Jaden Smith, the son of Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith, turned heads when he walked the red carpet ahead of 2025’s Grammy Awards—even if he could barely turn his own.
The younger Smith arrived with a diorama of a castle enveloping his head, with his face poking out of a circular hole. The headpiece was created by designer ABODI, which is apparently called “Vampire Castle.” (Vanity Fair pointed me to ADOBI’s site, which lists the so-called “wearable” piece for €4,500, which amounts to roughly $4,602.80. A bargain!)
On its Instagram account, the brand wrote, “The artistic headpiece combines the mysterious elegance of ABODI Transylvania with a bold, modern design inspired by Transylvanian history and the vampire legends of the Bathori.”
This is a unique fashion choice in at least two ways. First, the decision to wear a building on one’s head. Second, by the choice of building to wear.
The only time I have seen something close to this is at a few graduations where a few students put buildings on top of their mortarboard graduation cap. Some of these students were architecture students and this provided a platform for them to display a particular structure.
If people had to wear a building, what would they choose? How about a basic ranch house or a McMansion? Perhaps certain landmarks would be popular, like the Eiffel Tower or the Burj Khalifa. I do not see the trend catching on soon but one might want to be prepared to have an answer.
Two recent examples reminded me of a difficulty in assessing change: how much can we see in a short time period versus looking back and seeing significant change over time?
First, getting better at teaching. I have read books, heard talks, and participated in groups to help facilitate this. The emphasis is often on small and incremental change. This is all good but it can be hard to see change in action in a subsequent class session. It takes time to develop new skills and habits. Efforts to implement something may go well in one class and not another. Assessing the results requires additional work and reflection.
But, I can more easily see teaching change over the course of several years. I could have a better sense of how to approach a topic or what I need to emphasize to help students grasp a concept or have a better activity to apply the learning for the day. Pointing back to one particular moment when the pedagogy changed is hard but thinking about how I used to approach it years ago compared to now more easily reveals shifts.
Second, large scale social change. Years ago, I found the 2006 book Century of Differenceby Fischer and Hout. Each chapter looks at a different part of American life and details the changes between 1900 and 2000. The differences are often startling, whether considering education or family life or urbanization. At the scale of a century, contrasts are clear.
However, evaluating change at a daily or weekly level is hard. How do we know if a new policy or event marks something noteworthy? The amount of information we have is tremendous and news and social media today can amplify their magnitude. In the moment, we can compare to the past. We ask others and experts. And it can still be difficult to know.
I am sure there are other examples where it can be hard to tell if much is changing. At other points it is clear. Something so shocking and noteworthy happens – thinking of 9/11, as one example – that it is known to everyone as significant. For now, we can continue to ask whether our current moment contains big changes or the continuation of existing patterns.
Meanwhile, 2024 brought an increase in suburban office vacancies — an all-time high of 26.3%, up from 25.4% a year earlier.
The suburbs are job centers. For example, the article notes, “Schaumburg is Illinois’ largest hub of economic activity outside of Chicago.” So to have a lot of empty office space is not a good thing. Owners of these buildings would prefer to have full offices as would municipalities who gain tax revenues.
Will upgrades to the buildings make a big difference? That is what the rest of the article suggests as workers and companies seek certain amenities to enhance the workspace and compete well against work from home options.
Also interesting to note is the redevelopment options if there is too much office space. For example:
Schaumburg officials hope to assist the office market by reducing its obsolete properties. This includes buying a 204,000-square-foot building to demolish for the village’s next police station and nearing approval to convert a 45-year-old Class B office building across from Woodfield into a 98-unit high-end apartment complex.
How many suburban communities would be willing to pull the plug on decent office space and go through all the effort it takes to redevelop the same land? If there is not demand for high quality office space, will other land uses bring in similar revenues and have similar levels of prestige? I would guess edge cities are not interested in losing that status but finding the right balance of offices, residences, and other uses could take time.
I do not know of a genre of music that would exclusively identify with the suburbs. As Americans moved to the suburbs in large numbers in the twentieth century for numerous reasons, music changed in the United States as well. This included new genres, new methods for playing and hearing music, and new audiences. And all of this happened on a mass scale; music could be produced, played, and listened to for and by millions of people.
Hot adult contemporary (hot AC) radio stations play a wide range of popular music that appeals towards the 18–54 age group;[43] it serves as a middle ground between the youth-oriented contemporary hit radio (CHR) format, and adult contemporary formats (such as “mainstream” and soft AC) that are typically targeted towards a more mature demographic. They generally feature uptempo hit music from the last 25 years with wide appeal, such as pop and pop rock songs, while excluding more youth-oriented music such as hip-hop.[42][41] Older music featured on hot AC stations usually reflects familiar and youthful music that adults had grown up with.[44][41] Likewise, material from legacy pop acts such as the Backstreet Boys, Jason Mraz, John Mayer, and Pink is prominent within the format.[41][40]f
Pop music of the last few decades for 18 to 54 year olds is suburban music? Maybe more so than some other formats.
(The other part of this station’s tag line is that they broadcast from the ‘burbs. This contrasts with the majority of the radio stations in the area that identify with the big city.)
Three people have lived in the deserted cathedral in the past two years, with each occupant — an electrician, a sound engineer and a journalist — paying a monthly fee to live in the priest’s quarters.
The cathedral is managed by Live-in Guardians, a company finding occupants for disused properties, including schools, libraries and pubs, across Britain. The residents — so-called property guardians — pay a fixed monthly “license fee,” which is usually much lower than the typical rent in the same area…
The practice of populating disused properties with guardiansis unregulated in Britain and comes with fewer legal protections for the residents than renting. Guardians have also complained of inconveniences and outright hazards, such as no access to drinkable tap water and rickety ceilings…
The practice started in the Netherlands in the 1980s and has long attracted artists, musicians and other creatives in search of enough square footage to do their work, as well as those prepared to live more precariously. For example, in Britain, guardians can be asked to vacate the property with 28 days’ notice, compared with the two months afforded to most private renters…
The UK housing ministry states in its guidance on guardianships that it “does not endorse or encourage” the practice because people “can be asked to live in conditions that do not meet the standards of residential properties.”
This seems like a short-term solution to two big issues facing a number of cities. Where is the affordable housing? How might older but unused buildings be preserved or used again? Each issue is complex. Each would take a long time to address.
In the meantime, what truly happens to these buildings? It seems like they have some use but given the stories shared here, it sounds like they are slowly deteriorating.
And what are the experiences of residents? Based on what is shared here, it sounds like it might be a less than positive experience overall as people are able to get by and not much else.
Are there any cities in the United States that have similar programs and, if so, what are the outcomes?
It is easy to find headlines regarding cities and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. But, reading a number of these stories shows these are also happening in suburbs. This one story detailing locations across the United States includes these suburbs:
Or see this story of operations in Chicago area suburbs.
These are suburbs of major metropolitan areas. Cities may be the target of particular political ire but there is less recognition that many people who come to the United States live in suburbs (or rural areas).
And how will suburbs respond to these federal efforts? When migrants were sent to suburbs of Chicago in 2023 from other locations in the United States, few suburban communities were interested in having them stay (see posts here, here, and here). A number of big cities have announced how they will respond but there are thousands of suburbs in the United States.
In Sanctifying Suburbia, I look more closely at the locations of the National Association of Evangelicals in Chapter 4. As a group that purported to represent the interests of a growing evangelical movement from the 1940s onward, where did they locate their headquarters?
For decades, their headquarters were in two adjacent suburban communities roughly 25 miles from Chicago: Wheaton and Carol Stream. These two suburbs contain a cluster of evangelical organizations (discussed further in Chapter 5 and 6 of the book). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the NAE had multiple locations in downtown Wheaton. According to the local phone books, their location in 1957 was 108 N Main. Here is a Google Streetview image of that address from June 2019:
This is the same block that was briefly shown in a Walmart Super Bowl ad a few years ago. When I walked past the location earlier this week, the building is undergoing a massive renovation.
In the 1960s, the NAE moved a few miles north to Carol Stream. They concluded their time in the suburb in an office building within an office and light industrial area. Here is what the property looked like a few years ago (a Google Streetview image from October 2016):
The organization was there until 1999 when they had a short sojourn to suburban southern California before moving the headquarters to Washington, D.C. in 2002.
These headquarters fit in a suburban landscape, the first in a two story brick building in an older suburban downtown with the second looking like many other small office buildings dotting suburbia, with little more than a sign marking them as spaces occupied by a religious organization. And from these suburban locations, the National Association of Evangelicals supported a growing evangelical movement across the United States.
Between Manhattan and West Egg, where Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway live, spreads the “valley of ashes,” “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air”. Fitzgerald’s valley of ashes tips its hat to TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, but it was also a feature of New York at the time. The Ash Dumps were mountainous piles of ash up to 90ft high, a malodorous stretch of swampland in which coal ash, cinders, garbage, and human waste had been dumped. Lone figures wandered the desolate heaps searching for treasure or anything they could sell – a perfect image of a nation squandering its promise in search of a buck.
Most of the novel’s memorable details function in the same way, as realistic features of New York in 1922, and as symbols that fuse social satire with the novel’s metaphysical meanings. Gatsby is peppered with familiar symbols: the valley of ashes, the green light, the eyes of Dr Eckleburg that are mistaken for the eyes of God. It’s a novel that understands how signs can expand our capacity for thought. Gatsby’s green light has become one of the most famous images in literature, standing for Gatsby’s envy of the Buchanans’ world and his desire to attain it. It suggests his and his nation’s aspirationalism, their faith in renewal, in the fresh hope of starting over – and their drive for the colour of American money…
Hollywood routinely helps itself to any details from the 1920s that let it gesture toward the jazz age. Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film adaptation of Gatsby features Prada dresses in silhouettes that were not worn until around 1928. This may sound like pedantic quibbling – what’s six years in Hollywood time? But, socially and culturally, the 1920s ended in a very different place from where they began: the styles of 1922 were far closer to those of 1919 than to those of 1929.
Luhrmann’s Broadway is thronged with yellow taxis – but New York taxis were not uniformly yellow in the early 1920s. There were also red taxis, blue taxis, checkered taxis, and by the summer of 1923, lavender taxis, like the one Myrtle Wilson selects after letting four others pass by. Lavender taxis were known for being expensive and could seem pretentious, an impression heightened by their violent colour scheme: “cerise and lavender taxis with red and green checkers”. A night out in Prohibition New York, it was said, “begins in a bierstube [beer hall] and ends in a purple taxi”. Myrtle Wilson, with her violent affectations and social climbing, would naturally choose a lavender taxi.
These deadening clichés distort our view of Gatsby in important ways. They keep us from registering how rich and strange and alien its world is: the New York of Gatsby lures us in because it is a surreal and surprising city, without a trite yellow cab in sight – but a lavender one is waiting for those who care to notice. All these carefully chosen details also suggest a world beyond the merely mimetic – what John Updike once called the ability of language to be “worked into a supernatural, supermimetic bliss”. The reason everyone who reads Gatsby wants to join the fun has far less to do with our ideas of what a jazz-age party looked like than with the vital strangeness of Fitzgerald’s writing. The lavender taxi is hyper-realistic, but it is also surrealistic, capturing the phantasmagorical qualities of Gatsby’s New York.
Trying to remember the past of familiar places can be difficult. Images and narratives about New York City are so widespread and pervasive that they can be hard to counter. Was Times Square always that way? What about Harlem or Brooklyn?
Cultural works that try to do this can add to the difficulty. Did they portray things correctly? What sources are they drawing on? How many people engaged with that cultural work (whether it was accurate or not)?
Are there sites devoted to pointing people to correct depictions of places in the past and telling them which ones to avoid? For example, this article points out that Fitzgerald captures some unique features of early 1920s New York while the 2013 film does not. If I wanted to know more about New York as it was, should I watch the Godfather or find other sources?
Paramus officials say they’re exploring a lawsuit against American Dream, after learning that retail shops at the Meadowlands megamall are open for business on Sundays in defiance of Bergen County’s Blue Laws.
The stores at American Dream have been operating in violation of those laws for nearly a year, The Record and NorthJersey.com reported last week, despite the county’s longstanding prohibitions against the sale of nonessential items such as furniture, appliances and clothing. The restrictions, in place since the 17th century, exempt some services, including groceries and drugstores.
Paramus residents in particular have been proponents of the Blue Laws over the years. Supporters say they grant them a day of reprieve from heavy traffic that plagues the town the rest of the week due to the borough’s four malls…
“Being mayor of Paramus, I know how important the Blue Laws are to our way of life and the peacefulness of Sundays,” he said in an interview. “[It gives us] the ability to move around town, the ability for our emergency services to have less calls and regroup. As mayor, I’m going to fight like heck for Paramus and the county as a whole.”
Such regulations used to be more common across the United States. It can be surprising for some to hear that places would continue to follow these guidelines or businesses might choose to follow them (see some of the conversations around Chik-Fil-A in different parts of the country regarding their practice of not being open on Sundays). Even the article above notes that these restrictions date back hundreds of years; are these simply archaic local idiosyncrasies?
The explanations given by these suburbanites regarding the purposes of the blue laws are interesting in today’s context. Is Sunday a day of rest from traffic? Are the malls bringing in so many vehicles from outside the county that their closure on one day makes it easier for locals to get around? Do the EMTs and police need time on Sunday to regroup from all of the accidents and calls on the other six days of the week? The website of another suburb in the county highlights the Sunday prohibitions but does not say why they exist.
My guess is that the Bergen blue laws originate in religious motivations. Sunday is the Christian day of rest. I wonder how much of the current support for the blue laws is religious support as opposed for other reasons for having a day of rest.
Many municipalities in the United States want more local revenue. Having multiple local shopping malls is a good thing because it can increase commercial activity and sales tax revenues. Can communities still thrive if they limit shopping mall activity on one of the weekend days?
Map lines are inherently political. After all, they’re representations of the places that are important to human beings — and those priorities can be delicate and contentious, even more so in a globalized world where multiple nations often share the same maps.
Numerous examples follow:
The water bordered by the Southern United States, Mexico and Cuba will be critical to shipping lanes and vacationers whether it’s called the Gulf of Mexico, as it has been for four centuries, or the Gulf of America, as President Donald Trump ordered this week. North America’s highest mountain peak will still loom above Alaska whether it’s called Denali, as ordered by former President Barack Obama in 2015, or changed back to Mt. McKinley as Trump also decreed…
The Persian Gulf has been widely known by that name since the 16th century, although usage of “Gulf” and “Arabian Gulf” is dominant in many countries in the Middle East. The government of Iran — formerly Persia — threatened to sue Google in 2012 over the company’s decision not to label the body of water at all on its maps. Many Arab countries don’t recognize Israel and instead call it Palestine. And in many official releases, Israel calls the occupied West Bank by its biblical name, “Judea and Samaria.”…
The Associated Press, which disseminates news around the world to multiple audiences, will refer to the Gulf of Mexico by its original name while acknowledging the name Gulf of America. AP will, however, use the name Mount McKinley instead of Denali; the area lies solely in the United States and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country.
Humans make meaning of the world around them and maps capture some of that meaning. And because meaning is sometimes agreed upon and sometimes contested, maps reflect these realities.
What are innovative ways to include multiple names or meanings on a map? Or layer changes in a map over time? I have seen some interesting displays online that attempt to do this. How can maps be more dynamic and flexible?
Legally Sociable 