Amazon's exclusive original Christmas songs kind of feel like the Monkees consciously imitating the early Beatles

A dwindling number of businesses currently operating in these older suburbs go back that far, but the fraction that do are the closest you can get to time travel. A whole vanished world is contained within them.

Only time will tell whether Amazon has meaningfully added to that old-fashioned canon of popular Christmas music. But it's a fun and worthwhile effort. @ad-mastro.bsky.social on Amazon's original Christmas songs: lnk.thebulwark.com/4jkvVbS

I'm in @thebulwark.com taking a look at Amazon's foray into Christmas music. While little or none of it is great, it's cool to see the company that's basically today's Sears injecting new energy into an American tradition www.thebulwark.com/p/amazon-exc...

Conversely high-capacity housing and high-capacity transportation are also analogous and complementary.

the anti phonics stuff was always insane to me because… like… just… why?

TIL that Frederick, Md., a booming DC-area suburb was, in the era of mass railroad building in the 1800s, was but a small town of around 10,000 people. No wonder the state's contemporary railroad lines bypass many of today's population centers (except Baltimore). @ggwash.org

I think I've improved quite a bit on articulating the overall point, but this, from Christmastime 2021, is one of the first pieces I wrote probing this question of why suburbanites don't perceive legacy small towns as fundamentally urban places

I think on some level conservative NIMBYs oppose more housing because they dislike the idea of young people having more choices in how their lives are going to unfold

"It’s one thing to say we consume too much stuff. But it’s another thing to judge what does or should be meaningful to an individual person. Nobody really needs a Christmas clock. But I still want mine."

One of the most fascinating rabbit holes I've gone down, and which I think I could go down further, is the way that retail stores become less densely packed as they get bigger. Something about density operates from the scale of the metro area all the way down to store floorplans.

I did not think a casual visit to the old Walmart in Clinton, New Jersey was going to dovetail with a whole bunch of thoughts I've had lately about business in America today, but it did. Stay tuned!

Two ways to think of big-box stores: as 1) imitating traditional pre-car urbanism in their floorplans; 2) centralizing enterprise in a way which expands the scale of commerce

Trump: If we build more housing, the price of homes will go down, and homeowners will lose their wealth.

"The essence of suburban big-box retail is classic car-free urbanism."

You can overlay trendy buzzwords onto this: “farm-to-table,” “artisanal,” etc. But whatever the form, the substance is basically life and commerce as we’ve always done it. And even a modern Walmart still contains a trace of that old pattern.

There are roughly 20 departments in a Walmart; there are roughly 20 small businesses in this portion of Flemington, which is more than half of the downtown area. This is really striking. It’s a land-use story, but it’s also a story of commerce and scale.

A Walmart property is more or less the same size as the downtown of a small town. And its internal floorplan is quite a bit like a street grid. It's ironic that something like walkable, car-free urbanism can be had *inside* a suburban box store www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/archive-di...

It's striking how much of the DNA of a gridded downtown is preserved under the roof of a suburban big-box store www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/archive-di...

This is one of my favorite pieces, taking a look at big-box stores from a bit of a different perspective for an urbanist: in some ways, a suburban box store is an enclosed, car-free urban shopping district

Places with greater population & density give people with non-traditional, weird, frowned upon, or otherwise "unusual" (non-derogatory) lifestyles a place to exist relatively free from persecution. Probably some people hate cities *because* monitoring & controlling others is more difficult in them.

Pro-family means pro-housing

I knew the store that led to the creation of Toys ‘R’ Us was in Washington, D.C. I did not know that the first true Toys ‘R’ Us store was in Rockville, Maryland. But it was, and it’s still standing.

Last chance to subscribe to my daily urbanism-focused newsletter, The Deleted Scenes, with my holiday-season discount!

The oldest small-town Woolworth's store in here that became a brewpub is pretty good! Tried it today in Somerville, NJ. www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/that-old-s...

There is something curious about the way we use old buildings to read a kind of stability into the past, when in reality they are living symbols of the building spirit our towns had in earlier era

"There’s almost a kind of superstition at play here: if I never go through this stuff, I won’t age." www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/sacramenta...

To be pro-family must mean to be pro-housing

The first Toys 'R' Us store in America, opened in 1957, is still standing www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/the-first-...

I suppose both because I’m good at it and used to it, I forget that it’s actually pretty impressive to maintain something like this, at a high level of creative and technical quality, for this long. When I think about it, I probably do a better job.

"I can’t say that this is definitely 'the last town in America.' But it looks very much as one would expect such a place to look, and it comes from the time you would expect to see a last appearance of such a form."

Last chance to subscribe to my daily urbanism-focused newsletter, The Deleted Scenes, with my holiday-season discount!

"I am probably so simpatico with Strong Towns because I also fundamentally am uncomfortable thinking about things 'politically,' and I also ultimately want to give NIMBYs the benefit of the doubt."

"You subtly absorb the damage of violating your principles. You keep the stupid Walkman shell, like a useless totem, a communion wafer without a priest, or you immolate your worldview."

At the end of the day, my pre-Christmas week discount for new subscribers ends. Check out my pieces this week that I published at my daily, urbanism-focused newsletter, The Deleted Scenes. Monday's piece was a somewhat abstract defense of building things: www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/grasping-a...

"There it is. That is the building—shot by me on December 10, 2025—which housed America’s very first Toys ‘R’ Us."

Urbanism requires humility. It implies pluralism. It implies acceptance of new things that are not bad, but which may not be comfortable to us. It implies curiosity. It pushes us out of the idea that our preferences are the same as the public interest.

YIMBYism is about sex. And not just sex; it is about building the homes in which the next generation will be conceived and born and raised; about filling in and thickening up the neighborhoods in which they might one day be able to live.

At the end of the day, my pre-Christmas week discount for new subscribers ends. Check out my pieces this week that I published at my daily, urbanism-focused newsletter, The Deleted Scenes. Monday's piece was a somewhat abstract defense of building things: www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/grasping-a...

The thumbnail picture is the first Toys 'R' Us store ever. It's still standing and I found it. www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/the-first-...

You could say, for example, that writing one of these newsletters is a little like having a radio show. But I think it’s held together thematically a little more than that thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/what-kind-...

A fun reuse of an old small-town downtown Woolworth's store: brew pub. Somerville, New Jersey

ICYMI: by far my most-read piece this week (and I'm offering new subscribers a discount till the end of today!)

A great Christmastime deep dive on the early history of Toys 'R' Us, plus my hunt for the building in Rockville, Maryland where the first Toys 'R' Us in the United States opened www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/the-first-...

Trying to work through whether it's mature or immature to read significance into material goods

A lot goes into publishing something, and here I write about the actual process of producing a daily newsletter

This is like the key fallacy of NIMBYism. A unit of housing will cost less but your single family lot will increase in value a ton if building denser on it is legalized. You're conflating a plot of land with a single unit of housing.

An even better protection is not having to rely on a car for almost everything

In the 1740s, George Washington - yes, that George Washington - surveyed a tiny city in central Virginia. America has always true urbanism. What we today call "small towns" are cities whose origins and identity we have forgotten. www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/americas-u...