An empty storefront in the New York City subway last week was transformed into an art project, featuring items like trading cards of retired subway conductors and fake rat’s foot good-luck keychains. My colleague Winnie Hu wrote that the repurposed newsstand, in the West Fourth Street station, has “no other purpose than to amuse and intrigue New Yorkers — or console them on a bad day — and make their commutes just a little better.” How delightful! Stop by if you’re in town, and no matter where you are, check out some other things to amuse, intrigue or console you below.
On this week’s list:
1. The Thin Mint hustle
2. ‘Kindergarten for adults’
3. Return to reading
4. Overanalyzing ‘Seinfeld’
5. Turn any drive into a road trip
6. A tribute to the video store
I was a Brownie, but never a Girl Scout, and so never got to sell cookies, which I’ve always been a little sore about. I can’t recall why I dropped out — I think ballet class may have presented a scheduling conflict. I’ll be bringing all my frustrated salesgirl dreams to “Cookie Queens,” in theaters from Friday. The film follows four scouts as they work to move boxes of Do-si-dos and Samoas. It looks charming; some shots of the girls in their uniforms seem straight out of a Wes Anderson film. I’ve long been an easy mark for my colleagues’ kids’ annual pitches, and look forward to learning about their bare-knuckled, “Glengarry Glen Ross”-style sales strategies.
2.
‘Kindergarten for adults’
Saturday is HTML Day, where people around the world get together and learn, write and celebrate the code used to create content on the internet. With A.I. making it easier, for better and worse, to create websites without any coding knowledge whatsoever, how lovely that people are gathering in person to write code by hand! The point of HTML Day isn’t making the next killer app; the organizers describe the events as “kindergarten for adults, a reminder that we can gather, play and write in parks around the world.” They say you don’t need to know HTML to attend. Some example prompts from previous meet-ups: “How can a website move like the wind?” and “Make a site that makes you feel calm.”
The Couch to 5K program is an easy-to-follow workout regimen that promises to take you from being a non-runner to completing a 5K in nine weeks. You follow a schedule that has you working out several times a week, starting with walking and jogging intervals and progressing until you can run for 30 minutes straight. I did the program about 20 years ago and have been running ever since.
How clever that the British novelist Naomi Alderman has now created a Couch to 5K for reading, “intended for people who have great memories of reading enjoyably but have found that their brains have been sucked into social media and the smartphones.” It starts slow, with just five minutes of reading twice a day, ramping up to reading a 150-page book in a week, a 150- to 250-page book in 24 hours, or a more ambitious book in four weeks.
The original program worked because, in the beginning, the short stints of running were so easy. I felt I could run much longer, but solo efforts to establish a habit by running as far and as long as I could each time I set out had failed. It wasn’t until I had the structure of the program that I learned to pace myself and chart my progress. Starting with five minute reading intervals may sound too elementary, but if you’ve fallen out of the habit of reading, you’re more likely to stick with it if you start with tiny, achievable increments.
4.
Overanalyzing ‘Seinfeld’
You think you’re a big “Seinfeld” fan. You can quote George’s whole beached-whale tale. Perhaps you can do a mean Elaine dance. But you have nothing on Andy Kirk, a data visualization expert who has analyzed the duration and the strength of each moment of audience laughter to create sonic and visual representations of the show’s comedic patterns. You can listen to “the unique sonic signatures of each episode’s character and location, using a bespoke repertoire of instruments and sounds drawn from the show.” The result is quirky, obsessive and, like the show itself, an entertaining exercise in overanalyzing the minutiae.
5.
Turn any drive into a road trip
I keep hearing tales of accidental road trips: You may have read in last Sunday’s Morning newsletter about how my colleague Tom planned a three-day train ride as part of his family vacation and ended up driving 32 hours straight, from El Paso, Tex., to New Jersey. After a flight cancellation, my friend Avi embarked on a spur-of-the-moment drive from New York to Detroit to fetch his son at camp. I feel both pity and envy about these voyages. What a slog, piloting a rental car for so many hours when one had anticipated being a passenger, gazing out the window, dozing, reading an airport-acquired paperback, watching a movie. But what serendipity! A compulsory adventure — who knows what you’ll see or whom you’ll meet?
Should you find yourself on a road trip, planned or unplanned, check out Make My Drive Fun, a very cool tool created by a technologist in Sydney, Australia. You enter your origin and destination and you get a bunch of stops en route. I’m not going on any big trips (that I know of!), but I was an hour’s drive from home last weekend and when I checked the site I discovered that a railroad museum, a 19th-century blast furnace and a series of storm sewers connected to some spooky urban legends were all on my otherwise unremarkable route.
Soon I was concocting fantasy road trips just to see what attractions were on the way, say, from Tokyo to Kyoto (a stone monument park, a train station selling meals in Shinkansen-shaped bento boxes) or Portland, Ore., to Missoula, Mont. (a building shaped like a milk bottle, a neon sign museum). What makes a “long drive” a “road trip,” anyway?
6.
A tribute to the video store
You hear a lot these days about the importance of “third places.” The sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term in 1989 to describe destinations that are not work and not home, “public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals.” Coffee shops, gyms, libraries and bars can all serve as third places. Here’s a lovely case for the video rental store as an extinct third place, where clerks and customers communed over movies.
The writer, Joshua M. Greenberg, singles out the clerk as the “bartender” of the video store experience, the host who established the culture and presided over the discourse. I had forgotten about how rich the process of renting a movie was, how I wanted to both impress and learn from the uber-cineaste clerks at Kim’s Video in the East Village of Manhattan. You don’t get that bespoke, opinionated recommendation when you stream a movie on Netflix.
I’ve recently renewed a deal I regularly make with myself, to stop buying things online unless absolutely necessary. I’d just had a stimulating visit to Trader Joe’s where I got a hot tip from a sales clerk for a limeade to use in cocktails and felt buoyed all day by the exchange. There aren’t video stores anymore, but there are still bookstores, clothing shops and supermarkets staffed by people who know things about what they’re selling. You might not find a third place in the course of your IRL shopping, but when you are there in person, you have the opportunity to interact with the other persons there, and all the possibilities such encounters afford.
One more thing: Katy Murphy, a reader from Denver, has a brilliant idea for what to do with all the handwritten correspondence you may have saved from years gone by:
I am getting ready to put my house on the market, so I have been going through the many boxes and bins that have sat in the basement over the years. I pulled out the trunk I had used to go abroad my junior year in college and found it full of letters! Apparently I saved every letter I got between 1988 (when I went off to college) and 1996 (when I finally “settled down”). It has been an incredible trip down memory lane to reread these letters. We were heading off to college, traveling abroad, falling in love, getting our first jobs.
However, I realized that while it was fun for me, it would be more fun for the people who wrote them; after all, they were writing about themselves and what they were up to at the time, almost like a mini-journal. And they were writing as their 18/26-year-old selves, people they may not entirely remember. So I have been returning the letters to their rightful owners. It has been such a delight! The response has been so positive, mixed with belly laughs and sentimental tears as they reconnect with their younger selves. Some have been surprised that they even wrote letters! Which makes me think of my own adult children and the fact that they will not have relics like this when they too go through their boxes and bins 30 years from now. Text threads just aren’t the same. I am reinspired to pick up paper and pen and continue to write letters. There’s just no substitute!
If you find something good in a box in the basement, I hope you’ll share it in the comments. Or you can send me a letter: 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10018, if you prefer. (And I supposes there’s always email.) If you want to get The Good List in your inbox, sign up here. You can check out past editions of The Good List anytime. — Melissa
The editor of The Good List is Jodi Rudoren. Eli Cohen handles the photos.
