Jackets

• Interesting contrast today between a newly translated Juan Freire lecture about new hybrid public spaces and a typically stark Paul Graham essay about the public nature of existing cities. Both are interesting. Great footnote from Graham:
  

  One sign of a city’s potential as a technology center is the number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. According to Zagat’s there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York, and 20 in Paris.

• Scans from T. Hayashida’s (out of print, expensive) Take Ivy - a photoessay from the 60s on Ivy League prep style. I jokingly mentioned J. Press in the context of Obama a few days ago - the truth is, that company is now a privately held subsidiary of the Japanese company Onward Kashiyama and the prep look has become a complete affectation. When I was in school, the second-to-last local menswear shop was closing down, and the last one standing was looking awful lonely, with its stacks of $280 lambswool sweaters on walnut tables.
• Amazon Kindle news out of the D: All Things Digital conference - it seems, despite the 10% price cut, that the Kindle 2 is not near. To hear Bezos talk, it sounds like they have a ten-year investment in the device, that there won’t be a touch screen any time soon (”There are issues with using a stylus on an e-ink display, and putting something like a digitizer causes visibility reductions.”) I almost bought one of the things yesterday - I have, I don’t know, printed copies of maybe 300 public domain works, so I pay Amazon $30 in 10¢ conversion fees to get the Project Gutenberg versions on my Kindle, and in exchange they keep them in my cloud forever? Sounds like a good deal - I get all that physical space back, Goodwill gets to distribute the paper copies to the less fortunate, and some books I buy in the future don’t demand the sacrifice of trees and fuel. Something to think about. UPDATE: Amazon-converted files aren’t stored in the cloud, aww.
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