This wishing well in the Luray Caverns must be the most American thing I’ve seen yet. Nature: check. Money: check. Altrusim: check-check (all the money is donated). Note — the water is clear, but the stones underneath are green from oxidized penny-derived copper.

Ka-ching.

• If anyone ever tells me again that America is stagnating and points to China’s skyscraper forests that sprang out of nowhere, I’ll point them to Nashville. More cranes there than at a crane festival.
• Ditto for the line about American cities being more and more alike, so that it doesn’t matter whether one lives in the suburbs of Albuquerque or Atlanta. Take a walk up and down Broadway at 1pm on a Monday, count the number of live music venues packed side to side, and tell me of any other place in the country that has the same number per meter squared.
• Corollary to the above: if you can’t stand the smell of stale beer, probably best to stay out of downtown.
• There was a time between Vanderbilt University being founded and Grand Ole Opry exploding in popularity when the city was known as the Athens of the South. This was even before they built a full-scale replica of the Parthenon on the city’s centennial, in 1897. ⊕ The one from 1897 was made of plaster and torn down shortly after the World Fair it was built for. The more permanent one still standing is itself 100 years old now, being built in 1920. So yes, the Parthenon was so nice they built it twice. They were an industrious bunch.
• Speaking of engineering feats: North America’s largest non-casino hotel & resort is in Nashville, ready to give you that indoor river cruise experience you could otherwise get only in Vegas.
• Six bullet points in, and only now do we get to food? Well, it’s good! Much better food and service dollar-for-dollar than anything you will get inside the D.C. beltway at either end of the pricing spectrum. Hot chicken and banana pudding are favorites, though for full transparency I should add that none of puddings we had came close to the one from Bernard’s in Roanoke, VA.
• Some good murals as well.
• “Sarah Cannon Research Institute (SCRI) is a research organization focusing on therapies for patients which include drugs that are in development. With corporate headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, United States, it conducts community-based clinical trials in oncology, cardiology, gastroenterology, and other therapeutic areas.”
• We would pack our bags and move tomorrow if the summers weren’t as humid as D.C.’s. Also, catastrophic flood from as recently as 10 years ago would make me think twice. But it’s on the list!

Downtown Nashville TN, October 15 2022, 1:15pm CT.

Madam’s Organ/Adams Morgan, Washington DC, October 14 2022, 8:30am EST.

Thanks to a weekend trip to the DC zoo I now know about bear-cats, who are neither bears nor cats. Binturongs are cute as a button, smell like butter popcorn, and prey on backyard rodents. What’s not to love?

Ah, DC summers… (our office view right now)

So, we are fine tearing down the beautiful old Penn Station, but want to preserve the concrete tomb that was built in its stead? Worse than preserve: turn it into a greenhouse? Modern architecture is bonkers.

More art deco than brutalism? Yes, please.

A town that has more art deco than brutalism — the largest piece of concrete in sight was a modestly sized skate park — is my kind of town. It is at once frozen in time (picture unsupervised tweens riding bicycles and scooters down a quiet tree-lined street) and progressive (in the American sense of having more crystal shops than chain stores and more rainbows than stars’n’stripes posted on storefronts). ⊕ The same cannot be said about another picture-perfect town, Frederick, which is distinctly unlike its home state of Maryland. Note, however, that only one of these two states had segregation of some kind in this century. It is also, for someone who has spent the last 12 years in the Baltimore-DC area, noticeably white, but note more so than would be expected from any place in North Carolina.[^one]

Biltmore is as impressive as you would expect a 250-room house to be, but also shows how much better our lives are compared to the richest of the early 20th century rich. Yes, your 23,000-book library with wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling bookcases is beautiful, but even a person living on the street has access to more books than that from a device in their pocket. Never mind the demands of heating, cleaning, and maintaining the beast. No wonder then that the owners turned it into an amusement park instead of continuing to live there.

A few more observations:

• Farm Burger is a Southern fast food chain a few notches above Shake Shack that in addition to pretty good beef and incredible vegan burgers also serves roasted bone marrow. The only thing missing was sweetbreads.
• There are too many hills for it to be a biking town yet there were many people on bicycles. Having mostly narrow, slow-traffic streets downtown helps.
• There are not one but two interstate highways that bisect the city, but unlike Baltimore’s idiotic I-83 that destroyed many neighborhoods and ruined the city’s walkability, there are plenty of ways to cross the I-240 on foot. Here, having hills actually helped as the highway is in many places nestled between two slopes.
• Its largest neighbors are Knoxville (approx. 2 hours away), Charlotte (same) and Atlanta (3 and a half). That is… too far away for too little, perhaps?
• But was the 7+ hour drive from DC worth it? Hell, yes.

“Seoul is not a pretty town, not at least by most Western senses of beauty. It is a sprawling mix of the haphazard, with little seeming cohesion, beyond a shared culture. Two hundred and fifty square miles of building after building, of all styles, of all facades (glass, brick, stucco, tile, fake brick, fake stucco), jammed up against each other, almost all covered in visually loud, bright, large ads.”

Seoul was never on my list of must-see places and the first paragraph of this brilliant photo essay sums up why, but the rest of the essay — and those photos! — managed to tempt me.