much greater access to quality films than I find on streaming via Netflix, Prime, Disney+, HBO Max, and Apple+ (which, between them, have a surprising dearth of actual third-party films!). It's also so much easier to curate a "theme" or double-feature that you want to just grab off the shelf without searching in vain for the platforms that may have it or where (maybe) you can buy/rent a digital copy.
And I'm really enjoying sharing previous decades of movies (back when the industry was thriving and produced truly classic stuff) with my 4YO son, who is extremely passionate about "Ghostbusters," "Back to the Future," "The Sandlot" and other kids and family entertainment from my youth (all of which is now newly-available in 4K and looks better than it ever did in the theater or on TVs of the time). Frankly, that kind of movie just isn't made any more, and that's not from blinkered nostalgia or my lack of searching for it. Hollywood still makes pretty great animated movies, but not so much live-action movies geared at kids and families together.
All this 4K renaissance might be a "it's brightest before the dawn" situation, though, as streaming definitely has the mass-audience and disc-watching is for sure a niche, especially in the higher-definition media (you'd be shocked how dominant DVDs still remain). And it's no longer profitable for a dozen manufacturers to produce dedicated 4K players. Maybe in a few years there will be none. But even when 4K is a "dead medium," there will still be people publishing and buying new discs to play on old or deadstock players, just as you can actually still find publishers of VHS titles and that's become a bit of a flourishing niche, too!
Trying to figure out how to watch all of the Ghostbusters movies a few weeks back also broke us. We ended up renting the DVD from the library!
My son just insisted we watch the four (actually good) Ghostbusters movies in a row last Saturday. Have them all on 4K and it's glorious.
And, like, I got them for about $10/per, which isn't bad at all, considering how the kid spins them constantly. Back in the day, VHS tapes cost $50-90 in the 1980s! And even when they were more mainstream and cheap, they were still running $20+ in 1990s money.
I can't find any of them on any of the streaming platforms I currently subscribe to, much less all of them in the same place. Nor can I find most of the movies in my 1000+ disc collection on streaming at any given time. Almost all of the streamer platforms have recently transitioned mostly to in-house series and forgettable straight-to-streaming movies that disappear off the thumbnail carousel after a week or two from audience disinterest. Disney+ doesn't even offer many Disney movies! HBO Max is a shell of its former self. Prime is great for many older movies from the 1980s, but leans heavily into the male-geek-coded genre world of horror/sci-fi, and with fewer general-interest movies. Netflix offers a ton of in-house content, but most of it is bad, and they aren't investing in non-Netflix movies much anymore like they use to. Apple+ has some great in-house series, but hardly any movies. So where should people go to see most movies? Rent them from Prime or YouTube for the same cost as owning them on a disc?
Not physical media, but similar...I discovered my receiver has an FM radio built in, found an ad-free jazz & blues station.
I've found it's much more fun listening to a program of music I don't control (so I don't have to make choices) and which was selected by a human being & is being listened to simultaneously by (thousands of?) other human beings. It makes me feel connected in a way Spotify doesn't, and makes the music a lot more fun.
Gonna try some online simulcasts of terrestrial stations next to see if the effect holds.
I listen to NPR on FM radio in my cars pretty frequently. The content isn't always exactly to my taste, but I just get into my car and it starts playing without anything being plugged in or linked up.
But picture and sound quality of DVD's is vastly inferior to streaming.
"Many of the people talking about how their parents were able to afford a much better quality of life would never want to live where their parents did."
As a someone born in 1977 (HS grad in 1995) I can attest to this. In my childhood on Long Island, NO ONE wanted to live in NYC (in the '80s). My older siblings are all firmly Gen Xer's (and one cusp boomer) and none of then even considered it when they moved out. By the time it was my turn, large swathes of Manhattan were trending as the return-to-urban trend had just begun. I recall my father freaking out thought when I old him I was looking at places in the (gasp!) EAST VILLAGE. Brooklyn was a non-starter back then unless MAYBE it was Brooklyn Heights.
A close friend of mine ended up buying an apartment from an elderly neighbor who insisted he maker her an offer. Granted it was a tiny tiny tiny 1 BR (bed barely fit in the BR) but I remember thinking "almost $200K?? How will you DO that?!" This was probably ~2003.
Slowly and almost imperceptibly, our aesthetic and preferences began to take over: farm-to-table, mason jars, white subway tiles, ceramic sinks... the snowball rolled and it became more attractive to Millenials and moving into "the city" went from a bold choice just before us to a rare choice (us) to practically the default choice as wave after wave of gentrification pushed into every corner of Manhattan and half of Brooklyn and parts of Queens and Northern NJ. A desire t be urban by default post-college was NOT true in the 90s but it was true by 2010.
The trend spread from NYC to every major city and pretty soon chefs and bakers and brewers priced out the major cities set up shop in Albany and Rochester and every other second-tier city, attracting local urban gentrification.
Suburban sprawl (which could not continue indefinitely) was traded for urban concentration without an adequate expansion of housing. NYC has some of the first housing affordability issues in the country, and those followed as well to every corner. The housing bubble was boomer-fueled so built homes not where out generation wanted to live, but then after 2008 building practically stopped anywhere for 5-10 years, yet we were all piled on top of each other in urban centers.
If it were the 1990s we would mostly be back in or near our childhood suburban communities, probably moving a little further OUT from the urban core than our parents to take advantage of new home building.
On a separate note: my generation brought cool, crisp, clean aesthetics that probably DO make the light look different in photos compared to the 90s vibe of warm woods and runner rugs and the types of things that we would consider "clutter". That, plus film vs. digital (and the "filter" of nostalgia!)
And warmer light of incandescent lightbulbs vs. the colder light of LEDs.
It was the CFLs that were the worst!
CFLs were a great bridge technology and I won't hear otherwise. I'm glad we had them but I do not miss them.
I'm so glad when the day came when I could send all of those to the hazmat dropoff.
Color-changing LEDs exist
Forget "color-changing" smart stuff, just buy the color temperature you want! I definitely have a few 2700K LEDs in floor lamps in the bedroom for cooldown-the-brain evening reading (doomscrolling is strictly verboten)
True, though I think the people on social media the author mentions who believe the sun was different in the 90s are whatever aren't thinking through the logistics of why the lighting in some older photos are warmer than in some current digital photos.
Don't sleep on the "Great Beige-ification" of the late 1990s early 2000s, too! That, paired with the legacy 1970s/80s trend of traditional-style wood fixtures, wall-to-wall carpet, and incandescent lighting definitely diffused the light inside differently. Already, then, we were moving toward everything being built like shit out of artificial materials, but it takes a whole for the generational refresh of homes and interiors to be complete.
Now everything's glossy/shiny laminate or vinyl grey or griege and the lighting is UV and there's not a natural building material to be found.
Give me beige before grey any day! God I hate that grey vinyl
"Now everything's glossy/shiny laminate or vinyl grey or griege and the lighting is UV and there's not a natural building material to be found."
I must live in a different time and place than you do. Where is this?
Google "flooring" right now and you'll see what I mean. You'll see among the top hits an aspirational HGTV American interior with "geige" vinyl flooring and some white-on-white drywall walls and some furniture with artificial fabric upholstery and laminated pressed-wood product. A LOT of grey abounds. We're still in the Modern Farmhouse era, so you'll maybe see some faux-antique "barn doors" floating within door-frames, excluding nothing, not even the chronic din of TV noise and echoes that such a ticky-tacky home lets through its thin surfaces.
And the impeccability of the shiny, plasticine flooring gives away how easily scratched/scuffed/torn/peeled is all is. And how would you repair any of it? How long will that couch last? Or that hollow door? Or even the faux marble or non-ceramic tiles on the walls or kitchen surfaces?
How many people's houses do you go to that look like that? I don't go to very many.
Well, of course you raise a good point: most people live in homes from previous eras. And that's highly regional: New England homes are way older than your average homes in the Southwest.
But we were originally discussing the contemporary, new-built home vs. old housing stock.
I'm not a real estate developer/agent so I don't go into that many new homes. But most of the ones I see are the ones for sale where people are choosing bland inoffensive colors to sell their house. Beige, White, Grey, etc. A lot of people then move in and change up the color scheme to fit their preference.
And is anyone else tired of “farmhouse” style with the stark white board and batten siding and black trim windows? It was ok occasionally but it’s like oppressively stark. A bourgeois khrushyovka!
I don't think it's *as bad* as the khrushyovka or International Style of constructed Postwar housing in the rest of Europe. We have tons of these "Stalin Blocks" in Sweden and they are very unlovely, even as I appreciate their practicality, durability, and affordability as part of the "Million Homes" initiative of the 1950s-70s.
My issue with Modern Farmhouse is that, like with the McMansion style that preceded it, it's just built like shit. You emulate the *aesthetics* of a farmhouse, but without any of the robust, natural materials that actual farmhouses had. Give me the most tumble-down, 19th Century farmhouse in America and I can fix it with widely-available materials. The primitive, knob-and-tube wiring and rusted-through cast-iron plumbing can be a nightmare and you'll just have to give up if there's water damage from a decayed roof or burst pipes. But otherwise, you can repair anything.
Modern Farmhouse McMansions built in the 2010s will not be standing in the 2060s or beyond, and not just because the style will have been considered incredibly dated and cringe decades before that.
Yeah, I mean, I support tearing down a lot more old forest to build American housing (especially other countries’ old forest). It takes a long time for decent wood to grow, as a casual trip to the Home Depot lumber section would indicate.
That's very true and is a good argument against robust housing built out of natural materials. But, what's the alternative, similar environmental despoliation to make all the more artificial building materials, only to have them be landfilled and replaced in 20 years or so to suit their fragility and the HGTV trend cycle? The construction sector is a HUGE contributor to carbon emissions, as well as general resource overshoot from harvesting of all manner of feedstuffs, including things as prosaic as the sand, gravel, and cement that make up so much of a modern house.
At least when you build a good house, it lasts a century or more and you only have to replace some of the material every generation or so. Even lower-quality, new-growth pine and other softwoods harvested sustainably can last a very long time.
Also, another underrated aspect of contemporary construction is how much it skips over the more traditional focus on building setting/orientation and passive structural elements like porches, verandas, overhangs to keep a comfortable interior climate and instead relies upon mechanical HVAC to blunt-force your way to a comfortable temperature and ventilation. This makes a contemporary house very difficult to heat/cool and keep from getting moldy or stuffy without those mechanized systems constantly running (even if they are efficient). It also makes such homes very vulnerable to disruptions in electricity or natural gas supply, especially in the summertime. My old house is very easy to ventilate, since the windows are build to advantage cross-winds and there's plenty of focus on shade. But, in the winter, since it's not an open-concept and the walls are thick, it's easier to keep warm with less mechanical heating, despite the leaky, older windows.
Ugh, beige, my least favorite color by far.
Well, then, I have good news for you: everything is "greige" now!
Big cities were cheaper to live in back in the 80s and 90s partly because big cities were terrible places to live in.
Part of the reason that big cities are more expensive now is because they're much more desirable places to live in.
Late Gen X / early Millennials set the trend of urban life being desirable.
Boomers still disproportionally own the housing stock and resist building based on various combinations of property value, traffic, neighborhood "character", historical concerns, parks and public spaces, etc.
Then late Millennials / Gen Z got involved to "act locally" circa 2016 and built on this by adding everything bagel demands on social justice to many developments.
Demand up and supply failing to keep up.
Absolutely. That's why I say "part of the reason."
NYC was always awesome (for the food if nothing else)
I’m a little embarrassed to admit this but the movie Big had a, um, big impact on my desire to live in a city when I grew up. I’m the same age as you, but from the Midwest and had never been to New York.
You are accurately describing an East Coast and probably West Coast phenomenon. In places like Texas, Phoenix and Florida they are still sprawling. For better or worse, that's why their housing costs are not as daunting.
Though Dallas and Houston are filling up all the center city parking craters with four story townhomes and five over one apartment complexes too (though it’s still a small fraction of the number of homes being built in the suburbs).
b.1971, lived Upper East Side between 2nd and 3rd Aves. I’m always bemused how horrified suburbanites were about NYC back in the day. Then again, I’m horrified how suburbanites their kids managed to make it.
At what point is “safety” for another .2% of babies/children/adults no longer worth it for the unrelenting watchful eye that “protects us”? I grant that I may be looking back with nostalgia (Violet Hour sky is what was more vivid to me back then; and the new SNL movie didn’t have nearly enough dirt and grime in the outdoor scenes, go take a look at Downtown ‘81 to get it right), but the resulting isolation, or not even letting your kids go down to the store on their own (an early Sesame Street cartoon had a girl remember what her mother asked her to get), is soul crushing.
One thing that drives '90s were better' discourse is that the ever increasing percentage of people going to college means that the path into a stable career is, on average, longer and more stressful than it was in the 90s when it was easier to make a good career without going to college.
And kids these days can't really opt out of this as everyone else is going to college, so it's harder to find employment as a non-graduate compared to the 90s, so many kids see that they need to go to college to get similar jobs as their non-college parents had, and assume society is declining.
Yeah, I saw something about how easy it was to send 2 kids to college on one income in the 50s- very few people went to college!!
https://www.slowboring.com/p/nostalgia-economics-is-totally-wrong
The gold standard in attacking this idea.
Yes. YES!!!
Just curious, how long have you been reading Matt's work for? That's a question I always like asking fellow Slow Borers.
I found Matt on twitter and mostly just mainlined his tweets for a while but I’d say I’ve been reading SB for maybe a year? I stupidly subscribed on my personal email and it just occurred to me that’s why I never see the posts on the Substack app.
Thanks. Good to have you here, I know you'll be busy with your own publication but it'd be good to see you comment some more in the future here--you're already well outpacing Matt on comments per article by a writer!
I discovered Jeff Mauer ("I Might Be Wrong") via SB and read the cross posting the two of you did on lying about Santa Claus (which was great!) And now here you are on SB.
Real Marvel Cinematic Universe vibes starting to build here.
I mean, yes and no? I went to the U. of California from 1978 to 1982 and the tuition (pardon me, "fees") went from $400 a year to $600 a year in that time. Yes I've read the essay that City of Trees posted several hours ago. My point still stands. The costs at any UC campus have expanded much faster than inflation.
I think the observation is really that for someone that had a desire to send two kids to college they probably had a stay at home wife and it was pretty easy to pull off.
It's a lot easier to afford college on "one" income when you have all the free labor of the stay at home mom/housekeeper.
Not sure that's what's going on. Some of the causality runs the other way - it's easy to have a stay-at-home wife when you make enough money to pay for the necessities.
The other is that those that were most likely to send their kids to college were the parents at the top end of the income distribution and were in careers that required college degrees.
IMO the big break was that starting in the late 2000s, the tech revolution had spread to the job market, and fundamentally changed how companies hired.
- There were now too many resumes to manually review, so now we have keyword searches and automated review engines. This made it harder to just walk in the door somewhere and get a job.
- HR had mostly finished its long march through corporate America, so now HR schoolmarms were in charge of ALL hiring decisions, if they hadn't been already.
- Credential inflation and job description creep -- exacerbated by HR departments -- forced a lot of young Millennials to go back for grad school.
- Tuition inflation and student loans meant that once you graduated and GOT the job, you got to keep less of your take-home pay.
- Ditto for the then-burgeoning housing crisis. Entry-level salaries didn't feel like they went as far as they used to.
- Entry-level salaries were also just SHIT for most of the ensuing decade because duh the Great Recession happened.
I agree with you. What frustrates me is the people who graduated into the recovery (2015 onwards) who act like they were they were dealt the worst hand ever when they actually missed the worst of it. Even Covid didn't have that much of an effect on the employment of educated people.
I graduated in the post Covid years. I don’t think it’s the lack of a job that people are concerned about. But rather the lack of social connection in both their community and place of work.
A lot of the discourse seems to be about the hellscape of capitalism though. And a lot of the lack of social connections is driven by the very platforms Zoomers use to complain about their lack of social connections. No one is forcing people to be on TikTok all night and rot their own brain instead of just actually hanging out with friends.
And they all seem like fans of WFH, which I think is awful for businesses (there are studies that show nearly everything being done more effectively with in person interaction) and for the people doing it. Even if it feels good! Lots of things that are awful for you in the long term actually feel great in the short term.
I shall once again reiterate my take that WFH is basically a tacitly-accepted false equilibrium that most professional jobs don't actually require 8 straight hours of 9-5 work, 5 days a week. This was largely masked by the internet massively increasing both productivity and distractions, but if the game isn't quite "up" yet, it's at least becoming increasingly untenable.
As it stands, the labor laws can't be changed without the PMC basically tipping off the working class that we're all getting paid a 3-5x markup OVER the existing pay advantage PMCers have, because PMCers are working 3-5x fewer real hours. So the PMC, including even the HR schoolmarms, have just collectively decided to continue the legal fiction that everyone's still working 40-hour weeks, and WFH is part of the bargain to allow PMCers to go do errands and shit when they would've been sitting at a screen reading internet articles 10 years ago, or dozing off in front of a typewriter 30-40 years ago.
I think the ideal synthesis with your point about WIO being more effective is that most PMC jobs -- which are already at a "3 days in office, 2 days WFH" equilibrium -- should reduce to 4-day work weeks under 3-in/1-out, and then eventually just to a 3-day all-in work week.
As it stands, though, that'll never happen with our current political dysfunction, so there'll probably just have to be a revolution where PMCers like us just have to hope we don't get lined up against a wall ;-).
The technical debt is a sight to behold.
As someone who graduated in 2007 (lol) I do of course agree on some level, but I think it's worth saying younger people can still have been victims of the financial crisis (maybe one or both parents lost a job, maybe there wasn't much money due to defaulting on something, maybe they were just stressed and then not very nice at home, etc etc).
Yup. I have a kid who was recently looking for a non-professional job. The amount of crap ads - old, places not really hiring, places that never got back to him - at that level was shocking. Plus the places that required you to interact with an AI bot, where you really didn't know where your info was going. I keep hearing about places having trouble hiring people. Son is reliable, hard-working, drug free, and it was difficult for him to find a job due to this morass. He ended up at an appliance parts warehouse two miles from our house so all is good now. There had to be a better way than this for both job seekers and those looking to hire.
I think it's just the email spam problem replicating in another sector: When you reduce transaction costs to near-zero (IE filing an application or job opening with a bot), you get a flood of crap.
We need new authentication methods to verify quality again. That's what I think LinkedIn is somewhat banking on -- that it can provide social proof where algorithmic proof is lacking.
I have nothing against Linkedin as a concept, but it has made professional hiring absolutely miserable. As yet I am still able to keep up with a "to complete your application, please submit XYZ materials..." email to each lazy click-to-send-your-resume applicant, but I'm not sure how much longer that will be possible.
LinkedIn is absolutely not doing this.
I didn't say they'd be doing it *well*, just that it seems to be their theory of value, roughly.
All of these are terrible, especially the rise of the electronic job application, which should be banned.
I'm pretty far from a luddite but it's very clear to me that in some areas, transaction costs are a very good thing. Job applications and job postings are such an area.
In a sane world jobs would apply for people rather than the other way around. But in the absence of such a world there should only be paper applications, turned in in-person.
After air conditioning it’s all been downhill though unless you’re talking about the medical sector.
You can always be counted on for some good old fashioned Marxist Luddism. ;-P
Not a Marxist here, just a pissed off Luddite with a totalitarian streak :-P
Over 60% of Americans today still lack a college degree. People with college degrees are still badly outnumbered! Yet most of the people who are having these conversations online, it seems to me, don’t even know any of those people. Any idea how many people work for Walmart, Amazon warehouses, etc in the year of our lord 2025? The Very Online contingent seems to have none of those people in their lives.
CHH mentions this:
“These kids might have grown up considering themselves “middle class” when they were actually safely upper middle class. Their parents, not wanting to be unseemly, probably told them they were middle class.”
I grew up up broke, in the 80s and early 90s. All of these people talking about how life was back then, whether they realized it or not, were rich kids. I look at what they’re pointing to in the past, and I didn’t grow up that way nor did anyone around me. And there were lots and lots of us, all over the country.
Excellent comment. Having grown up in an unfashionable suburb of Detroit, raised by parents who didn’t go to college (and whose own parents were immigrants), for quite a long time I thought of my origins as kind of lower middle class. When I got a mid career graduate degree at a CUNY school, I realized how actually middle class and extremely fortunate I was.
A good rule of thumb is that on the internet (reddit and twitter especially) middle class = upper middle class. And very firmly upper middle class at that.
I do wonder about sorting mechanisms here, though. I know lots of Boomers who did not graduate from college, including my own mother. I think I know...two maybe?...people my age (elder millennial, like lots of folks here) who didn't graduate from college. And I believe the college graduation rate for my cohort is higher, but it's not *so* much higher as to account for that drastic of a difference.
I don’t know anything about this Cartoons woman, but this essay strongly suggested her childhood was in a place quite different than mine.
But the percentage of Americans with a college degree has been about 35% for a while. And the number of high schoolers is decreasing.
This means fundamentally the quality of college graduates has gone down (and this selection effect is exacerbated by certain pedagogical reforms like non-zero grading, passing everyone forward, cueing theory of learning, and ubiquitous cellphones in class.)
Yeah, especially after the travails of recent years I'm not confidence this is going to hold up.
NPR just had an article on the closures of colleges.
One small silver lining for Gens Alpha and Beta might be something like a return to normality in this regard for no reason other than that there are fewer of them.
or from my perspective, college still did the simple thing we asked of it - I went to college and I easily got a decent job, even though my grades weren't grade
When did you graduate? I’m betting it wasn’t between 2008 and 2012.
exactly - I meant graduating in the 90s like I did.
apologies if that context was unclear.
Great post, and in one of my favorite genres, the ‘nostalgia reality check’. It’s all basically true but i won’t give up: the 90s were still the best! Politics was still pretty normal, Bill Clinton was awesome, America was saving people from genocide, there were no powerful foreign enemies hacking our government every other week, and gas was $0.95 per gallon.
Thank you so much!
All that said, air-travel is way safer now—which is super nice. You’re right to focus on motor vehicle accidents but I’m crazy like everyone else and am just more scared to fly than drive my car to the airport.
As someone who helps cars get built, people have no idea how much safer cars are today, because you don’t see most of the improvements. If you hit something hard, head on, in the 20th century, the engine was probably going to be forced into the cabin of the car, for instance.
Today, crash test standards require front rails that break away and drop the engine to make sure that doesn’t happen. Just as one example. I see cars mangled all to hell that people came out of virtually unscathed.
Obligatory Bel Air vs. Malibu crash test footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_r5UJrxcck
Exactly. And I bet the outer body panels on the Bel Air are made of steel that’s almost twice as thick as what’s on the outside of the Malibu. You might instinctively think that would be helpful, but not so much. It’s the stuff under it that has been almost revolutionized that saves your life.
How do you see EVs changing this? I have to imagine that the design flexibility EVs afford must be helpful, but I have no idea.
Not to mention the sensors and cameras with automatic collision avoidance
Not to mention, technological advancement was always good (or at least felt like it was good). It was search engines and 3d video games and non-addictive dumb cellphones. Whereas these days we have smartphones and social media and generative AI, which all have complicated pros and cons and lots of worrying aspects.
All progress felt like actual progress in the 90s, even if it didn’t turn out to be that way.
Smartphones really do suck, too.
I suspect (though am too lazy to do the math) that if you control for the gas efficiency of modern cars, gas prices are the same to lower today than in 1990.
For me, that is not the case. My high-school car was a 1987 Toyota Tercel, which got about 27 miles/gallon in the city. My car now is a pretty similar looking Subaru Forester, which gets 20 mpg or so.
Cherry-picking individual cases where it might not be true doesn't really accomplish anything meaningful.
If you just look at gasoline-powered vehicles, “theeleaticstranger” actually makes a great point. Average fuel economy stagnated for a while as more efficient engine technology was counterbalanced by increasingly heavy vehicles.
I feel like you made a post by putting two years of my comments on this substack, throwing it all in ChatGPT and then putting into MattY speak; because this has basically been my argument on a variety of topics no matter which topic you talk about. No, things were not actually better in the good ole days.
And yet as soon as you mentioned dunkaroos, my brain immediately went to remembering eating roll ups, gushers, pixie sticks, nutter butters and found myself instinctively smiling inside. Which led to me remembering watching Seinfeld, Simpsons, Michael Jordan Bulls, listening to Green Day and Rage Against the Machine…and then I had to snap out of it. I’m probably the most “don’t over romanticize the good ole days” person there is and here I had 5 minutes where my brain just over romanticized the good ole days.
It really tells me this instinct is genuinely an instinct you need to try to fight against.
One thing you didn’t bring up that is worth mentioning is that we are an aging society. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t think we can talk about the seductive nature of MAGA without talking about the fact that median America age is rising. It was 30 in 1980 and is now closer to 39. Which means “back in the good ole days” thinking carries more heft politically then it did 30-40 years ago. I’ve noted that you can look to UK for an area where median age is even higher and see how especially damaging this can be. One of the many things I worry about next four years (how much is anti green sentiment just pure nostalgia good ole days thinking to a time when green tech was extremely cringy).
I can’t say I’ve been watching you THAT closely 😂
(Thank you!)
Cartoons Hate Her is great. I had forgotten about Snackwells and their promise of weight loss salvation through tiny cakes.
Thank you! I lived off those as a child- and White Castle frozen burgers!
My mom used to buy those all the time.
Now she just buys “nutrition bars” from Kind that are just candy bars.
This Seinfeld episode is a perfect time capsule of the obsession with "non fat" foods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Non-Fat_Yogurt
I was a teenager when those devil's food cakes came out, and as such I wasn't thinking about weight loss at all, and instead just plowing through a whole box to sate a typical appetite of that age.
David Foster Wallace has an essay called "Mister Squishy" in the book "Oblivion" which is probably the world's most prolific meditation on the snackable dessert cake.
Me, my brothers, and my cousins used to crush boxes of those things at my grandma's house.
Great post. Thanks for being here.
A request: Could you make the posts you linked to on your substack "free" for a few days? I clicked on two of them -- the one about toys and the one about men's fashion -- and they seemed interesting but then I was stopped from getting to the end of them. Not sure if I want to subscribe, but maybe. Either way, I'd like to be able to read a linked post where possible.
I can make the toys one free!
This is a basic problem of Substack, you can't pick and chose what to read, only whom to read.
The platform really ought to allow people to buy access to individual posts. Newsstands were never a treat to newspaper subscriptions, why is Substack different? Would too many of Matt's subscribers desert to buying only a few per month? At the very least the platform should let the writer chose to include that option. Is this a problem for Substack's business model? Why?
The subscription vs. pay-per-view debate has been discussed numerous times in SB comment sections. To provide the argument for subscriptions, I'm going to lazily reuse a past comment of mine from Dec 2023, https://www.slowboring.com/p/another-brutal-year-for-the-media/comment/45242472
Pay-per-view is a bad business model. Publishers don’t want sporadic purchases, but instead the more consistent revenue from subscriptions (and ads). That entails creating a product that is a regular, consistent, novel point of view. Select free articles, as well as publicly on other venues like twitter can convince potential subscribers to consider the product. Customers need to be compelled to commit to a paid subscription.
The tech analyst Ben Thompson has written extensively on the subscription business model for news and opinion publications. He has first hand experience as he’s been running an amazing paid newsletter since 2013. (Substack founders cited him as their inspiration). Notably, see his 2017 article, “The Local News Business Model” [1]
> It is very important to clearly define what a subscriptions means. First, it’s not a donation: it is asking a customer to pay money for a product. What, then, is the product? It is not, in fact, any one article (a point that is missed by the misguided focus on micro-transactions). Rather, a subscriber is paying for the regular delivery of well-defined value.
> Each of those words is meaningful:
> Paying: A subscription is an ongoing commitment to the production of content, not a one-off payment for one piece of content that catches the eye.
> Regular Delivery: A subscriber does not need to depend on the random discovery of content; said content can be delivered to the subscriber directly, whether that be email, a bookmark, or an app.
> Well-defined Value: A subscriber needs to know what they are paying for, and it needs to be worth it.
He has a lot of free articles that cover news and more generally the media industry, particularly how the internet disrupted it. If you find this topic interesting, I bet that you’ll find reading a few convinces you to commit to a paid subscription for $120/yr.
[1] https://stratechery.com/2017/the-local-news-business-model/
And *I* am also going to even lazier copy and paste my reply to you from December 2023, verbatim:
"How about not strictly pay per view, but where you buy essentially a gift card for # number of views? Like, if you want to charge a dollar per article, and the minimum purchase is something like $20? As John alludes to, I just utterly despite monthly recurring subscriptions, because they want to suck you into set it and forget it mode and add friction to stopping the sucking of money away from you. I would be more eager to purchase articles without that being demanded so damn often."
And I also remain firmly in the ¿por qué no los? category on this, even if standalone article purchases are considerably more expensive than monthly subscriptions would be on a per article basis. That's my understanding on how the old newsstand model that TLH describes work, and if it worked then I don't see why it can't work now. It just seems like publishers are leaving money on the table here.
I would be interested to listen to actual publishers like Matt or CHH on what their thoughts would be.
One thing I will add is that places that have comments almost always have a better comment section if its restricted to subscribers. I subscribe to SB because I enjoy the conversation in the comments as much as I enjoy Matt's writing. That isn't to say that subscriber comment sections can't be trash, so there is definitely a link between author/moderation policy/commenter quality.
Nevertheless, if you are trying to build an engaged community, I think allowing one off articles to be purchased is very counterproductive.
One could always design it to still limit commenting to recurring subscribers only.
I really like the gift card idea!
In searching my substack comments, here are two of the past discussions we've had on the topic
* 82 comments, Dec 2023, https://www.slowboring.com/p/another-brutal-year-for-the-media/comment/45240702
* 28 comments, May 2024, https://www.slowboring.com/p/reflections-on-almost-four-years/comment/55937506
I believe there have been more, but I'm to lazy to search further for those discussions.
Thanks for always bringing the data. I appreciate it.
Matt brings tons of value to this comment section.
This is a discussion of media strategy in general. I am asking about Substack. Matt was just an example of one kind of posting. Is there no one that could not garner a little more cash by allowing single or small lot purchases in addition to subscribers? Even more puzzling would be the sites that let anyone read, but would charge for commenting on a single or small lot of posts! Obviously everyone thinks their views are correct, but do their subscribers need to be protected from other points of view?
One danger there is that writers would be less likely to write essays expressing viewpoints they think their audience would disapprove of.
Seconded. I subscribe to a few stacks and would continue to do so but I'd also totally be willing to spend a few bucks for single posts here and there without full subscription.
Yeah, I feel like you could make the pay per view price high enough to make it worth it
What’s great about it?
It is well-written, witty and accessible. Uses a good mix of data and anecdotes to argue against a 1990's nostalgia that glosses over the profound improvements in US life over the past 30 years.
Why do you ask?
I felt it was so-so.
I like CHH, but she is stronger on dating/relationships/marriage than on social trends. Matt would have done this post better, especially because he is older and has a better lived memory of the 90s.
CHH also repeats herself too much.
I was alive for a few months at the end of the 90s. I thought this was a great post.
Thanks for making me feel old, Ben. 😉
No one thanked me for making them feel young. :)
Sorry if I missed your comment about being around in the 70s 😊
I'm exactly the same age as Matt, and this post was a good description of the things that were different (and better) in the 90s.
Unpopular opinion, but I actually enjoy being an adult much more than being a kid.
Same. Largely because of school: “Wake up two hours before you wanted to and sit at attention all day having to focus on a topic you may or may not be interested in.”
Elementary school should start at like 7:30 and high school should start at 9.
Most people yearn to be *young* adults, though...
I want my young adult body back but enjoy my life as a settled middle-aged adult better. And I am certainly glad I am out of the dating scene, although I understand that that sucks for all ages now.
I am 40. I'd like to be 27 again, but I'd rather be 40 than be 10.
The true ideal is to be 27, but also richer and wiser than one was then. Cruel how it doesn't line up that way for almost all.
23 is very different from 10
>>They don’t feel like their children are safer than children in the ‘90s, and their proof is mostly “all the stuff I’m hearing” and “how things were when I was as kid.”
This jibes with a LOT of what I was saying the last two years about inflation. People genuinely don't know how the fuck to interpret an inflation graph, let alone look one up from the Fed. People have simply just been bitching about grocery prices for their entire lives, and if they look up at the news in the DMV and it says "Inflation reaching record highs", they free-associate that with whatever ambient bitching they've been doing, and maybe they say something to the person sitting next to them, who mindlessly agrees, and then soon enough you've got a South Park-style pitchfork mob ready to oust a president because of "inflation".
I think most people equate inflation with price level, not the change in price level.
I think most people don't know what the fuck a price level is, but you're nevertheless mostly on the mark.
And yet, I think this is also why people are ALWAYS bitching about the price level: because the Cost Disease is ALWAYS ramping it up beyond inflation.
Side note: I can't wait until econ textbooks 100 years from now talk about how noble economists like Matthew Yglesias taught everyone about the Cost Disease and YIMBY, in the same hallowed terms as they now talk about Keynes.
Say what you will, but the cost disease hadn’t fucked things nearly do badly in the 90s
I dunno... people were already bitching about it back then.
That must be why Reagan won 49 states in 1984 and why, according to Gallup, the percentage of people dissatisfied with the way things were going went from 84% in 1979 to 40% in late 1984.
It should be noted that even when inflation is only hitting the Feds target of 2% that's still a LOT of inflation.
at 2% inflation you've lost 18% of the value of your money within 10 years and 1/3 of it within 20 years. That's fricken huge.
Not to mention the CPI is deliberately massaged to make the number lower than it should be. These use technological improvement to reduce inflation numbers. For example, if a new iPhone is released at the same price as the old one these pretend that's a reduction in the price level. But it's not. Technology is supposed to get better. But that doesn't lower actual price inflation.
And of course CPI is used to set all types of cost of living increases. So technological improvements in electronics is used to make it look like say housing isn't causing the CPI to increase as much as it otherwise would have. Which means less COLA for everyone.
And of course because housing is so a large part of our expenses each month the WAY above average home price inflation really hits people's pocket book hard.
Anecdotal data, in the late 90's you could get a track home in my town for $100k. Now they are $600k. Incomes sure didn't go up 6x.
I think this article is overall solid. The main thing I will give 90's nostalgia is that the US definitely had a vibe that the world was getting better overall. There's been a lot written about how the movies of 1999 were all about how having a good job was boring. 9/11 killed a lot of that and we let ourselves become an angry country for a while. We started to get that optimistic vibe again during Obama, but we then let ourselves become an angry country again since 2016. The Trump era is one of self-imposed anger at everyone for no reason.
We won the Cold War in the early 90s! No more nuclear threat, the world was our oyster. Very optimistic time.
I don't think first-term Obama was a very optimistic time, due to the long hangover from the Great Recession. (And I have a lot of nostalgia for that time, anyway, because I was in my 20s and my life was good - nostalgia is really about your own personal circumstances rather than the state of the world!) There was a brief moment late in Obama's term when it felt like optimism might return, then...well...
Also, I think you're contradicting yourself when you dismiss 2020s stranger danger and also nostalgia for kids just getting to wander. It really was safe for kids to just wander because stranger danger isn't based on statistical reality. (Kidnapping is very close to exclusively a crime committed by family members, usually as part of a custody dispute.) Which is another genuinely bad thing about now: the ossification of a worldview that prioritizes safety over other human values to a toxic degree.
Ugh. Nostalgia. I HATE it.
I remember talking to my grandparents about how terrible the 1930s were. Back then, people weren't nostalgic at all!
Can't we go back to that world?
I have relatives who were born in the late 30's and early 40's in the deep South. They aren't nostalgic for that time at all. It was unpleasant for them and they are glad to escape it.
hmm, I quite liked the 90s, though of course partly it's just fun to be in your 20s. But I'll give some specifics.
- Dot com jobs were AWESOME in that we got raises quickly and none of use really knew what we were doing
- Since we had just come out of the dangerous 80s, the 90s seemed super safe. Especially in NYC.
- I bought a 1 BR apt in NYC (ok Queens) for less than $100k, with some of that dotcom money
- Even though I had taken out max public student loans, the payments were really manageable and it was all cleared up before I turned 30
- maybe it's nostalgia, but the politics seemed a lot more chill.
- global events: it was a sweet spot between the end of the USSR but before 9/11, and it just seemed like the world was a nice safe stable place
- drugs: pot was technically illegal, sure. but it was a sweet spot between crack and the opioid crises, at least for casual partiers. you could get a little high and not worry you were risking your life.
I dunno - I loved the 90s.
While Americans experienced the world as a nice safe stable place, the Russian economy collapsed, the Bosnian Genocide happened, and the Middle East turned away from peace and development to give us today's wars.
The former SSRs all went their separate ways. No one forced them to do that; it was just because the Soviet Union was a great evil.
Obviously it was not a great time for EVERYONE - my intent was to relay why it was pleasant for many Americans, specifically me at least
Fantastic piece. People always underrate the latent progress of prosperity in the moment. I wonder how much of the 90’s nostalgia is just reverence for the lasting cultural production of the era? The music of that decade was simply unbelievable, who could imagine bands like Oasis arising organically today, and the nostalgia is so strong they are coming back on tour this year. Fantastic movies like A Few Good Men and The Fugitive may not even get made today in Hollywood’s IP/sequel driven era. Not to mentioned indelible sports icons like the Jordan Bulls and the last time the Dallas Cowboys were worth a damn. Everything here is correct but I wonder if it’s more easily explained by huge lasting cultural signifiers instead, some that were genuinely better than today’s.
Thanks so much!! I love seeing so much discussion about it. It was an honor to be featured here.
It is very good to read one of your articles here, many people have been praising your work for quite some time now, and I'm glad I got an opportunity to see why. Thanks for stopping by!
Thank you so much! I’m honored Matt gave me the chance
I wonder how much of the cultural nostalgia is driven by the atomization and asynchronization of modern shows/movies/etc. I’ve read about how we have fewer viewers per any given show today, and we never have to watch exactly when anything airs. I miss the idea that we all were super into the exact same thing all at once because if you missed it, you missed it.
We've lost a lot in terms of communal sharing because people consume products at wildly different times.
"Boy, that was amazing at the end of "The Sixth Sense" when we find out--"
"Shut up! I still haven't finished it!"
I think it is a fool's errand to guess at what people in 2050+ might think of today's music. It is, itself, a form of nostalgia to say things like "they just don't make them like that anymore"
Also, I remember pretty clearly in the 90s that everyone bitched about how no one was making original movies and that every thing was a sequel. And let's not gloss over the fact that The Fugitive itself was "IP driven" -- it was a remake of a 60s TV show. As was Mission: Impossible (yes, you are old, the first one was in 1996), another banger from that era.
To look at modern stuff: Into the Spiderverse is obviously "IP driven" but is probably the best superhero movie ever made, Paddington 2 is one of the best movies ever made (no, it's not just a meme, seriously, go watch Paddington and Paddington 2 *right now*, you will thank me later), Dunkirk can compete with Saving Private Ryan for best war movie ever made, and Tarantino is still making great movies, Pulp Fiction was not just a flash in the pan.
Yes, there are lots of sequels and franchises, and it IS bad now, but... remember Batman Forever and (cringes) Batman & Robin? How about Alien: Resurrection? My Girl 2 (really, what the hell, did they even watch the first one?) How about Home Alone 3 (yes, they made three)?
I do think Dunkirk stands out as what will be remembered as the best movie made in the last 10 years
The movies of the 90s were very good. The music was a mixed bag: definitely better in the first half than the second.
A lot of this has structural explanations, and I think that's a really underrated aspect of why/when art is good. Art needs a commercial basis or else it doesn't happen and/or you never hear about it.
I cannot emphasize enough how much of this is personal preference. Imagine someone walking up to you in the 90s and telling you how much modern movies sucked and were better in the 60-70s. That's you now.
Movies really were pretty great in the 70s.