Proven Winner

It’s honestly Andrew Jackson Downing’s fault as much as anyone else

It’s really a cultural thing—there so many cultivars basically because there were a lot of apple nerds in the 18th and 19th centuries, and enough in the 20th to keep it alive

There’s a little bit of a treadmill of responding to disease pressures as they crop up but no I think the idea that cultivars inherently degenerate over time is a myth afaik

It’s apple guys. Bought scions today and half the descriptions were like: “German variety from 1584. Prone to scab, fire blight, and rust. Low-yielding, fruit require 3 months storage to develop their classic flavor, with notes of liquorice and wet cigarettes. Perennial best-seller, supply limited.”

Not necessarily in a good or bad way, just different

It’s striking how different this is from what even the most bike-pilled pedcel transportation planners in the US would come up with

If Mamdani does go through with universal daylighting that would actually be a relevant bit of revenue, but I doubt he’s considering lost revenue from hypothetical parking meters that doesn’t exist yet.

This makes some sense on a macroeconomic level but I kind of doubt it would play out in practice. Streetscape projects that remove parking are typically so piecemeal— I doubt the lost revenue will drive decision making when removing 2-4 spaces at a time.

also I hate its little mouth so much

I feel like “Scrotum Jokes” has to be a whole section in the employee handbook.

sometimes you just have stop and wonder at the fact that planters peanuts not only built a giant scrotum-shaped car but also named it the nutmobile

Do kids today still have ready access to David Macaulay books or do we need to organize some sort of airdrop program around this?

My apologies to the horse girlies but I said what I said

The average donkey is a miserable bastard, but one you can negotiate with. Horses are essentially malign spirits that are temporarily bent to your will with the equivalent of a pentogram drawn in salt.

I have spent a fair amount of time in the company of horses and donkeys, and my conclusion is that domestication, even in closely related ungulates, follows wildly divergent paths.

if you think “anarchists” are driving transit policy in any us city you may be spending too much time on x dot com the everything app

there’s this annoying thing that happens to certain urbanists types where they get yelled at by like 3 communists with furry pfps and then they start acting like every american transit agency is run by the local chapter of food not bombs

I get that golf should be on the list here but it feels slightly different to me. Maybe what I’m getting at is “hobbies that taught people how to think a certain way, with unfortunate results when that way of thinking becomes widespread outside of the confines of that particular pastime.”

I’m tempted to say Dungeons and Dragons too. I think D&D has definitely had a pretty bad influence on fiction at least.

A game I sometimes play is trying to think of what seemingly benign things have had wide reaching and malign influences on society. Fantasy sports feels like one of the big ones here.

my position on jasmine crockett is the same as my position on graham planter: i live in rhode island

batboy and I are about the same age so im just sentimentally attached I guess

Has anyone ever recreated a comprehensive record of batboy’s life as reported by the weekly world news? Is batboy canonically still alive? This seems like something the internet would be on top of but I can’t find the answers I’m looking for.

I think part of it is that trump has like 50 years for which “i know the mayor of New York, he’s a friend of mine” is a core part of his self-identity and as he actively descends into dementia that part sometimes overrides the part of him that remembers he’s president.

Makes strong men

yeah when people strip the wire out of the walls it’s not because they forgot how electricity works

im washed enough at this point that i learn about what the youth are up to from magazine articles so what do i know, but it does feel like the “hating women” part of heterosexuality is increasingly passing from subtext to text for teen boys in a way im not a huge fan of!

i dont know how many saturday nights i spent in high school in the company of other boys, texting friends to find out what they were doing, and above all, were there other girls there? we wanted to talk to girls so bad!

heterosexuality is always constructed, but it’s kind of striking to me that the version of performative masculinity I grew up in and was inculcated into was based on, at some level, liking girls and wanting to be around them, and im not sure that’s true anymore?

What is The Birth of a Capital? This post is decades in the making. Since high school, I have been interested in a particular part of my childhood that neighbors discussed uneasily, or apologetically, if at all. The big park up the ...

Routinely, I am asked, "Why is DC *like that*?"

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