There are 39 gas stations left in Manhattan, down from 60 in 2004. Just 12 of these stations are below 96th Street. This is not because people aren’t driving, or because cars are becoming more efficient, or because the public transportation system has expanded. It is a small problem created by a much larger problem, which is itself a symptom of enormous problems:

Thanks to skyrocketing real estate prices, Manhattan gas stations are worth much more than the money the owner can make selling gas. Last year, a Getty near the High Line sold for $23.5 million. A few months later, another station in the borough went for $25 million.

Developers love gas stations because they’re on corners and along major thoroughfares, and in a town of skyscrapers, their one-story buildings are easy to tear down.

This is New York real estate conventional wisdom, more or less: Gas stations are just empty lots that other people have been saving for you. From a 1985 Times piece called “ACTIVE BUYERS; SPOTTING THE DEALS ALL OVER TOWN”:

The successful real-estate operator must have an intimate knowledge of locations. ‘’You’ve got to be able to make a judgment instantly and you’ve got to be capable of concluding a contract in a day or two tops,’’ said Mr. Goldstein. ‘’If you can’t perform that fast, you can’t compete in this market.’’

One who has been competing actively in the last year is Mr. Shapolsky, who at 43 has been in the business since 1962, in partnership with his brother, Allan. Their father was an apartment renovator who also bought and sold buildings. The Shapolskys avoid rental apartments, but they buy commercial warehouses, garages, parking lots, industrial buildings, gas stations, vacant apartment buildings and vacant land.

A 2004 article about the decline of the Manhattan gas station starts: “Note to motorists: Do not become attached to a gas station in Manhattan. It could be replaced by an apartment building tomorrow.”

So it’s an old trend! But it’s a downward trend, which means it has an absolute endpoint. In the article from 2004, taxi drivers were already complaining about hour-long waits and lost wages. “Last week at Houston and Lafayette,” one driver said, “they didn’t have gas.” Skip forward to today:

Farther downtown, two other stations are already on their last legs. The BP at Houston and Lafayette is expected to close this year to make way for a seven-story retail and office complex. A Mobil Station in Alphabet City is also expected to close shop.

This station will be overwhelmed with patrons until the day it closes.

What happens where there are practically no gas stations at all?It’s an interesting thing to consider! Manhattan gas prices can only go up so far before it’s always worth it to leave the borough to fill up elswhere — the rate at which gas stations are closing is not mirrored by an increase in profitability for remaining gas stations. It’s possible that, at a certain level of real estate insanity, gas stations will simply not be welcome at all, like front lawns and parking lots.

Owning a car in the city will become less attractive, I guess? Driving a car for a living will become harder and less profitable, which will have to be factored into riders’ prices, which will take a long time (because the TLC works slow, and because Uber is trying to destroy it) and deter people from riding in general. These are both bad things for some people but… maybe good things for Manhattan? No gas station will ever be as valuable as a 20-story luxury mixed retail/residential luxury tower, so it’s conceivable that virtually all conveniently located gas stations in Manhattan could be replaced. Future New York might be filled with the relatives of Russian plutocrats, who will find a way to be driven everywhere regardless, but future New York might also have fewer cars and less traffic! A pedestrian paradise. A biker’s dream! At least the last few decades before New York is swallowed by the sea will be great for commuters.

Photo by Ianqui Doodle

The Great Laundry War

This is actually happening:

The company needed to make a move, one that showed the tech community who the alpha laundry company was. In early October, Washio opened up shop in San Francisco. Not surprisingly, the area around Silicon Valley was already awash in laundry disrupters. In addition to Prim, there was Laundry Locker, along with three other locker-technology-enabled businesses: Sudzee, Drop Locker, and ­Bizzie Box. There was Sfwash, which offered ecofriendly cleaning on top of pickup and delivery. There was even, briefly, a service called Your Hero Delivery, whose driver-founders dressed like superheroes. (“At the end of the day, did we really want to spend our whole lives schlepping dirty laundry?” one of them told PandoDaily of their decision to fold. “No.”) Another upstart was about to launch: Rinse, whose founders described their business to a Dartmouth alumni newsletter as “an ‘Uber’ for dry cleaning and laundry.”

Spoiler: everyone dies in the end.

It is said that the Divine Comedy contains passages within passages — lines between lines — only visible to the dead and the young. Could it be true? [via Gothamist]

by Kyle Chayka

When Caroline Eisenmann, a young assistant at a New York literary agency, decided to rename her OkCupid profile, she wanted something that would make her stand out — a name that wouldn’t get lost amongst the omnipresent references to indie bands and cute animals, something that was “flippant” but with “a bit of a melancholic undertone” that would attract a suitably urbane mate, Eisenmann told me. Fingers poised over the keyboard, she wrote:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

OkCupid rejected it. That it wouldn’t accept the lopsided, grinning face with upturned palms is almost strange: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is, and was, part of the language of the internet, and it has been popping up more than ever in tweets, work emails, and gchats from friends.

The shruggie or “smugshrug,” as it is sometimes called, is what’s known as a “kaomoji,” or “face mark” in Japanese. It’s similar to an emoji or emoticon, but it incorporates characters from the katakana alphabet, instead of underscores and carets, for a wider range of expression. (The (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ table flip is a favorite.) It went viral in English when, after Kanye West shot down Taylor Swift in favor of Beyonce during his infamous 2010 Video Music Awards interruption, he gave a little shrug with his hands outstretched in a slight acknowledgement of his own ridiculousness; the rap crew Travis Porter immediately tweeted, “Kanye shrug — -> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” as a crude representation of the gesture. For a time, post-Kanye, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ continued to represent a kind of self-aware victory over the world: It was appropriated as the victory trademark of SeleCT, a competition-level Starcraft II player from Team Dignitas, after which it became known as “sup son,” and by late 2011, it was parodied on YouTube by Starcraft competition announcers and plastered on signs held up by fans.

After seeing the light of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, it’s hard to not notice it everywhere. Han Solo makes the gesture in Star Wars, as Reddit noticed in 2012. Daily Dot writer Miles Klee caught the Spider-Man super villain Mysterio doing it. In 2013, it appeared in a Reddit post that commanded users “lol idk just upvote.” “Lol idk” seems like a fairly apt description of the shruggie’s meaning, but it also doesn’t begin to describe the nihilism that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ embodies today.

It was the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ of times, it was the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ of times.

— Kevin Nguyen (@knguyen) May 13, 2014

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is fundamentally connected to the experience of being online, in part because it cannot be spoken, only acted or typed. “Well, it’s like, the default Internet feeling,” Shane Ferro, an editor at Reuters, told me. She uses it “while gchatting a lot for ‘there is outrage on the Internet, but I just can’t today.’” Amazon editor Kevin Nguyen has it saved in his phone under the shortcut “IDGAF,” “but I realize that I don’t really use it to mean ‘I don’t give a fuck,’” he said. “It represents a way to acknowledging that maybe we take ourselves too seriously on the Internet.” Writer Molly Osberg explained that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is “the natural answer to spending too much time in Internet c a s c a d e.”

Yet it also transcends the Internet and perhaps language itself, echoing incoherent expressions of sublime rage or terror, like the untranslatable keyboard smash, “asdfasldkvhjasd.” “There’s no parallel word, but it stands in for any number of horrified and numb and nihilistic sentiments… like ‘I don’t even have the bandwidth to comprehend how terrible this all is,’” Osberg said. She suggested an example sentence: “Would mass human extinction rly even be a bad thing? I awno ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.”

“There’s always a bit of a melancholic undertone. It’s like if YOLO grew from a reckless teen to an overly pensive twenty-something,” Eisenmann said. “The reason it works so well to convey bemused resignation must be some combination of the little half-smile and the wide arm-spread,” Wordnik founder Erin McKean explained. “PURE RESIGNATION, that’s my definition, caps included,” Jezebel contributor Phoenix Tso told me.

But, in addition to symbolizing despair, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ can be wielded as a Zen-like tool to accept the chaos of universe. Meditate on its wide eyes and upturned mouth; that’s not the expression of a quitter, it’s the carefree face of #blessed, radical openness.

walked 65 blocks home so i could get pizza without feeling guilty and then in the middle i got hungry and ate chipotle instead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

— Jessica Roy (@JessicaKRoy) May 13, 2014

When someone performs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in real life, shrugging their shoulders and raising their outstretched hands in supplication to the sky it evokes an abdication of blame and a good-humored acknowledgement that shit, at times, happens, and there’s nothing we can do about it. “I think it’s obviously a ‘dealing with it’ vibe,” Vox Media designer Dylan Lathrop told me. “It’s a reaction more than a lifestyle, but I can definitely see people employing that vibe for their worldview.”

Rusty Foster, who writes the Today in Tabs newsletter, recently noted, “We are entering a golden age of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, which is very nearly the only reaction I am capable of having to anything.” In a yet-unpublished thousand-word manifesto, Foster writes, “11 plain black strokes perfectly capture the essence of everything I really believe most deeply. In short, my view of the whole universe is:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯.” Taking ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ the worldview to its logical conclusion, Foster makes the fatalistic argument that everything is predetermined and space-time is a false construction of the human mind:

Nobody has any actual free will, and nothing we do is chosen — what happens now is just is what happens, and we make up stories about it that make it seem like things happened for reasons and cause and effect aren’t just mirages of our flawed perception of a fundamentally static and fixed system.

Why go on living in our stage-set of a world? Indeed, why even bother tweeting at all? The answer, Foster thinks, is: “¯\_(ツ)_/¯ why not?”

Kyle Chayka is a freelance technology and culture writer living in Brooklyn.

Atlanta’s Rome Fortune, whose rapping already does not hurry, pairs up with Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet. What they come up with is something slow and easy and just all around kind of a relief, as far as songs go. (via)

★★★★ Surplus light sent morning shadows pointing eastward in the shade. People and foliage and cars had shimmering auras; birdsong was general and passionate. The temperature hovered at the precise inflection point between too warm for the jeans and too chilly for the short-sleeved shirt. Buying sunglasses appeared on the mental list of things to do, if not necessarily right away. Here and there were graduation robes, the lively air filling out their volume. The clouds were sturdy enough in the afternoon to plunge things into dimness when they passed over the sun. They piled up and developed gray interiors, then spread out an purpled, as the river upstream went silver. The first of the flies that had gotten indoors caught a glancing blow from the flyswatter and obligingly tumbled sideways and down to expire in the toilet. The second fly got grazed and dropped somewhere into the shadows, unfindable. The third fly might have been the second fly revived, and it was untouchable, dodging in and out of zones of light and dark, till long after nightfall it finally came to rest on a bathroom mirror and was obliterated.

Burger King has a new slogan, and it sounds like nonsense: “Be your way.” Be your way. Be… your way. What does this mean? It is not clear.

The last one was less confusing. Have it your way: “It” refers to “Burger King food.” To “have it” a certain “way” suggests that it can be altered to align with special preferences. These preferences are yours. Have it your way. Burger King will change its food for you, a little.

Now, Be your way: Hmm. “Be your way” suggests that a person can “be a way.” But this, like Burger King’s last slogan, sounds peeved: “Have it your way” is a phrase used to end an argument; “be your way” reads like “be that way,” which nobody says when they’re happy, so the new slogan only works with knowledge of the prior slogan’s usage of “your way.” Have it your way — also, now, be your way. But that too has issues: “Your way” used to be a burger configuration; now you must extrapolate from that an entire identity. A customer happy with having it his way is now faced with adapting that order into a WAY, as in a way of life, a way of existing. So is the new slogan in fact a universal maxim, divorced from the burger context entirely? Maybe! The tautological slogan is in vogue right now. LAX, the airport, now promotes itself with “LAX is happening.” Our slogans are collapsing in on themselves again and again and again, until they reach a single point. Burger King: Yes. Burger King: You.

The press release accompanying the announcement lays it out like this:

[The slogan] reminds people that no matter who they are, they can order how they want to in Burger King restaurants and that they can and should live how they want anytime.

That sentence zooms out pretty quickly! (Plus, most Burger Kings aren’t open 24 hours.) That Burger King now feels the need to tell us 1) that we can order whatever we want, but 2) that we should be however we want as well, suggests that it does not fully believe that our years of having it our way were totally honest or accurate — that, in fact, our way was not really ours.

So maybe this is actually a violent coup: We had things our way, which was actually one of Burger King’s ways, and now Burger King says we should be that way, because what else are we than an agglomeration of purchasing preferences? That would be horrible, but the reality is worse: That this is all just nothing, an arbitrary word nightmare summoned by the marketing department in the name of change:

“Be Your Way’ is a better reflection of who we are and how we want to interact with our guests,” said Axel Schwan, Burger King global chief marketing officer, in a press release. “And, the executions under Be Your Way will showcase our guests being their own way in whatever iteration that may be.”

Rude! These branding people hate us all so much! If it’s any consolation, I’m sure they hate themselves too.

Image via Louise Thompson.

by Elizabeth Lopatto

Lee Smolin thinks that time is real. If that strikes you as unusual, you haven’t spent much time with theoretical physicists, who tend to think that the passing of time is either an emergent property of the universe, or, perhaps, an illusion.

“Some of my colleagues suggest that time is an approximate description of the universe,” Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute, writes in Time Reborn. “A description that is useful on large scales but dissolves when we look too closely. Temperature is like this.” The reason that some physicists have rejected time, he argues, is that they have mistaken mathematical models for reality. Smolin says that, while superstring theory has been around since the eighties, it has no experimental support — or hope of it — in the near future, because it not only describes our world, but an infinite landscape of possible worlds, without a guiding selection principle. The further scientists venture into it, the more complicated the math becomes, and the farther from our observable world it seems to be.

Smolin’s forthcoming book with philosopher Roberto Mangabiera Unger, a professor at Harvard Law School, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, presents their views on the importance of philosophy for physicists, why falsifiability is important for science, and why we should care about whether time is real — all of which we talked about the other day.

Reading your work, I was struck by how much more it discussed the history of thought — both science and philosophy — than I expected.

I’m a physicist, but I’ve always been interested and inspired by philosophy. I wrote about this in the Trouble with Physics: When we look at the really hard foundational issues in physics and cosmology, the philosophers can’t solve the problems for us. But knowing the history of thought is something you can learn from; scientists who think about fundamental problems are often people who are knowledgeable in the history of philosophy, at least with the problem they’re working on. But different styles dominate different times. During revolutionary periods, it becomes the dominant style to quote philosophers and historians.

Like Albert Einstein hanging out with the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. You quote Rudolph Carnap, an important member of the circle, in Time Reborn about how uncomfortable Einstein was with the meaning of “the Now.”

I didn’t know Einstein was involved with the Vienna circle apart from his conversations with Carnap. Though he was very influenced by Mach, an early positivist. Many of that generation [of physicists] were very philosophically well-educated, and it wasn’t unusual for a scientific paper or talk to begin with mentioning Kant or Leibniz. And then my sense is that faded after World War II, when the European culture associated with those people was destroyed.

Since then, physics has been dominated by the American style, which is more pragmatic. I think Freeman Dyson described it best: We normally think that the established scientists are conservative and revolutionaries are young. But here, the revolutionaries were old, and the young generation were conservative and just wanted to apply quantum physics to understand more physics. They were frustrated by hearing so much about philosophy from the older generation of revolutionaries. And then in the late seventies, that pragmatic style had broken down.

Right, scientists have declared philosophy dead in a number of recent books. Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design, co-written with Leonard Mlodinow, was especially funny, since the opening basically says there’s no need for metaphysics — but then the rest of the book is metaphysics.

I thought that was so embarrassing. Or Lawrence Krauss — he is a brilliant and articulate and highly effective advocate for science — and I am usually on his side, but in this one case he got in over his head and claimed that inflationary cosmology solved the problem of why there is something rather than nothing. David Albert did a review of Lawrence’s book, and I remember thinking, “This is the most cutting and acerbic review of anything I’ve ever read.” But he was right. He took Lawrence to task for being ignorant of what philosophers were trying to understand.

I did my undergrad degree at Hampshire, and it was partly physics and partly philosophy. We called it natural philosophy. I went to graduate school in physics intending to do a degree in philosophy but was very turned off by the philosophers I met. Meanwhile, the philosophers of physics of my generation, people like David Albert, Simon Saunders and Harvey Brown, are much more knowledgeable about the technical details of physics. They know physics very well, and they are very sophisticated about contemporary physics.

What you’re saying in the book with Unger is that many of the rules we’re using to create a cosmology don’t work well at that scale, right?

All of physics, except the attempt to make a theory of the whole universe as a closed system, can be understood from an operational perspective: Whether you describe it as operational or effective, basically, there’s a theory which works within specified boundaries and specified limits as to scales of distance and energy. Within those limitations, it has a methodology which generates falsifiable hypotheses.

I give a bunch of examples in the book, but one way to argue is that the application of a theory through an experiment is always approximate. You’ve got the interactions that are too weak to influence things; interactions that are too weak to measure; interactions between the system itself; and what is left outside of the boundaries of the system we are studying.

You might think that to describe the universe as a whole, you just describe part of it, but you can’t do that. One of the problems is that once you describe the whole universe, you have to account for not just its survival, but also, why these laws. That’s what you need to think about when you’re trying to make a full theory.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. You want to account for the choice of the laws, which have empirical consequences and are testable. Something has to happen. There has to be something which allows laws to change that is empirically testable, and that’s only possible if the change is something real that happened in our past.

When did you start thinking seriously about time?

Oh, I’ve always thought about time! It’s at the core of the physics of quantum gravity, which is the main thing I’ve worked on all my life. But for these ideas, there were three parallel movements that came together.

First, the laws of nature have to evolve to be explained. I started thinking about this in the late nineteen eighties, because of string theory. Instead of a unique solution, it was very clear there would be a landscape of string theories — a vast proliferation of different versions of the theory. So I proposed a model by which the laws of nature could evolve through the history of the universe, analogous to natural selection. It’s called “cosmological natural selection,” and I first published on it in 1992. That was the first step, and I’ve worked on it on and off since then. The implications took a long time to sink in.

I didn’t see until I started to talk to philosophers that there was a contradiction between believing time was emergent, and believing laws in nature evolved in time. I had an interaction with Roberto Unger and this made me realize there was a contradiction in my work — believing that laws evolve in time, on the one hand, and believing that time emerges from timeless law, on the other.

The other thing happening about that time was that some of my friends and colleagues working in quantum gravity began to treat time as a fundamental quality, a fundamental part of the picture. I had to take seriously what they were doing, even though it was heterodox from a mainstream point of view. And there were some internal technical issues to making time emerging work, and those technical issues began to bother me.

So with those things, my view began to shift toward time being real.

String theory has been the dominant force in physics for a long time, but this isn’t optimal to you, right?

People should be examining hypotheses which are testable, and abandoning hypotheses for things that aren’t testable, instead of chasing ideas that they love that aren’t testable. Anybody who looks at the recent history of physics has to see [the lack of progress] as a crisis of explanation.

The results from the Large Hadron Collider are extremely disappointing to people working on particle physics. Many thousands of people fear that forty years of work are lost — their whole careers they’ve spent on very intricate and elaborate models with motivating ideas, they have now to reconsider in the light of the evidence. The question is how people think when what they thought was contradicted.

One of the issues is that the standard model is extremely fine-tuned on 29 parameters to take either very large or very small values. Once you accept the idea that laws are fine-tuned — and that this requires explanation — you have to believe there must be some dynamical process acting in history that did the fine tuning. Then you’re looking at something like cosmological natural selection.

If you were given an ideal experimental set-up to test your theory, what would you look for? What’s the best way to see if cosmological naturalism works?

There aren’t many predictions, but there are a few. One is holding up remarkably: When I first published [in 1992], I predicted no neutron star should have a mass of more than 1.6 times the sun. That wasn’t quite right; the prediction was based on a theoretical calculation done by nuclear astrophysicists, and when that was done more carefully the upper limit predicted ended up being two solar masses.

So if a more massive neutron star is found, our universe’s natural laws don’t produce the maximal amount of black holes and cosmological natural selection is falsified. Presently the heaviest neutron star whose mass is precisely measured is just within the prediction with 1.97 solar masses, but there are other neutron stars whose masses are less accurately measured, but whose central values are above two solar masses. There could easily be a new measurement that would precisely measure a neutron star mass of more than two solar masses and this would contradict the theory, so the theory is quite vulnerable to falsification, which means it is real science.

Elizabeth Lopatto is a science writer based in Oakland. She likes philosophy of science too much for her own good. She’s on Twitter.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Catapult highlights emerging fiction, nonfiction and poetry writers, with your host Jaime Green. This episode has Meghan Flaherty and Matthew Rossi telling stories about the vagaries of human incubation. Sort of! You can subscribe on iTunes or follow on Tumblr.

It was barely a decade ago when the hipster fashion retail chains began their American invasion in earnest, starting from the West, North and East and working their way inward. Now their fortunes have turned rather dramatically, and the teens are driving them back into the sea:

The company said Monday that Urban’s comparable sales fell 12% in the three months ending April 30, following a 9% drop last quarter, and a 1% drop in the three months ending Oct. 31. Urban is the retailer’s biggest chain; it also owns Anthropologie and Free People, which continued to see sales soar in the first quarter.

The company says the problem is that its customers are becoming younger. Actually, what it says is that its “brand” has “moved somewhat south in terms of age group penetration.” There were warning signs, I think: If you’ve set foot in an Urban Outfitters over the last year or so you might have noticed that it has become something like a toy store — it has clothes in the same way that Hot Topic has clothes. It’s a Spencer’s Gifts for internet teens.

American Apparel is still having trouble for a variety of reasons, but mostly because every major store has some square footage dedicated to AA-looking basics — truly, you could probably stock a 2009 AA from a 2014 Target — and so it will either have to become a watch and sunglasses kiosk or a store for baby clothes. What’s next, then, for the teens? Anyone who says he knows is a liar or worse. Is it time to bring back the mid-2000s yet?