Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 127
Your stuff is actually worse now, how vial memes conquered piñata design, New Yorker Cartoon of the Week, Recipe Corner, and more.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting. Check out the archive of previous newsletters here.
Your stuff is actually worse now
How the cult of consumerism ushered in an era of badly made products.
According to this piece, all manner of things we wear, plus kitchen appliances, personal tech devices, and construction tools, have been stunted by a concerted effort to simultaneously expedite the rate of production while making it more difficult to easily repair what we already own, experts say.
We buy, buy, buy, and we’ve been tricked — for far longer than the last decade — into believing that buying more stuff, new stuff is the way. By swapping out slightly used items so frequently, we’re barely pausing to consider if the replacement items are an upgrade, or if we even have the option to repair what we already have.
“If you change the style regularly, people get tired of the style,” says Matthew Bird, a professor of industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design. “They start to treat cars like sweaters — it’s become grossly accelerated. The pressure to make more stuff, of course, lowers the quality of what’s being made, because the development and testing is just accelerated even more.”
So what’s driving this change?
Industrial designers often focus on three things: appearance, functionality, and manufacturability. That last part is where the most change is happening.
Despite advanced in technology, industrial manufacturing still relies on human labor. This is a problem.
While machines have dramatically increased how much can be produced and how fast, humans are still mostly involved every step of the way from ideation to production. Today, nearly everything is assembled by human hands, even if some parts are 3D-printed, cast, or spun by machines. “You’ve done all these other steps, and then you have the person who sits there and actually puts these pieces together,” says Cora Harrington, a writer and lingerie expert. “It doesn’t matter how complicated. It doesn’t matter how simple. We don’t have robots that put together our clothing automatically, so it’s all done by an expert.”
The Great Depression changed the very nature of consumerism. The economy desperately needed stimulation — and consumer goods were one way to do it.
Fast-forward a handful of decades, and now several generations of people are conditioned to buy the new thing and to keep replacing it. Companies, in turn, amp up production accordingly. It’s less so that objects are intended to break — functional planned obsolescence, if you will — but rather that consumer mindsets are oriented around finding the better object. But “better” doesn’t always mean long-lasting when companies are incentivized to produce faster and faster and faster.
So our consumer goods aren’t as good as they once were. How do manufacturers cut corners?
Usually that’s accomplished with a change in material. This could be a thinner, new-to-market fabric, or a more fragile clasp, for instance. The average customer isn’t going to know the difference, especially when shopping online. “There is an entire generation of consumers at this point that doesn’t actually know what high-quality clothing feels like and looks like,” Harrington says. “It gets easier, I think, for consumers to just not know any better.”
The electronics industry is also susceptible to material changes because products are competing against each other on price point.
“Even though designers may say, ‘Oh, this is just as good,’ the components themselves are increasingly plastic instead of metal,” she says. “They’re using more glue instead of screws. There’s some definite design trends that are making these things not work very long. A friend of mine was a big HP reseller and he said that it used to be that you could take that $4,000 HP LaserJet that you’d have in your office, drop it off the back of a truck, and plug it in. It would still work. But that was no longer the case as new generations came around and they were made with more and more plastic.”
Then there’s the classic way companies keep costs low: underpaying and overworking workers.
Social media helps accelerate the trend cycle even further. Consumers are buying five times more clothing than they did back in the 1980s. In order to produce goods that fast, both the quality of the item and the quality of life for workers have to take a hit. This is happening alongside a decrease of prices for the consumer (not rooted in reality!) to encourage more trend-oriented shopping and haul buying.
Of course, there are shifts in production methods that help companies avoid higher labor costs.
Again, robots do not wholesale make our things, but for products like phones, computers, remote controls, and the like, it’s often cheaper to design in a way that reduces human labor. This can mean using as few parts as possible; if you can design by plate or by chunk, especially if the object has to be manually completed, it’ll save a lot of time, and therefore money.
“In the design of objects, they’re trying to reduce the amount of labor, and that changes what the object is,” Bird says. “That produces cheaper goods, but it doesn’t necessarily produce better goods.”
So, you want to hop off the treadmill of constantly buying new stuff? Companies have made that harder too. Your goods probably have a shorter life span than they did years ago, and if you want to repair them — especially tech — you’ll come up against major barriers.
For years, Apple opposed right-to-repair laws, claiming they would expose company secrets. Because their screws are proprietary, you need special equipment to open up a device. This meant swinging by the dreaded Genius Bar or an authorized third-party shop to fix a broken screen until 2021, when Apple announced it would finally sell the parts required to open (and therefore fix) a device following years of pressure from regulators. Apple’s products still remain some of the toughest to repair on your own, according to iFixit, but the company is not alone in opposing right-to-repair; Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Tesla, John Deere, and General Electric have all spent billions lobbying against right-to-repair laws.
Smash hits: How viral memes conquered piñata design
Forget tradition. Social media trends are now driving piñata sales in Mexico.
A traditional part of Mexican culture for centuries, piñatas have become a reliable indicator of popular cultural trends.
Over the past few decades, piñata makers have slowly drifted from traditional forms in favor of cardboard representations of characters from movie franchises or cartoon series. To avoid copyright infringement, they are never exact replicas. As pop culture trends increasingly move online, memes, emojis, TV series and gaming-related characters, and even tech companies have inspired piñata makers to keep up with the times. In the process, they’ve helped a centuries-old tradition of craftsmanship survive.
It turns out that piñata makers are no different than the rest of us. They just want to go viral.
Piñatería Ramírez in Reynosa, a border city in the northern state of Tamaulipas, is a shop established by the Ramírez family 35 years ago. It started out by making traditional piñatas. These gave the family a steady income, but Dalton Javier Ramírez, the son of the shop’s founders, started making different piñatas out of boredom after years of replicating the exact same traditional star shape.
About 80% of his sales are piñatas shaped as children’s TV or cartoon characters, which are a favorite for birthday parties. The rest are online trends — singers, celebrities, politicians, memes, or internet characters — that Ramírez keeps an eye on, in the hopes he’ll go viral. He doesn’t do it so much for the sales but because it’s good publicity.
“Sometimes, a piñata goes viral and we start getting a lot of orders, like the time we built one of Donald Trump in 2016,” he said. “But the orders for these trendy piñatas’ popularity never last too long.”
Guess what? Piñata makers are now selling their works online.
Taking a cue from where their trends emerge from, some piñata makers have taken their businesses online, too. Guadalupe Pérez does not own a brick-and-mortar piñata shop. She takes custom orders via WhatsApp and uses her Instagram page as a catalog for potential clients. She told Rest of World she can make any design within a week for 500 pesos (about $25) — including one for Cheems, the famous dog meme, or a Demogorgon, the monster from the Netflix series Stranger Things.
As much as piñatas are cherished elements for celebrations, their representations of culture are not always born of admiration.
“Piñatas can also have a cathartic impulse of breaking symbols of what is perceived as evil, like a politician or the coronavirus,” Honorat said.
Ramírez said the piñata resembling Trump was successful because “everyone wanted to smash a Trump piñata.” Diego said a young girl came in a few months ago to choose her birthday piñata, and went home with one in the shape of Facebook’s logo. “She said she hated Facebook because all of her cousins were always on the site,” he said, “so she was going to be happy to smash it.”
There’s something all cultures can agree about: Facebook stinks. Twitter is worse right now, by the way. But that’s probably a discussion for another time.
New Yorker Cartoon of the Week
Recipe Corner
It’s soup szn, fam. This take on a traditional tortilla soup looks mighty enticing.
Chicken Lime Soup
For the broth:
5 cloves garlic unpeeled
2 chicken breasts (about 1 1/2 pounds)
12 cups water
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
3 bay leaves
3 whole cloves
2 1/2 teaspoons kosher or coarse sea salt or more to taste
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
For the sofrito:
2 tablespoons vegetable oil plus more for frying tortilla strips
1/2 red onion chopped (about 1 cup)
1 green or yellow bell pepper stemmed, seeded and chopped
1/2 pound ripe tomatoes chopped
1/2 teaspoon kosher or coarse sea salt
To serve:
6 to 8 Corn tortillas cut into 2"x1/2" strips
1 thinly sliced lima (lemon or lime) for garnish
2 to 3 limas (lemon or lime) to add right before serving
1/2 cup fresh cilantro leaves and upper stems chopped, for garnish
1 habanero chile finely chopped (optional)
For the broth:
Place the unpeeled garlic cloves under the broiler, or on a pre-heated comal set over medium heat, and roast or char for 10 minutes, flipping a couple times in between, until completely blackened. Set aside.
Place chicken breasts in a soup pot and cover with 12 cups water. Add the charred garlic cloves, oregano, thyme, bay leaves, whole cloves, salt and pepper, and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Partially cover with a lid and cook for 40 minutes, until the chicken is completely cooked through yet still tender. Remove from the heat. Remove the chicken breasts and once cool enough to handle, shred into fine pieces. Strain the broth into a large bowl, incorporate the shredded chicken, and reserve.
For the sofrito:
Rinse and dry the soup pot. Heat the oil over medium-high heat. Once hot, add the onion, bell pepper, tomato and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Cook, stirring often, for about 10 minutes until the vegetables are completely cooked through and practically mashed and mushy.
Pour the reserved chicken broth and shredded chicken into the pot with the sofrito, bring back to a simmer, and cook partially covered for 8 to 10 minutes, until all the flavors have come together.
Heat about 1/4" of oil in a deep skillet or casserole and set over medium heat. Once hot, working in batches, flash fry the corn tortilla strips for 10 to 15 seconds until lightly golden, and remove with a slotted spoon or spider. Place on a plate covered with paper towels, drain and lightly season with salt. Alternatively, you spread the tortilla strips on a baking sheet and bake at 275 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 to 15 minutes, flipping once in between.
To serve:
Ladle the soup into bowls and add a couple very thin slices of lima. Top with tortilla strips, and give everyone a half a lima to squeeze into their soup right before they eat it. Additionally, you may set out chopped cilantro and habanero for everyone to garnish as they please.
Limoncello-Ricotta Cheesecake
Did you know it’s peak citrus szn as well? It wouldn’t be a bad idea to try this out before bringing it to a SuperBowl party next month.
Cooking spray
9 ounces spiced butter cookies (such as Biscoff), broken into pieces
⅛ teaspoon kosher salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
2 (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
¾ cup granulated sugar
1 cup whole-milk ricotta cheese
½ cup limoncello
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (from 1 lemon)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
5 large eggs
Lemon peel strips (optional)
Small basil leaves (optional)
Preheat oven to 350°F. Place a 12-inch parchment paper round on bottom of a 10-inch round springform pan; secure springform pan ring around bottom. Coat inside of springform pan with cooking spray, and wrap the outside and bottom of pan with aluminum foil.
Process cookies and salt in a food processor until ground into crumbs, about 30 seconds. Pour melted butter through food chute, and process until crumbs are moistened, about 30 seconds. Press crumb mixture into bottom and about 1 inch up sides of prepared springform pan using the back of a large spoon until packed and smooth.
Bake crust in preheated oven until set and firm, about 10 minutes. Remove springform pan from oven, and let cool completely, about 30 minutes. Do not turn oven off.
While crust cools, beat cream cheese and sugar on medium-low speed in bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes, stopping to scrape down sides and bottom of bowl as needed. Add ricotta, and beat on low speed until combined, about 1 minute, stopping to scrape down sides of bowl as needed. With mixer running on low speed, gradually add limoncello, lemon juice, and vanilla, beating until combined, about 1 minute. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating until incorporated, about 1 minute. Stop and scrape down sides of bowl, and beat on low speed until batter is smooth, about 1 minute. Set aside at room temperature until ready to use.
Place springform pan with crust in a large roasting pan. Pour batter into crust in springform pan. Place roasting pan in oven, and carefully pour hot water into roasting pan until water level reaches halfway up sides of springform pan.
Bake at 350°F until center is almost set (it will still wobble slightly), 50 to 55 minutes. Turn off oven. Leave cheesecake in oven until water in roasting pan has cooled to just warm, about 30 minutes. Remove foil from springform pan, and transfer springform pan to refrigerator; chill until set and firm to the touch, at least 3 hours or up to 12 hours.
Run a knife around edges of cheesecake in springform pan. Remove springform pan ring from cheesecake; remove parchment paper and bottom of springform pan. If desired, garnish with lemon peel strips and basil leaves. Wrap cheesecake with plastic wrap, or place in an airtight container; store in refrigerator for up to 4 days or in freezer for up to 1 month.
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