As of April 2026, approximately 42% of households in New York City own at least one personal bicycle, translating to roughly 1.3 million bike-owning households across the five boroughs. New York City has been encouraging alternative forms of transportation since the early aughts, finally publishing a full-blown Strategic Plan in 2008. The benefits were clear: cycling improves public health, saves roads from wear, lowers emissions, and makes streets safer. Tapping into the zeitgeist of the trending urban planning phenomena of smart cities, the only feasible solution was to instill a bike share system. Cue the Citi Bike.

Clunky, shoddily maintained, and aesthetically disappointing, the Citi Bike program was delayed by Hurricane Sandy before finally launching in May 2013 with a fleet of 332 stations and 6,000 bikes. It was originally operated by Alta until it was acquired by the ride-share giant Lyft in 2018. The program has grown considerably over the past decade, reaching upwards of 5.1 million rides in a single month. As of 2023, there are 180,000 annual subscribers. This number might sound small as a percentage of NYC's total population, but it represents millions of annual trips and does not account for single-ride tourists and locals.

Lyft isn't offering a public service out of goodwill. In fact, the ride share giant gets benefits from subsidizing its bikes and maintaining its operations. Single trips cost $4.99 for 30 minutes plus $0.27 per additional minute, with e-bikes racking up even higher per-minute fees. If you don’t want to pay for each individual trip and consider yourself a frequent flyer, you can sign up for the aforementioned subscription options, which currently stand at $239 per year. The issue isn't paying for transit, it's paying a corporation instead of our city.

Like every for-profit corporation, the need to make capital is fundamental to its continued existence. When Citi Bikes were first rolled out, they were reportedly only in neighborhoods that were considered financially viable. As a 2018 Vice article explains, “[while] Citi Bike launched in Manhattan and Brooklyn in 2013, it has taken more than five years to reach the city’s least affluent borough where 29% of residents live in poverty—more than twice the national average—and most are either Latino or black.” Think the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Dumbo, etc. Places like Kensington (Brooklyn), Flushing Meadows (Queens) and Norwood (Bronx), were initially outside of the Citi Bike roll out radius, providing another way to be in a transit desert. It’s not a secret that the farther you go from financial centers, the less maintained the roads, subways, traffic signals, etc. are.

There is also nothing stopping Lyft from raising the price of trips astronomically over the course of the year, months, or even overnight. That, coupled with the incredible terms and conditions that no one reads makes it a rather “at Lyft’s whims” kind of relationship. Finally, Lyft also captures your data to track flight paths, gentrification flyers, and other aspects of your trips. In exchange for subsidizing the bike share program, Lyft gets an additional revenue stream via subscriptions or day passes as well as a piggy bank of data to sell to corporations looking for urban demographics. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a Whole Foods is coming to Bushwick. Lyft fronted the cost of the bike share program in exchange for what is essentially passive income with quarterly customer data packages. It’s genius, from, like, a corporate overlord perspective.

So why are we ceding public space and transit revenue to Lyft? Bike share systems belong in the same civic category as subways and buses. I would like to be clear with the intention of this article, if it ever somehow gets to Mayor Mamdani’s desk. I do not oppose a shared bike share system, and in fact I believe it fundamental to the efficacy of all cities. However, I do wonder why, after nearly a decade of using Citi Bikes, we still continue to use them.

The only benefit of this private-public partnership is the hardware. Isn’t it high time that NYC benefits from the infrastructure too? My proposal isn’t unique; Street reporter David Meyer proposed a similar concept in 2018 around the same time when Lyft took over and even NYC’s own Independent Budget Office (IBO) issued its own critical analysis of this system last November.

Outsourcing public transit to a private company is like renting a house indefinitely. It might save upfront capital, but you end up paying far more over time without acquiring any equity (and I say this as a rent paying New Yorker). Transit is a civic right and funds should thus go back into the system which maintains it. Bike share systems are beneficial for the city in the way that subways and taxis are. The equivalent as it stands now would be to spend the 3 bucks for a one way subway ticket and have the funds go to Chipotle or Amazon. It would be different if there were multiple bike share systems, sort of how we have the classic NYC Taxicabs with Uber and (yes) Lyft. But it’s not. Lyft has the sole monopoly on NYC’s bike share space.

NYC should have its own bike share system!

Bike share systems owned by the city itself are not novel concepts. Plenty of cities have city-owned bike share systems. Chicago has the Divvy and our lovely neighbor Philadelphia has Indego. Internationally, Montreal has BIXI and Barcelona has Bicing. All of these are examples of the city owning its own bike share system. While the operations might be subcontracted, it’s the city who primarily owns and benefits from it. Transitioning to a municipal system requires political will and administrative heavy lifting, but it is far from impossible. What’s stopping NYC from doing the same?

In this theoretical rearrangement, the Parks department could fund and maintain the bikes, not dissimilar to the boats in Central Park. If you’re wondering about maintenance, surely working on bikes isn’t too much of a lift for them? And it could also be an opportunity for job creation. We have arborers, park rangers, and Recreation Specialists. Can’t we have a resident bike person?

After the initial set up of the infrastructure, licenses, RFPs, and other Kafkaesque components of city operations (note: the author used to work at the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services), the program could be self sustaining. In addition to the eventual dividends that would go straight back into the city’s capital veins, there is another boon to taking back the bike share system with our own: an opportunity to promote culture and community.

In lieu of blocky and ugly Citi Bike ports, the city could host design competitions for bike racks. If you think that’s silly, it’s not. Just last year, the CEI Arts Education’s BENCHMARK program accomplished something in similar vein. Created in 1989 with the mission of ‘empowering students to create murals on benches to inspire their communities’, CEI Arts Education has tapped over 550 student artists from Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island (sorry, Queens) to create murals that are exhibited in NYC parks every summer. The benches aren’t just aesthetics, they are meant to show what matters to the students who created them, with each student-selected theme showcasing topics like the environment, cyberbullying, and strengthening our communities.

Imagine if your communities had bike racks that represented your neighborhood’s values. NYC is commonly referred to as a ‘melting pot’, and each neighborhood has its own identity. These bike stalls could function not only as an artifact of community pride but an activator for students, neighborhood artists, and non-profits to co-create and engage with their community.

In addition to this, you could have city sponsored fitness classes and tours. The aforementioned Recreation Specialist’s literal job description includes: “[the development of] fun and engaging programs in sports, fitness, art, tech, and outdoor adventure at New York City parks and recreation centers for individuals of all ages and abilities.” If that role is stretched too thin, fear not. NYC has roves of non-profits dedicated to cycling. A great example is Bike NYC, which offers free bicycling teaching classes for adults and minors.

Then there’s the dark horse of rider data. Rather than letting a corporate operator harvest and monetize New Yorkers' movement data, those insights should belong to public city planners optimizing transit infrastructure. I’m not the biggest fan of this, but it’s the lesser of two evils. Furthermore, pricing wouldn't fluctuate at a corporation's whim as rates would undergo public oversight, just like bus and subway fares.

Bicycling, for some, is more of a way of life than it is for others. But I’d be hard pressed to meet any cynic that would deny learning to ride a bike as a rite of passage for childhood. The inspiration for this article came from a walk in Prospect Park, where I passed by a father teaching his daughter how to ride a bike. They had rented a Citi Bike and were making clumsy yet confident progress. Maybe next time you rent from a bike share, you’ll be using a bike that was someone’s first.

…but wouldn’t it be totally awesome if the bikes were OURS instead of owned by a corporation?

For New Yorkers, instead of the automobile as our main form of transit, we travel through the tunnels like the little pizza rats we are. We pay higher rent in exchange for closer proximity to the ‘pulse’ of culture. Yet one of the most quietly accepted inconveniences of city life is the lack of amenities. These come in all shapes and sizes, but the fact remains: it is less likely that a typical New York City apartment has the various tools, gadgets, and instruments which a larger house can afford and employ. I’m talking dishwashers, which simultaneously confuse and intimidate me, and garbage disposals, the noise of which frightens me. We forgo closet space and garages and basements and attics. Just the concept of “laundry in unit” is enough to convince your friends you married into the Rockefellers.

We have buildings dedicated to providing these necessary services. What are we to do if we don’t have laundry in our apartment and the building does not have laundry in the basement? We take our unmentionables to the elements and head to the nearest laundromat with a sherbet-colored vat of multi-syllabic chemicals.

It’s grueling work and at times hyper inconvenient. The alternative, of course, is simply buying new clothes, but that’s insane. Thus the labored but not unfamiliar posture of a person lugging large, shapeless lumps across cracked sidewalks, street vendors, and yes, over the occasional dog turd. But within this biweekly ritualized grooming, there exists a transparency: Laundry day is a collectively shared inconvenience. No one wants to go to the laundromat because they want to, it’s because they have to.

The laundromat is one of the few places where the neighborhood regularly bumps into itself. Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter called these everyday relationships ‘weak ties’ in his 1973 essay The Strength of Weak Ties. Strong ties are your friends and family. Weak ties are the people who quietly populate your everyday life: your bodega owner, the barista, the MTA station manager on a smoke break, etc. In walkable neighborhoods, these ‘weak ties’ are what make a community feel like a community. Granovetter argues that these ordinary interactions do more to bind communities together than we often realize. In this sense, the humble laundromat does more for establishing your community as a community than any once-a-summer street fair ever could.

But doing laundry is more than simply getting your clothes ready for next week’s inevitable stains and splotches. It is one of the few routines that requires us to share space with strangers. It is taking up space in your community. It is acknowledging that we are all a part of a system that we all agree to maintain.

The laundromat makes your private life briefly public. There is a strange equilibrium that occurs on laundry day. If any of us could afford in-unit laundry, we sure as heck would. But we can’t, and everyone knows that no one else can either. No one dresses up to go to the laundromat because all your clothes are currently being washed and dried. It’s easy to keep the peace in a laundromat when you’re in your rattiest T-shirt and least favorite pair of pants that you tugged out of your drawers for this precise occasion. Everyone has some form of “laundry pants”.

When it is laundry day, I toss everything in and then GTFO. If it’s during the day, I might sit at a café or head back home for that twenty-two-minute rinse cycle. If it’s in the evening, I might stop by for a beer a block down and tell the bartender that if I leave for ten minutes, don’t close out my tab because I’m coming back for the dryer cycle. But the most important aspect of this is that I leave all of my clothes out of my control. Technically, nothing is stopping someone from seeing my Billy Crystal-circa When Harry Met Sally sweaters in the dryer and making away with them before I come back from that aforementioned second beer.

Come laundry day, what we lose in convenience we gain in community interface. Trust, via ‘weak ties’, is built into the laundromat.

As Kurt Vonnegut said, "we're dancing animals." Laundry day is one of those dances, and the laundromat is the reluctant stage.

P.S.

For everyone who has ever just finished their laundry, taken it up three flights of stairs, poured their contents over their bed to fold, and discovered a pair of socks has now been reduced to single, lonely sock, I can assure you that those socks went to sock heaven and are doing fine.

P.S.S.

One time, when I was living in Greenpoint, I did my laundry with Arrested Development and Superbad actor Michael Cera. His washing machine broke and apparently he didn’t have an assistant or something. It was just the two of us. I asked if he was Michael Cera and he said yes and then I said okay and then we never spoke again to each other. He probably doesn’t remember. But Mr. Cera, if you do, I apologize for hounding you on laundry day.

One day I found myself in an Internet rabbit hole, facilitated by a potent edible. When I’m in this mode, I like watching cooking videos. On this particular evening, the culinary crash course I was partaking brought me on the topic of homemade hot sauce. Then THE ALGORITHM flirted with my inner sadist and suggested that I watch people reacting to hot chili peppers. Seeing people cry, wince, swear, and play an orchestra was enjoyable, but their reactions felt strangely performative. When did eating spicy foods became a gimmick which boiled down to “do a normal thing but with gastrointestinal discomfort”?

Then THE ALGORITHM led me to hot pepper eating contests. And oh boy, what a treat. To stand up on stage and eat increasingly more challenging and infernal vegetables1 for the delight of sadists was an experience that I could only begin to grasp. Their motivation was arcane and contradictive (I’ve already written on silly performances in the past). Why go through the pain for the pride of withstanding the most discomfort? There is no political office to be gained, no key to the city to be earned. The royalty of Pepper Land doesn’t knight you. If anything, you are forecasting an intense and highly discomforting bowel movement to everyone in attendance. So what’s the point?

We’re over thinking it here. Simply put, the peppers taste good.

If you look up the flavor profiles of the hot pepper you’ll find a myriad of nuances and complexities beyond the aggression of the peppers themselves. People report habaneros tasting sweet and floral. Scotch bonnets have a cherry / apple like undertone that gives way to a subtle but still grounding smokiness. If you’re thinking that it’s insane to identify these flavors through the heat and pain, you’re not alone. I too was skeptical until I embarked on this journey, much to the chagrin of my partner.

-Masochism-

I started out with jalapeños. Easy. Then I moved into habaneros, which remain to this day my favorite. Then onto ghost peppers with their bitter and earthy undertones. I pushed forward to even Scorpion Peppers, named for their distinctive “stinger” tail (for the spice and salt tolerant, scorpion pepper infused butter goes great with popcorn). Once I got accustomed to the heat, I found my tastebuds adapting. Soon I was able to taste the floral notes of the habanero, the pepper and coffee undertones of the Carolina Reaper.

The science behind hot peppers is fascinating. The burning heat you experience when biting down on a habanero or even the embarrassingly mild poblano is actually the release of the chemical compound capsaicin. If you want to get really nerdy, capsaicin works by binding to the TRPV1 receptors in your skin, eyes, tastebuds, pretty much everywhere. Anyone who has gone to the bathroom after cutting up jalapeños knows what I’m talking about. But the sensation of spicy foods itself is not actually burning any part of you, rather, it’s an illusion. Your brain is tricked into thinking you are having a heart attack. I’m aware I’m not selling the experience here. But please know that any hothead is probably salivating, Pavlovian style.

Capsaicin has many benefits other than hardening your willpower. A 2014 study proves that this firecracker chemical reaction desensitizes your pain receptors, which helps with chronic pain. Another study released just last year denotes a small but not insignificant inhibitor of boosting your metabolic rate by at least 5%. When taken as a raw chemical compound, you can also weaponize it, ie. pepper spray. Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly relying on the numbing benefits of the compound for drugs like Qutenza, which helps with shingles, and Civamide, which unexpectantly, assists with cluster headaches.

But the greatest aspect of eating hot peppers is not so much the flavor nor the victory over a self-administered gastro-intestinal obstacle course no one asked you to do. As any pepper head will attest, it’s the ensuing high and the come down from the capsaicin released and then subsequently absorbed into your system. The high is powerful. Did I mention it’s organic? And you can get it in sauce form, too.

-Capsaicin Cold War-

But behind every hot sauce is of course the mighty and angry pepper. Many farms dedicate a patch in their acres for hot peppers, with most of them coming to your grocery stores and farmers markets in late summer / early autumn.

Then you have the agricultural psychopaths, with the crown going to none another than spice daddy himself, “Smokin’ Ed” Currie2. Those not already in the know might know him from Epicurious and or First We Feast. Mr. Currie is the owner of the interestingly named PuckerButt Pepper Company and is responsible for creating the hottest pepper in the world, the Pepper X. This atomic bomb measures at 2.69 million SHU (short of Scoville Heat Units. For reference, jalapeños have at most 8,000 SHU) . Mr. Currie created this pepper in the way any mad scientist would; by simply looking at what was and deciding what could be, but without heeding Dr. Ian Malcom’s introspection from Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”. The enigmatically named Pepper X is the Frankenstein combination of the world’s previous hottest pepper (also grown by Currie) the Carolina Reaper (2.2 million SHU) and, pausing for emphasis, a secret pepper given to him by a friend.

While Mr. Curry is the reigning champion of gastro-artisan nightmare vegetables, he is not the only one in the arena. There are others who aim to take the crown of the Spicy Daddy. The pepper triad of Wahid Ogeer and brothers Nigel and Russel Rooplal previously held the 2012 World’s Hottest Pepper title with their Trinidad Moruga Scorpion pepper, with Mississippian Butch Taylor of Zydeco Farms previously holding the 2011 with the self-named “Butch T” pepper.

If you do the math here, you’ll find that Sizzle King3 Mr. Curry has held strong with the world’s hottest pepper accolade for ~15 years, with both the Carolina Reaper and Pepper X. Is there anywhere to go but up? The answer is yes. Word on the street is that Mr. Curry currently has the pepper equivalent of an atom bomb in his farm / laboratory / secret liar. He’s simply waiting for one of his lagging rivals to beat Pepper X, if possible, before releasing it to the public in what one might consider an act of chemical warfare. His “secret farms” are patrolled with pickers who carry fire arms. He’s withholding the spiciest pepper in human existence as a gambit.

It’s not a far stretch of the imagination to picture these hot pepper breeders with their capsaicin burned fingers hovering over a fire-engine red button. The state of the pepper eating world is currently akin to a Capsaicin Cold War, and luckily, because Mr. Curry is leagues above his opponents, the clock is pretty far from striking midnight.

As Smash Mouth says:

My world’s on fire, how ‘bout yours? That’s the way I like it and I’ll never get bored.

-I’m sorry I’m like this-

And since you’ve made it this far, I’d like to offer a humble and much delayed public apology to my partner. Sauteed ghost peppers might be delicious to me, but they sure do turn the kitchen into what I can only assume is a previously undiscovered circle of Hell. And also a preemptive apology for this summer too.

Now to quote The Red Hot Chili Peppers:

Can't stop, addicted to the shindig.

The principles of Taekwondo (which break down as Tae- (foot), Kwon- (fist), and Do- (way)) were ignored to satiate my Power Rangers and Dragon Ball Z power fantasies. I would return home flushed with sweat and knuckles raw from pounding a miniature punching bag, which would make me feel like I was leveling up in the “Don’t Fuck with Me” department. It was then that my step-siblings pestered our parents to take classes, and before I could protest it was the three of us away for an hour, every Monday and Thursday.

And then things got weird.

Within a week the other neighborhood kids caught on, enthralled by this mismatched child cohort strengthening our collective minds, bodies, and spirits. Our cul-de-sac, nestled deep within some hardly cleared New Jersey Pine Barrens (home of the Jersey Devil) lower income housing settlement, had 8 different families. Each family had 1-4 children, so we’re talking +/- sixteen kids all of roughly the same age. And like most children who covet what they do not have, the need to incorporate martial arts into the fabric of your soul spread from house to house with as much rush as trying to feed your Tamagotchi before its digital, neglect induced death.

The next week my karate class had nearly tripled in size. Now it consisted of a couple weirdos like me, my tag-along step-siblings, and quite literally the entire cul-de-sac of all children between the ages of 6-11. When not in the dojo, our combined backyards took the rigidity of a war training camp, as if we were preparing to overtake the neighboring cul-de-sacs by force. We would walk barefoot on rocks and pine needles to harden our feet (Tae). Trees became targets to strengthen our fists (Kwon). I myself started meditating, whatever the fuck that meant for an 8-year-old (Do).

And then things got weird. Again.

The psychic wave of influence jumped from the collective childhood cohort to the parents. I’m not sure whether it was our suburban training regimen or a reflection of their lost childhoods but within two weeks every adult, including my parents, had donned adult-sized Doboks and cinched a sweat absorbed white belt over their aged bodies. The adult classes, a historic and inspiring first for the dojo and no doubt to the financial boon of the sensei, proceeded after the child classes. Each generation would take turns waiting for the other to finish. To watch your grown father be instructed on how to kick a rubber torso by a man whose only ethos was the color of his belt was nothing short of humbling. The sensei was obviously unequipped to handle the now quadrupled class size, ages from 6-50+, and simply repeated the lesson from the child classes to the adult, almost verbatim. A student was a student no matter the egregious chronal discrepancy.

I really dislike that fuckwit Andrew Tate’s schema of “Alphas” vs “Betas”, but we were a cul-de-sac of betas. One would think that the now intergenerational tag-team of living weapons that were our bodies would make civil disputes like lawn encroachment or parking spaces battlegrounds to test our mettle, animal kingdom style. This could not be more incorrect. In fact, the very truth of our community’s collective fighting prowess was transparently quantified. We all knew not a single one of us could kick any other person’s asses. There could be no neighborhood bully because we were all primed to be bullied. We were a village of white belts. There was an equal playing field in every permutation of relationships; siblings older and younger, the hot neighbor down the street, the used car salesmen, even my bartending step-mother and line cook father. All of us were as good at fighting as everyone else. If our cul-de-sac were to encounter a rival cul-de-sac that had even one yellow belt, we would be at a mathematical Taekwondo disadvantage and would thus have to acquiesce to their serfdom.

Fads, by definition, leave as fast as they arrive, and the Suburban Karate Craze of 2002 was no exception. The white-belt graduate ceremony into the second rank of yellow belt did not scale with the advent of the adult class. For the uninitiated, this rite of passage typically involved smashing a decently sized block of wood with your bare fist. If you are below the age of 10, this made you feel like a superhero. If you are above the age of 40, it seemed like, well, child’s play. Almost every adult, suddenly confronted with their own strangeness, did not attend the adult Yellow Belt ceremony. Most of the kids, seemingly off the hook themselves because their parents did not want to seem hypocritical, did not attend their ceremony either. I myself earned the yellow belt and thought myself the community’s protector, because I was, according to rank, the best fighter in the neighborhood.

Per Uncle Ben’s last words to Peter Parker: with great power comes great responsibility. But I didn’t want that responsibility. Because I was eight. So in the closet my yellow belt went, never to be seen again.

I’ve only had to throw down twice since my prudent retirement from the craft, but those are stories for another day.

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1) It is the diner capital of the world.

2) The cultural North-South divide on the “official” name of a delicious processed meat.

3) The Jersey Devil. Not the hockey team.

While the first two facts make me feel like a New Jersian, the third is what makes me feel particularly proud of being someone from South Jersey. The Jersey Devil is a Cryptid from the Pine Barrens. It’s not as popular as the A-listers like The Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. But do keep in mind that the Jersey Devil was featured in the 5^th episode of the X-files, an episode of Supernatural, and a handful of cheaply funded documentaries aired on (gasp) The SyFy Channel. So, we have at least achieved local celebrity status.

The story goes that Joseph and Mary Leeds were living in incredible poverty in the Pine Barrens. When Mary became pregnant with their 13^th child, she screeched “Let the child be the devil”. Quickly after the child was born, it grew large bat wings and a goat head, adopted the body of a horse (complete with horseshoes, somehow) and flew away, but not before incinerating the house in the process. This is the Galloway interpretation, which is a county about 23 miles away from Atlantic City. But the lore actually exists in state of limbo. Esteville, near Mays Landing, claims instead of Ms. Leads being poor, she was a witch (apparently being a wealthy witch is an oxymoron). The point is that there is no objective truth to the origins of the Jersey Devil, but everyone can agree that it haunts our spooky Pine Barrens.

If you think all this is a little weird, it probably is. New Jersey is canonically weird. There is a whole magazine dedicated to it. Weird NJ started in 1989 and ran content exclusively focused on New Jersey for about fifteen years before jumping to other states. This publication covers everything from UFO sightings, strange architecture, abandoned silos, etc.. Outside of our famous Cryptid we have local haunts like Clinton Road, of which I’ve personally experienced the penny loving Ghost Boy and the outright aggressive Ghost Truck. There is the Goosebumps-vibe Gingerbread Castle in Hamburg and the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital. I was nearly arrested exploring the latter sometime around 2012, but that’s another story.

So back to Cryptids. Outside of New Jersey, you’ve probably heard of a few: Sasquatch, Jackalope, Chupacabra. West Virginia has the creepy Moth Man and the even creepier Flatwoods Monster. Lake Champlain has Champ, who is sorta like a B-list Nessie. The list goes on. According to J.W. Ocker in his 2022 book The United States of Cryptids (probably available at your local library), there are approximately 66 Cryptids in the mainland United States alone. The point is that there are more Cryptids than you’d think, and with that comes regional folk lore, mythologies, and insider knowledge.

Engaging with Cryptids and spooky folklore encourages non-mainstream thinking. Cryptids, by definition, are inherently unproven. They exist primarily in the realm of dreamers, sleuths, and most importantly, mystery. With mystery comes whimsy. Imagine Salem without the Witch Trials. Entire towns have based their identity on their Cryptid, if only for commercial reasons. These are aptly referred to as “Cryptid Towns”, in which places like Point Pleasant, West Virginia, puts on the annual Moth Man Festival.

The fascination with Cryptids and folklore are important for small towns. These traditions provide necessary street-cred against all the other chaos and oddities of the world. Folklore formalizes a collective identity and shared historical knowledge on a community level. A great neighbor-to-neighbor inside joke passed down through generations. I’d like to point out that my “Galloway” telling of the Jersey Devil’s origins several paragraphs up was not something I learned on Youtube; it was told to me by my father on a long car ride when I was six or seven. What I did learn was that the lore actually changes on a county by county level.

When we ignore the strangeness around us, we make it easier for us to ignore what makes our communities so, well, weird. There is an untapped sphere of cultural identity that is lost in pursuit of truth, logic, and evidence. Why can’t the Jersey Devil exist? Whether or not our local monstrosity is real or not is irrelevant (it’s real), it’s the fact that those who engage with the folktale are those who typically find enjoyment in the mystery and unknown.

To acknowledge and embrace our homegrown folktales and oral traditions is to celebrate them. People need to be apart of a greater whole, and traditions are one of the first binding agents in our communities. Yet to discourage the weird is to create an identity vacuum often filled with sports teams, brand names, and politics. Sometimes they intersect, but not often. I recognize that championing Cryptids is itself to become one with a brand, but at least it’s your brand and one that has historical and community roots that you can share with your neighbors. To embrace the weirdness of your town or neighborhood is to appreciate the immediate environment in which you engage and exist. Go to your local ghost walking tour, read Atlas Obscura and filter for your town or state. The world is an Advent Calendar of impossible woodland creatures and blink-and-you-miss-it deformed 13th children.

To quote Fox Mulder: I want to believe.

I’ve mentioned in a previous article about how movie theaters are not third spaces. Libraries function as the inverse in that they are quintessential third spaces. They are open in the day time hours, hold community events, and have plenty of entertainment. The only thing missing is the access to coffee, of which you can bring your own. Some libraries, such as the Brooklyn Central Library, have full-on media centers.

Libraries offer more than just the loaning of books and a comfortable environment to read the New Yorker or tap into their free wi-fi. There are chess clubs, community boards and afterschool programs. There are free classes for helping immigrants prepare for their citizenship test. In the age of AI, institutions like the Queens Public Library have even incorporated free seminars to teach you about how to use AI responsibly. In addition to all of these boons, libraries have also functioned as a food shelter and safe place for the less advantaged and homeless to temporarily rest. During the melt-worthy New York summer (if anyone was around in 2025, we had several days above 100 degrees), libraries functioned as cooling centers.

Holding up these benefits is the Interlibrary Loan System. Have you ever asked for a book to be put on hold? That’s the loan system. Have you ever had a librarian say that your book was in another branch, and they can have it shipped to you? That’s the loan system. Each of the boroughs have their own finances and boards and employees and resources. For New York City, these are separated into: New York Public Library (88 branches across Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island), Brooklyn (62 branches), and Queens (66 branches). By partaking in shared resources, smaller and less equipped libraries can rely on their collective artefacts: books, laptops, air conditioning, citizenship tests, guides on what to do when you encounter ICE. Your neighborhood library might be out of Gravity’s Rainbow or Cooking with Carrots, but if you wait a little bit, you’ll get it from a couple towns over, and they will let you know when it’s ready.

Within New York City specifically, libraries are in constant threat of being underfunded or straight up closed down. In 2023, former New York City Mayor Eric Adams implemented budget cuts to invest in a higher police presence in the subways (that’s an article for another day). Libraries were hit with a 58.3-million-dollar reduction to their services, with an estimated 60% of the impact being towards both Manhattan and Brooklyn. Libraries were universally closed on Sundays, which seems like the least apt day to close a library, if you’re going to force a mandated closure at all (if you have to close one, maybe Wednesday?). This budgeting was restored in 2025 through the near Herculean endeavors of several advocacy groups, library staff, and city council members. What this shows is that while Adams was able to restore funding, he only did so under public duress. It’s like he didn’t expect people to care so much.

On top of everything, MAGA is coming for the Interlibrary Loan System. Two months after retaking office, Donald Trump issued an executive order to dismantle the Institute for Museum and Library Services. This is a federal agency that provides fundamental support to state libraries, which of course includes deciding the budget of state, city, and county libraries. Operational components, such as requisition of new books, updates to infrastructure, and providing Internet, are all within the realm of influence in this agency. Without the IMLS, each library would function as an island with their own funding sources. This would silo the efficacy of libraries and create a literal classist distinction between “rich” and “poor” libraries. The better libraries would presumably be in places where Whole Foods reigns supreme and with an abundance of transit i.e. the places with a higher median income. A participatory commons dessert.

Fortunately, this was federally blocked in November 2025, but the brandishing of the knife has already been communicated. In our capitalist reality consistently defined by class, the library as an institution is one of the last bastions of how we as a people can educate ourselves in a safe environment. The consistent attacks from both the state and federal fronts to eliminate the efficacy of libraries have fortunately been met with equal passion to preserve them. But how long can readers and writers like us maintain this stalemate? I’d like to say as long as it takes, but as some of the more conservative folks in power have illustrated, libraries are not a priority and are among the first on the chopping block.

Oh, and simply because you’ve made it this far, take a look at my library card. It’s spectacular. Get a library card. It’s free and it boosts numbers of engagement.

PS. I finished this piece in the beautiful Jefferson Market Library. I was just informed that it’s closing in 20 minutes, so I’ve got to go. Turns out librarians don’t live in some secret reading nook hovel accessed underneath their desks. Who knew.

Taken directly from Wikipedia, movie theaters are “…a business that contains auditoriums for viewing films for public entertainment. Most are commercial operations catering to the general public, who attend by purchasing tickets”. The rules are simple: buy a ticket, watch the movie, leave. There is a clear engagement loop in a movie theater, both as employees and as customers. You have already given your money; they have already rendered their services. Now go somewhere else. This creates a challenge for the bigwigs of movie theaters: with its function accomplished (you’ve now seen the movie) how else can they ensure you spend your money in the cinema before or after the film? By lingering, of course! To promote this behavior, movie theaters having recently begun to tap into the concept of a “Third Place”.

Established by urbanist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 essay The Great Good Place, a “Third Place” is any spot in a community that is neither your home nor work, but a rather a place you can frequent to be in public in a non or semi-commercial setting. In short, places you can “hang”. Think of your local café or bar. To be considered a Third Place, there needs to be a social component where your social battery can be charged, a place where you can be either anonymous in public or an active participant. Your grocery store is not a Third Place, nor is your laundromat – although technically they could be if you’re an odd duck. These are places that you cannot entirely force, nor assign value to. Places that, for the most part, run off vibes.

Third Places are spots you linger. Movie theaters need you to linger so you can spend more money. In the lens of movie theater design, there is a clear opportunity to tap into the sociological benefits of the Third Place in order to increase revenue. Movie theaters need to promote amenities in the way of karaoke or an arcade to mimic the organic nature of these Third Places. But movie theaters do not have the charm of the neighborhood bar nor the chillness of the café down the street. In the same way that corporations like Target will try to be “cool” and end up being ingenuine, the initiative to make movie theaters an established Third Place in our public consciousness comes off as phony and ineffective.

Herein lies our central problem: The seeds of a Third Place are planted in places like barbershops or the neighborhood dive because they happen organically. For movie theaters, it’s some top-down level of bullshit design in which the provision of amenities seeks to accrue capital by the “rule of cool”. Look, we have a bar! Look at our new arcade! We have karaoke! It is a capitalist wolf in community building clothing.

The kicker, of course, is that movie theaters already function as a Third Place, although not in the way that one typically experiences them. I posit here that movie theaters are not so much a way for neighbors to gather and contribute to a collective place-making but rather an unspoken exchange where everyone except the corporate overlords themselves share an inside joke.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever snuck food into a theater. It’s prohibited, FYI. Yet everyone does. I once saw my friend sneak an entire Five Guys burger in his coat. While this is an admittedly hyperbolic example compared to the Twizzlers or M&Ms you might bring, it only goes to show how open this secret has become. The workers are not really incentivized to stop you, so they don’t care. And the viewing public doesn’t want to say anything, because it would not only mean we are hypocrites, but most importantly, that we are narcs. Are you a narc? Of course not. We are protected by this unspoken social code.

There is an inverted display of power here. The corporate overlords of movie theater chains want their employees to imprison the thirteen-year-old bringing in Sour Patch Kids purchased at 1/8^th of the cost at the bodega next store. The workers are empowered to act as enforcers in service to their employer. Subverting this contractual expectation (employees protect assets) is a class unity manifested through Raisinets warmed by your breast pocket. A value dissonance not through the workers and the customers, but through those who seek profits from over bloated concession sales and those who want a cheap and accessible way to spend the afternoon. It is this value dissonance, or rather, value alignment, that fosters the organic nature of a Third Place.

People do not like to be told something is cool or fun. They need to experience these things themselves, and to embody it organically. There is community in movie theaters, but that fire is fanned not through customers and employees, but through the dialectic of Corporate Executives <> Everyone Else.

Movie theaters need to stop trying so hard. No one is asking for karaoke or pre-movie brunch. Let people have their secrets with strangers. We’re doing fine.

But what exactly constitutes a ‘chef’? We have our Gordan Ramseys, our Anthony Bourdains, our Ina Gartens. These are the people who are food first, personalities second (contrary to how Mr. Ramsey presents himself, he spent time working at La Tante Claire and Harvey’s before making a television appearance with his current mien).Then of course you have the celebrity chefs that are bombastic by design such as Emeril Lagasse and Mayor of Flavor Town himself, Guy Fieri. Yet even these former chefs have experience as, well, chefs. Sure they have adapted their culinary ethos to the Internet age, but they did get their start behind an actual burner.

So it’s an odd find to go to a bookstore and see cookbooks that are, for all intents and purposes, written by people specifically not chefs. What do Gwyneth Paltrow, Benny Blanco, and Snoop Dog have to say about the art and craft of cooking that more renowned giants haven’t already said? In what world would someone opt for Baywatch star Pamela Anderson’s cookbook I Love You: Recipes from the Heart instead of Thomas Keller’s masterclass tome, The French Laundry Cookbook? Would you buy a survival guide from Taylor Swift or Bear Grylls, the guy who eats snakes on television and uses camels like Tauntauns?

The answer is the obvious one: celebrity endorsements, celebrity advertising, celebrities being celebrities. The works. The publishing machine hides nothing: Snoop Dog, famous for other things beyond cooking, is a highly marketable person, and cooking is just one theater that his brand can conquer. Obviously there are some chefs who exist within the Venn-Diagram of the chefs | celebrities matrix: Babish got his start on the Internet recreating food from televisions shows (my favorite is always his reaction to Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s “milk steak”) and both “cool / nerdy in a Rivers Cuomo kind of way” Josh Weissman and “70’s punk aesthetic meets VSCO girl” Olivia Tiedemann got their momentum from posting videos. But it’s still them cooking. You can tell that these chefs in the era of culinary content creation still live and breath the culinary arts. If they weren’t making videos where they made wagyu smash burgers or homemade tortellini they would probably be working BoH for someplace trendy and awesome.

The standards for what constitutes a celebrity hobbyist and a professional are a fine line when taken through the veil of celebrity star power and the publishing industry. Fans of Danny Trejo might want his cookbook, Trejo’s Tacos. I had a cookbook that made Harry Potter inspired snacks when I was ten, and no doubt some publishing company filled their coffers using my need to have chocolate frogs and cookies shaped like the Golden Snitch. Yet there needs to be a difference between celebrities who simply enjoy cooking, and actual chefs who create user manuals for autodidactic upskilling. This lack of distinction and how we approach culinary texts are cannibalizing itself and weakening the authenticity of what a great cook book is. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat should be held in a higher regard than a musician who discovered that souffles and lobster thermidor impresses people at parties.

But then again, why does it matter? I bet no one else is losing sleep over this. If Dolly Parton’s cook book helps you be a better cook, so be it. I’m not trying to bash celebrity cookbooks, but I do think it’s worth highlighting that pop culture and star power have a top-down approach towards homogeneity. Cookbooks are now being published not by the merit of the food or the time spent cooking by the author, but more instead of their Instagram following or their ubiquity on Tik Tok. Perhaps it’s because most cook books have a picture of the author on the cover.

But 5 million followers can’t be wrong, right?

From an outside perspective, it’s simply showing off to a bunch of strangers that you don’t need spell check to write an SAT essay. It’s impressive in its own right, but nothing that’s worth putting on a resume. Yet somehow in the moment, being on a podium and asked to spell an esoteric medical term feels like it does matter, and what transpires is a very intense echo chamber where the stakes become very high over something so inconsequential.

Spelling Bees don’t have a lot going on beyond the fact that they, um, go on. Hot Pepper Eating contests, of similar vein, are just masochists performing for sadists and at the end of the day everyone goes home with a tummy ache. There aren’t any jerseys for this type of event. They seem to exist for the act of existing and bragging rights in a vacuum.

Above these mundane exercises, competitive eating does have an edge in the echelon of “inane activities somehow warped into a ranking system”. I think anyone in the scene can appreciate Joey Chestnut’s impressive display of gluttony as a spectacle (in addition to being the champion of eating Nathan’s weenies, he holds a plethora of world records that didn’t exist until he made them: 141 hardboiled eggs in Kentucky on 2013, 55 glazed donuts in California in 2017, 54 brain tacos in Minnesota in 2013. The list goes on).

But what really put Mr. Chestnut on the map was introducing the radical mind-bending strategy of efficient hotdog consumption: you dip the bun in water and use it to help pad down the encased mystery meat like a trash compactor. How obvious in hindsight! How beautiful in theory!

Like a chess master devising a new opening gambit, Joey Chestnut invented something new in the competitive eating scene.

So where is the Joey Chestnut for spelling bees?

And more importantly, is there room in the spelling bee paradigm to allow people like Mr. Chestnut to push boundaries? Spellers are given options of definition, origin, and usage in a sentence to level the playing field between themselves and the dictionary, but there is no method that’s the equivalent of “huh, well I suppose that is a more efficient way to eat a hot dog”.

But then again, why does it matter? One could argue that the joy of eating the most of anything scratches the same itch as being able to outlast someone in spice, or bragging rights for the best speller. Perhaps the Spelling Bee circuit is doing just fine, and it doesn’t need naysayers like myself trying to reinvent the wheel. The act is itself rewarding enough.

When I was younger my father once told me to make my bed and I said, “Why make your bed if it’s only going to get messy again?”

And he answered, “Why eat if you’re only going to get hungry again?”

Maybe that’s the message. I don’t know. I’ll go eat my feelings with something spicy and then practice spelling all the multi-syllable ingredients at the back of the box.

What makes these games spectacular is the humanity of it all. The writer’s did a great job on creating a very real Spider-Man. Don’t forget, he’s the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. That doesn’t mean he needs to be punching out Sandman or dodging lightning bolts from Electro. Sometimes its collecting pigeons. Sometimes it’s swinging with a bodega cat (pictured above, obviously). Sometimes it’s sitting on a park bench with an old man. Sometimes its delivering pigeons. That is what Spider-Man means to me. And my goodness, do these games get it. And what’s more, these games explore the intersectionality of Spider-Man with Peter Parker and/or Miles Morales. With Peter’s life specifically…it sucks. It just sucks. He’s alone and makes little dollars and has a house he can’t afford. If memory serves correctly, the first half of the first game he literally homeless. With few exceptions in recent Spider-Man media, these games capture the emotional, financial, and interpersonal strain being Spider-Man has on Peter’s and Miles’s life.

If you are a Spider-Man fan, I suggest playing these games. If you are New York City fan, feel free to walk around in superhero spandex. It’s still going to be a good time, although I promise you’ll want to swing.

Anyway, here is my take on a classic ‘about town’ a la the New Yorker. Except that it’s just me. I am not an architect or a chef or a movie maker. I’m hardly even a writer. Like most people, I am not qualified to give an opinion on anything, ever. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.

Literature //
Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

Mr. VanderMeer is a modern day champion of the New Weird Genre, which is a type of science-fiction that I have a great affinity for. Author of some of my favorite book series like “Area X” (the first book is better known as the film Annihilation to most folks) and the even more inventive and strange Ambergris saga, I came into this book expecting to be inspired and humbled. However, his somewhat newer novel, Hummingbird Salamander, was a near miss on all accounts. You would think that a noir-inspired thriller set during the beginning stages of an apocalypse fueled by the Anthropocene would fit in not only with his existing body of work. But alas, the story failed to capture any of the magic of his previous tales.

Every character was insufferable, the language was stilted and cold. The plot hardly made sense, and any symbolism, which I don’t really require for myself as important ingredients of a story, hit me over the head like a blunt object. It was hard not to be a tiny bit insulted. All the amazing concepts that the story hints at remain as taunting whispers. I hate to sound like any fan of a band that goes mainstream, but if Mr. VanderMeer’s further novels continue on this trend, I will be forced to declare to any hipster at The Strand who is unfortunate enough to be within my proximity, “His old stuff was better”.

Music //
Tennis Courts

Not to be confused with Baseball Fields or MMA Octagons, Tennis Courts is a band that I hold near and dear to my heart, even though I discovered them semi-recently. Galivanting around Washington Square Park one weekend, my partner and I were invited by this bowl cut wearing weirdo to go to his concert. Feeling full of joi de vivre, we went. No, Tennis Courts was not headed by that coiffure abomination, but he was the opener. We came for the weirdo, but stayed for the main event. There was literally one person in the crowd who found Tennis Courts when they performed at a dive bar in Tennessee two years ago, but he had enough STAN power for the entire venue.

Tennis Courts is headed by an entirely gifted duo. Their sound is indie-pop and has been described as "hyper-caffeinated”. I agree, but I’d also add gloomy and nostalgic, the feeling of being older and looking back at times that you didn’t think were important. Of weekend benders and being invincible to hangovers and seeing a high school crush at a hometown bar during Thanksgiving break. But it’s also of driving in the summer with the top of your convertible down, not that I own a vehicle. Give them a listen.

Movie //
Furiosa

I’m not sure if this is a hot take, but I don’t watch the Mad Max movies for Max. In fact, I don’t really watch it for anything other than how insane and unique the world is. Also, I like explosions. Like most millennials, my journey into the series came in reverse - I saw Fury Road in theaters and then started at the first one. Maybe I’m a product of my time, but Fury Road is my favorite over the original three. It was a great gift to see a return to this diesel fueled, anarchist-Australia through a character that I felt had more personality, screen presence, and arc than Max himself: the great Imperator Furiosa. In this prequel, where she is played now by Anya Taylor-Joy instead of Charlize Theron, she contends with an equally imposing Dr. Dementus, who is quite a different flavor than Immortan Joe.

This felt like it’s own movie, but not necessarily a necessary one. It was a treat to return to this desolate landscape, and everything was top-notch, but I’m not really into these movies for the story. In terms of narrative development, I don’t think Furiosa adds anything to the plot of the Fury Road, but it doesn’t really take anything away, either. As such, I’m viewing the movies in the way that Mr. Millar originally intended to film them: in parallel.

Television //
True Detective Season 1

My whole life people have pleaded with me to watch shows or movies that they just know that I’d love. Now, I’ve settled down to embark on this quest (hence this entire post). After 10 years, I’ve somehow discovered the beauty that is the first season of True Detective. Bleak, creepy, infuriating, and anxiety driven, no one in this show is redeemable in any sense. Matthew McConaughy’s character is a drunken, misanthropic, oddball. Woody Harrelson’s character is a drunken, waddling adulterer. Take these two simulacrums of decent humans and put them against a Lovecraftian backdrop in the bayou and you get True Detective Season 1. Picture this: eating a bag of Doritos and seeing that famous “Dorito dust” capped on your fingers. Rub them together and feel uncomfortable. That’s how it feels to watch True Detective. And you’ll end up loving it.

This show is a masterclass in character development and world building. While this show is nothing I haven’t seen before, I will still be holding any new cosmic-horror detective story against this. And it’ll be a hard champion to beat.

Art //
Glumlot

Prepare for a hypocritical contradiction.

I do not inherently support AI in the creation of art and its products. Perhaps I sound crotchety, perhaps it’s a resistance to change, I don’t know. But I do know that, as it stands today, I feel that AI actively weakens the relationship between artist and art. There are tools like Midjourney and Gemini which are mighty fascinating, but the product is of the software, not so much the artist. One could argue that you are training the AI to spit out what you want it to, but at the same time, it’s not really yours. It’s not like Yves Klein’s “Klein Blue” painting, where he literally created a color never seen before in the human spectrum. For AI, you are just pulling from an existing neural network. It’s not the same.

But.

And yet.

An Instagram account that I follow is Glumlot, an AI artist. My opinion still stands that I think AI is hokum, but that still does not stop me from enjoying the utter strangeness of Glumlot’s work. A quaalude laced cocktail of Tellytubby-esque fever dreams, liminal spaces, and 70’s low (high?) quality sci-fi pulp, Glumlot’s work is quite a delight if you’re looking to get uncomfortable. To say there is a vacancy of the soul in this output is to be misguided - there is a vacancy of the soul, but whatever has replaced it is insidious and teetering on the edge of delirium. I’m sure it won’t be the strangest thing I’ll see in this AI landscape, but it’s certainly one of the most unique.

My position still stands, however. Bite me.

Travels //
UFO & Paranormal Museum in Pine Bush, New York

A couple months ago I spent a long weekend in Walden, New York to go to the Angry Orchard Cidery. You’d think I would detail the amazing ciders, the deep red of the farmhouse, the apple orchard which surrounds the cidery. But instead I’d like to take you to somewhere a tad more unique: the UFO and Paranormal Museum in the neighboring town of Pine Bush, New York.

For those who don’t know (we certainly didn’t), Pine Bush is a world renowned hot spot of UFO activity, and a frequently travelled location for UFO chasers, conspiracy theorists, and d-level celebrities famous for appearing on the History Channel. The museum, designed by a man whose trade was building escape rooms, is split into two halves. The first half is dedicated to all things UFOs, testimonial sightings, news paper clips, “leaked documents”. It was all pretty legit, and I can actually see how someone could fall down a rabbit hole and attend UFO chasing conventions. The second half was for cryptids, which theoretically would have been amazing, had the bar not been set so high with the E.T. exhibit. The cryptid component had very little going for it sans one or two news articles, testimonials without ethos, and drawn pictures that looked very much like attempted suspect photos. The entire experience started legitimate (as much as it could be) and devolved into “have you ever seen Dogman? No? We haven’t either, but it would be really, really strange if you did, right?”

As I write this, I’m thinking now that the Pine Bush UFO and Paranormal Museum is exactly the type of establishment I’d run if I were an E.T. and trying to lay low. It’s a little too on the nose. Yet for what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure my friends and I were the only aliens wandering around that one-street town, gawking at the trees, the open space, and the vehicles like the urban denizens that we are.

Video Games //
Alan Wake

A creatively drained novelist takes his wife to the small, woodsy town of Bright Falls. What starts as a nice weekend getaway from New York City quickly delves into a nightmare world of light versus darkness, the novelist’s diminishing sanity, and the kidnapping of his wife, of which he is framed for her murder. On top of that, there is a ‘dark presence’ that aims to take control of the novelist’s narrative, both in his actual life and the new novel that he doesn’t remember writing. Sound like a Stephen King novel? You bet. Inspired by Twin Peaks? Obviously. What about Twilight Zone? Um, have you ever heard Night Springs?

But is it derivative? Absolutely not.

Alan Wake, release in 2006 by Canadian studio Remedy (responsible for games like Max Payne and Control, the latter of which is one of my favorite games of all time), one can learn a lot from this game in terms of storytelling, both narratively and environmental. The gameplay is very 2010, as are the graphics and voice acting, but it’s important to allow excuses for the time. That would be like judging the Rock in Scorpion King for the bad CGI. The game isn’t necessarily a horror game, although I’ve read that was the intent. It’s more atmospheric and uncomfortable. The quiet, small town of Bright Falls flips from a Stars Hollow to the sinister muck of Blue Velvet’s suburban hellscape during nightfall.

The gameplay is basic and not terribly challenging, although there are times when the shooting aspect can get tactical. The puzzles are embarrassing for all parties involved.

Yet, strangely, the sum is better than the whole of its parts. For Alan Wake, the story is the main reason for entry, as are the characters and the clear homages to its source materials. It’s more like watching a television series (the game itself is comprised of 5 ‘episodes’, each which end with a cinematic cliff hanger and a licensed song to entice the players to tune in next week). Honestly I’m surprised there hasn’t been a television adaption yet.

Architecture //
One River North by MAD Architects

Ever since grad school, I’ve always been irked when people would refer to their projects as “informed by”. For example, this building was informed by the natural landscape, this dish was informed by my culinary history of my grandma. It’s not informed, it’s inspired. Informed means that the relationship between you and your “muse” is top-down, that you, as the artist, designer, writer, chef, etc. are merely a humble vessel for the great mysteries of the cosmos. I mean, when scientists study silk worms, are we informed by the tensile strength of these little workaholics? Or are we inspired, curious, aiming to replicate? When anyone says that their project is “informed by”, it’s really just a way for them to validate their shitty product by saying it contributes to an existing conversation. And what’s worse, it sounds pretentious.

Such is the case for the One River North apartment complex by firm Mad Architects. Situated in the rapidly gentrified industrial neighborhood RiNO in Denver, Colorado, this apartment complex aims to be informed by the neighboring Rocky Mountains. So basically it’s a modernist clam shell cracked open to reveal what honestly looks like bone cartilage. Described as a “vertical canyon”, the “cracked” component of the apartment is actually functional - it has public areas, the amenities, a pool, possibly even a gryphon ride and a tireless and chipper bellhop whose family is buried underneath the grounds and is locked into immortality and eternal servitude by some terrible, architectural based cursed. Point is, this building is not informed by anything. It’s another copy of a copy of a copy. It’s like a mall courtyard, but a high end one. I cannot imagine an ecosystem existing among the plastic plants and the salt water pools, I cannot imagine blemishes and jagged rocks and actual elevation while the residents are playing billiards in the game room or showing off their amenities to their friends. Canyons are organic, this building is anything but.

But look, I get it. Rich people are allowed to have rich people apartments. But can’t they just admit that being “informed” is not a component? Informed does not equal taste. And to that I say: Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Food //
The Nuaa Table

Located on a street very near and dear to my heart and a true anchor for me during the pandemic, The Nuaa Table remained the only restaurant, nay establishment, that I had not opened my coffers to. The Nuaa Table is a highly rated Thai restaurant located quaintly on the corner to enjoy the “open streets” of main avenues (when the city shuts down streets for traffic, so you can walk in the streets and get hit by rampaging electric bikes, I guess). The inside has ingredients of art deco and Ikea, which is what drew me to the place, although the bar in the front is so tiny that I wonder if the restaurant wasn’t a a cafe in a past life. Additionally, the patio is a tiny sliver akin to an alley, although this doesn’t detract from the ambience. In fact, it sort of makes you feel like you are in a caged vehicle traversing the safari, in so far as the hectic open streets are kept at a respectable distance by some cast iron fencing.

The food, however, can only be described as those moments when you see a band and the guitarist or the singer is significantly carrying the ensemble. The stars of the show shine so brightly that it actually dims its companions. Such is the case of the Jasmin Tea-Smoked BBQ Baby Back Ribs, which is an unexpected combination of umami and sweetness. You know you are eating ribs the entire time and you will get messy. If this restaurant only sold this out of their garage I think they’d make a killing.

I admit, I haven’t had the entire menu, so I could be missing some rockstars. But I have had appetizers and their soups and forked food off my partner’s plate as if I were spear fishing, and still those ribs are playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.

Whew. And that’s that. Turns out I have opinions after all. Watch out world, I officially feel empowered to screech my unasked for opinions in public. Picture an Animorphs cover where I turn into a Karen.

Thanks for hanging.