Starbucks, bulwark of the cafe culture

Here's an article on the changing cafe culture from then until now, in which the author notes a decline from the Viennese ideal:

We've also used it to balkanize ourselves. The Viennese coffeehouse is a communal exercise in individuality: As an Austrian friend noted recently, his compatriots don't go to cafes to socialize -- everyone goes to watch everyone else. This phenomenon doesn't quite work in America because cafes here tend to draw specific crowds: a hipster cafe, a mom cafe, a student cafe.

Of course, there is one minor holdout against this trend:

With the exception of the ubiquitous Starbucks, where slumming and aspiration meet, we use our coffeehouses to separate ourselves into tribes.

That tiny exception of the ubiquitous Starbucks shows that there's nothing to worry about on this score. Only a handful of pretentious geeks hang out in these Balkanizing cafes. That's true, by the way: the indie cafe in my neighborhood only has liberal white people between 27 to 47 who belong to indie rock or hippie culture. At the nearby Starbucks, you see little kids up through grandparents, with the middle 50% being from about 20 to 50. You see Hispanics, Asians, and Middle Easterners regularly, and blacks too, though less so. It does trend liberal, but hardly. I'm as likely to overhear a group of queers talking about staging a kiss-in as I am to sit next to religious conservatives discussing how to honor God through their behavior. The sub-cultures you find in the indie cafe are all there, but most people appear drawn from the mainstream.

The only filter at work at Starbucks is for IQ, but that's true for all cafes, and I think it's much weaker at Starbucks. Indeed, trying to signal how brainy you are is one reason why insecure people hang out at the indie cafe -- "You know, people who only graduated high school go to Starbucks. They're not going to know about Feynman or Truffaut." It's important for smarties to stay in some contact with the left half of the bell curve -- especially ones who have naive views of how to help them out -- so Starbucks wins on that count too. (It would be better still to go to a sports bar, but I can't stand watching most sports.)

As for the most annoying trend among cafes --

Which brings us to the laptop. At any given moment, a typical New York coffeehouse looks like an especially sedate telemarketing center.

This is also less pronounced at the local Starbucks than the local indie cafe. I almost never see anyone in the indie cafe reading a book, and rarer still the newspaper. But using their laptop to check their email, refresh the NYT's homepage again, and follow Connor Oberst's pet hamster on Twitter? You bet. There's a handful of laptop users at the Starbucks, but they're a smaller percentage. Compared to the indie cafe, there are just a lot more people-watchers, socializers, meeting-holders, readers, writers, drawers, and lovers.

There's not much to do at an indie cafe other than sit around and signal. If you actually want to go do something, head over to the Starbucks instead.

Juvenile vs. mature open-mindedness

Continuing with one of the ideas from the post below, one landmark of growing up is changing your mind about some things that you hated from your childhood and adolescence. Typically we think of young people as more open-minded, and the personality trait Openness to Experience does peak in the late teens and early 20s. However, this is more of an openness to new or different stuff. I'm talking about being open-minded enough to admit that you misjudged something good as bad -- a much tougher error to admit than the other way around.

When you're a teenager or young adult, you're too socially desperate to question the worth of your behavior and your culture -- you just have to shut up and go with it, or else you won't fit in with your clique during a time when you are unable to go it alone. Once you're more socially independent, which happens sometime during your mid-to-late 20s, you can relax your narrow-minded devotion to your group's products and practices. You're even free to borrow things from a rival faction and not suffer as much: ostracism is less powerful when social relations are less tribalistic.

How do we know that tribalism declines after the early 20s? Simple: look at how conspicuous your group membership badges become. Even adults belong to groups and signal their affinity, but the intensity of the signal is lower and the noise around it is greater. For one thing, unlike teenagers, adults don't wear clothing with logos, or with names, pictures, and other icons of their favorite entertainers. Their use of slang is a lot less frequent, and the turnover rate is much lower. Some professionals have jargon, but it's nothing like the slang of teenagers, which obviously functions as a set of shibboleths.

As a concrete example, consider all of the pop music groups who disgusted you as a young person. (Which pop music groups we follow is one of the main ways that we express our tribal membership.) It's possible that all of your judgments at the time were correct, but it's not very likely. Now, some of them you'll grow to like just because your tastes involuntarily change with age, like preferring the more bitter espresso to Frappuccinos or the more pungent Roquefort to cream cheese. But these don't require questioning your earlier assessments.

Take a group that was pretty popular when you were a teenager, but one who your tribe was steadfastly against. If you had even considered listening to that group, your peers would've threatened you with excommunication -- "we don't listen to them." Once you can more safely tell those people to fuck off if they don't approve of your musical tastes, you start to re-examine some of your earlier judgments and find many of them to have been wrong. You may feel that they were necessary and rational in the context of surviving tribalistic adolescence, but still they were unfair. All of a sudden, your mind opens up to wholly uncharted waters of the cultural oceans.

At the same time, you don't overturn all of your previous decisions. Motley Crue really did stink -- no mistake there. But if you don't uncover at least a couple of faulty convictions when you rummage through the volumes of your life experience, you haven't matured yet. To see that their underlying merit is what gets a sentence overturned, many people who re-examine the same collection of cases will independently arrive at the same conclusions -- that one was dealt with fairly, but this one shouldn't have been punished. Unlike Motley Crue, Guns N Roses are much more likely to have their credibility re-established, quite simply because they were better.

To measure how much more open your mind has become, we just ask how you respond to the cases that would sting the most to admit you were wrong -- namely, where their worth was so great and yet where you spilled the most blood. There's no one perfect example of this, but disco sure comes pretty close. At least within the realm of pop music, few other groups can match Chic on musical innovation, virtuosity, complexity, and breadth of emotional range. If the most sophisticated evaluation you can make is that "disco sucks" or that only queers like dance music, you still have a lot of growing up to do.

Last great rock band -- Guns N Roses?

I've been thinking more about this post on age, generations, and pop music that Steve Sailer posted from a reader. My take is that the decline of quality rock music doesn't stem from a lack of young people: there have been echo booms that should've allowed for something good to emerge, and anyways how many young people does it take to make good music? It's not as though we went through a bottleneck after the Baby Boom. Tens or hundreds of millions is still a shitload of people.

Rather, the decline stems from the general civilizing trend that started in the early 1990s. Violent and property crime rates are down, so are the many forms of child abuse (except parental neglect), promiscuity started falling, etc. When the culture is thrill-seeking, there's a demand for wild music. When fun no longer characterizes the zeitgeist, you're going to get whiny, angry, and sappy music.

(As an aside, someone here, perhaps TGGP, says that alternative rock wasn't supposed to be fun, why is being sad sometimes such a bad thing, and so on. That misses something: no one listens to grunge or alternative rock when they're sad and want sad music to give them company. People would rather listen to "Drive" by The Cars, "Don't Cry" by GNR, "Everybody Hurts" by R.E.M., or "End of the Road" by Boyz II Men. Those groups made fun music on the whole. When you listen to those songs, it sounds like they're speaking to, for, and about all people. When you listen to most alternative rock, it's hard not to conclude that the sadness is really just bitterness from some loser outcast. It doesn't feel like the singer is reaching out to anyone, but instead insisting that everyone else listen to him whine about how bad his particular life is.)

At any rate, which band marks the end-point of rock music? I searched YouTube for a bunch of candidates and sorted the results by how many times the video had been viewed, a measure of popularity long after they were in the spotlight. I just looked to see who had videos with 10 million or more views. For comparison, Michael Jackson has a lot -- more than 10, maybe 20 or so, but I didn't check for duplicate videos. No surprise for the King of Pop.

Guns N Roses has 5, and no other group has that many then or now. Actually, Fall Out Boy does, but those videos are very new; it's most likely a fashion thing, given the quality of their music. We can check again in 20 years to see how they're judged. Much older groups have fewer just because demand for videos on YouTube is driven by young people, so The Beatles don't do well (although Elvis does). Either that or GNR really are better than The Beatles.

In second place, not even neck-and-neck, is Nirvana with 3. (If you lower the cut-off to videos with 1 million views, they still don't win.) I checked some other usual suspects -- U2, Green Day, Pearl Jam (they're nearly forgotten, thank god), R.E.M., Bon Jovi, etc. -- and couldn't find anyone. Even Aerosmith's comeback of the '90s didn't come close.

You can try for yourself and see if there's someone I missed, but it seems like Guns N Roses were the last great rock band. No ax to grind here, as I'm not a die-hard GNR fan. At the time, I was much more into Nirvana than Guns N Roses, but in retrospect it was just fashionable. During the transition to alternative rock, I remember that you could still listen to Guns N Roses, but that was it -- no Bon Jovi, even though they made some great songs too. After whiny rock became the norm, though, you couldn't even like GNR -- they got lumped in with Motley Crue and Poison.

Anyway, it's also neat to see how the rankings of a group's songs has changed somewhat over the years. I remember Nirvana's "Lithium" getting a lot more airplay on MTV than "Come as You Are," but in YouTube view counts it's the other way around. And "In Bloom" places 6th on YouTube even though it was shown more than either of those two on MTV -- by a longshot. Still, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" tops both. And now "Don't Cry" by Guns N Roses handily beats out "Welcome to the Jungle," but I recall the popularity going the other way around back then, in the early-mid-'90s at least. Again, it isn't musical chairs because "November Rain" and "Sweet Child O' Mine" are at the top of both lists. For Metallica, the top YouTube song is "Nothing Else Matters," far ahead of "Enter Sandman" -- a complete reversal from when those songs were released.

Although only based on a few groups, it seems like we don't value the harder and wilder songs as much as the slower and more despondent ones. I doubt that it's because the original fans of Nirvana etc. have grown up and now have different tastes. Most people on YouTube probably didn't even hear "Sweet Child O' Mine" when it first came out. Maybe we're just picking the songs that are closer in mood to today's festival of whining. You could check that with The Beatles. In the 1980s when the culture was still wild, did they value the early or later Beatles more? Of course after alternative rock, we're supposed to worship all that dopey junk that followed Rubber Soul.

If that's not it, my second guess is that we value the slower songs because there's been such a dearth of substitute songs since rock music ended in the early '90s, whereas we've had plenty of songs that are close enough to "Enter Sandman" or "Welcome to the Jungle" that we don't really need to mine the past to satisfy those wants. I should have asked my high school tutorees what slow dance songs they played at their school dances -- could there be any good ones written in the past 15 years? Maybe "Good Riddance" by Green Day. That's all that comes to mind.

Creepiest place ever

Without a doubt, that would be Sur La Table. You're typically the only male there, which you'd welcome in another situation, but not when they are middle-aged women who block out their childlessness by cooking all day long, and who probably haven't been touched in decades. Sometimes teenagers will track me nervously through a store and at a distance (it's hard not to notice when they're looking at you). But in Sur La Table the women shamelessly descend onto your space, and you have to be really nimble to escape because they counter your evasion right away.

It really is striking how quickly the knack for flirtation fades away in females. With teenagers or college students, it feels like a playful game of hide-and-seek through the maze of displays in Urban Outfitters. Once they get into their late 20s, you feel like you're surrounded by a bunch of determined kidnappers.

He really is that influential

Malcolm Gladwell recently released a bla bla bla, and there's been a lot of yadda yadda in the blogosphere about it. Are his credulous misunderstandings really as influential as the critics suggest? Here is a plot of how frequently the phrase "tipping point" has appeared in the NYT through 2008:


There's one occurrence in 1941 and another in 1959, but it's not until the '60s that it shows up regularly. Still, it's just a small but steady stream of blips, typically less than five times a year. In the very year that Gladwell published a book with that title, it shoots up by an order of magnitude, and since 2005 it has risen yet another order of magnitude, although this lame phrase appears to be passing out of fashion.

You don't have to coin a new phrase or concept to get rich quick -- you only have to popularize an existing one in a way that makes managers come away feeling well read.

"About half in U.S. would pay for online news" -- NYT

Read the full article here. This may be the first time that the headline was better written than the first paragraph. The writer emphasizes how less willing Americans are to pay relative to people from other countries, when of course the real news is that people are willing to pay for online news. Nevermind the endless hogwash you hear from Silicon Valley about how no one is willing to pay for anything anymore in this brand new economy of ours.

The consulting group who did the study suggests that charging for online news will make American newspapers more profitable. We already knew that from the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and even the smaller-scale Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. But now that "studies show," maybe everyone will listen.

It's not surprising that Americans are more price-sensitive than people in France, Italy, or Spain -- that's true across the board, not just for online news. Spaniards are willing to pay a little more to get a little better quality for just about anything, which is why junk food, Wal-Mart-wear, and skyscrapers have enjoyed much less success over there compared to here. The flipside, which we don't see when we romanticize their lives, is that their choices make them more strapped for cash.

Having lived in Barcelona for about a year, I still prefer the American lifestyle because there are more options here. You can certainly live the human-scale, cosmopolitan life here if you want, but you're also able to wear jean shorts and eat Doritos for your dinner. Given how weak our social bonds are here, and given how cheap the transportation costs are, people will sort themselves into areas where they don't have to be bothered by people who have tastes that offend them. Of course, that sorting is far from complete, so people from across the spectrum are forced to live in the same areas.

While I'm digressing, I think that's another superior aspect of American life -- being forced to interact with people who are different from you, especially those who you'd rather not be around. You always hear people whining about how homogeneous our communities are becoming and that we need to struggle to make them more diverse. But if they think our communities are that way, they should visit any of the European cities that they romanticize. In the same way that whites who live in all-white areas are naive about what black and Hispanic culture is like -- and in general I think naivete is dangerous -- Spaniards were infuriatingly clueless about how Americans really live.

Americans don't hold strong but foolish views about how Spaniards or Italians or anyone lives because they don't give other countries much thought at all. But it was totally common for a Spaniard to ask me "Why does everyone bring guns to school in the U.S.?" while their friends looked at me with a straight face, expecting a serious answer, rather than turn to their friend like, "Nigga, is you crazy?" They had seen Bowling for Columbine -- I mean, how much more research can they be expected to do? It was a real "AFL-CIA" moment.

But that's an example of little consequence. What I really mean is that Spaniards are naive about how slobs live because there are such much fewer of them. Some pleasures we respond to on their own merits, almost reflexively. But many other things that enrich our lives do so even more when they stand out in contrast to their inferiors. Sporting a rakish necktie or savoring some French onion soup in America may make us more snobbish -- "Well, I for one still care about my appearance" -- but I think we draw greater satisfaction from it than a Frenchman does because we look around and see baggy cargo shorts and jelly beans and think to ourselves, "God, that could've been me..."

People in the Latin countries are more likely to take those pleasures for granted, having grown up with them, while the Americans who enjoy them don't process them in such a narrowly hedonistic way -- we feel a humbling sense of gratitude because throughout our daily lives we see how fragile civilized ways of eating and dressing are.

Returning finally to newspapers, I'd bet that those Americans who appreciate good reporting get more out of it than the Germans or Italians do because, as the article notes, we have a much wider variety of news sources here, much of it free crap, while journalism in much of Western Europe is dominated by a few high-quality sources. Reading the WSJ isn't merely rewarding -- it feels like they've come to the rescue! "Jesus, I almost had to go to CNN..."

And don't even get me started on how much more grateful we Americans are for Penelope Cruz than are the Spaniards, who take her for granted...

Why you might sensibly fight for a stunning but older woman

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The rise and fall of American journalism in one picture

Looks like the NYT's search engine now lets you search by date all the way back to its founding in 1851. Searching for the word "the" returns the number of "articles" in a given period -- I use quotes because it may have been only a few paragraphs or several columns long. Using this measure of output, here's the annual picture over time:


Output of articles has been stagnant, though with oscillations, since the early 1970s. The really sharp drop began in 1952, perhaps reflecting the spread of TV as a news source from then until TV was close to universal in the 1970s. WWII had a visibly negative impact, although not the Great Depression -- output stalled out but remained at an all-time peak throughout, with the most articles written in 1936. The period of fastest growth was -- you guessed it -- the Roaring Twenties (leaving aside a brief dip that may reflect the early '20s recession). Before that, growth was pretty steady except for the early 1890s and mid '00s (the banking panics then may have disrupted output).

I'm not concerned here about the financial health of the industry but rather the quality of the product. It's hard to quantify quality, but since newspaper articles are probably like books, movies, and TV shows, you need much greater sample sizes to find the rare gems. Small sample sizes give you a decent picture of normal distributions, but these things are more fat-tailed or "superstar" distributions.

So, knowing very little about the history of newspapers, and using only this incredibly crude measure of quality, I predict that true journalism lovers will revere the 1920s and 1930s the most, with the '40s and '50s in second place (the absolute level is slightly lower, but it was also trending downward rather than upward, and we don't like downward trends). Output was greatest then, so it must have discovered more superstar articles than in other periods. As a rough check, judging from bibliographies the '20s and '30s look like the peak periods of activity for both Walter Lippmann and H.L. Mencken.

Who said quality is so hard to measure?

The best bread substitute -- huge honking pork rinds

Whether you're gluten-intolerant or following a low-carb diet in general, you occasionally want something like toast, bagels, etc., to pile your egg salad on top of, to provide a sturdy base for a stack of lunchmeat and cheese, and so on. Most options are made from grains and seeds, and the human digestive system isn't designed for grains, and neither is that of any of our primate relatives.

Today I found the perfect substitute -- pork rinds the size of pizza slices. Usually the fat is cut into pieces similar in size to chips, but Guerrero makes some called "chicharrones gourmet" where they've thrown an entire canvas of pork fat into the deep fryer.

Tonight I made low-carb pizza with them, and it tasted better than any other homemade pizza I've ever made. They're not flat, so you have to break off some of the curled areas, but you still get a pretty big piece to work with. Around the edges they were very crisp, like thin-crust pizza, and toward the center the tomatoes and olive oil had softened them somewhat, making them slightly pliable like doughy pizza slices. The real difference, though, was not tasting a bunch of flour. Pork-flavored pizza crust -- hard to beat it.

I also made some salmon salad, and the curly pieces I'd broken off of the big ones worked great as a cracker substitute. Ditto for carrying the side of liverwurst that I had. And again, pork crackers taste better than grain and seed crackers.

If it's more of a chip snack that you're looking for, Guerrero also makes something called "chicharrones de cerdo," where the skin is left attached to the fat before deep frying. They're very crunchy and taste much richer than the skinless type -- no surprise there.

I'm not sure how widely available these Guerrero products are, since they seem to be targeted at Hispanics, but they're definitely worth looking for.