When a show creates and airs more than 740 episodes of television, finding consensus about the best of those episodes is nearly impossible. Yet, 30 years after it first aired, The Simpsons‘ “Marge vs. the Monorail” might be closest to the crown. This piece from Alan Siegel isn’t the first time an outlet has examined the episode’s impact — see Vice‘s oral history from 2020 — but it gleefully dives into the origin and execution the way few others have. D’ohnt skip it.
The episode was the first true extravaganza for a groundbreaking animated series that was originally conceived as an intimate family comedy. Both visually and narratively, it was an installment that expanded the world of The Simpsons as it moved beyond its first few seasons. All the quotable lines, sight gags, pop culture references, ambitious set pieces, and catchy songs add up to something unexpectedly (and eternally) prescient. The episode is now synonymous with modern hucksterism: Whenever a fancy newtransportation system, or a billion-dollar eyesore, or a deal that enriches corporate executives and few others comes along, it can’t escape comparisons to Lanley’s genuine, bona fide, electrified, six-car monorail. “I get a kick out of the cultural reach of The Simpsons,” says television writer and producer Jeff Martin, who had a hand in making “Marge vs. the Monorail.” “Now if there’s some shorthand for a dishonest salesman, a flimflam man, it’s a monorail salesman.”
“It is difficult to build utopian housing in a non-utopian world,” writes Rachel Monroe in this feature on 3-D-printed construction. But Jason Ballard, the co-founder of Icon, a construction startup in Austin, Texas, is determined to do just that. Icon uses a largely automated process to create houses one layer at a time, typically with cement. The company is one of the biggest and most well-funded ventures in the construction space, and even has a NASA contract to develop technology to build lunar structures. It has the potential to show the world that 3-D-printing can be a less expensive alternative, and one that produces more resilient, sustainable housing.
But is the industry ready for this disruption?
A printer can create the shell of a simple building in as little as twenty-four hours, although real-world conditions (rain, cold temperatures, operator error) slow the process. In the past two years, as Icon has expanded, its fleet of printers, called Vulcans, has printed military barracks, disaster-resilient houses, a luxury residence, and, at the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, a full-sized simulation of a Martian habitat, for nasa. Other 3-D-printing companies have produced an apartment building, a houseboat in the Czech Republic, and a house for Habitat for Humanity. Dubai has pledged that, by 2030, a quarter of its new construction will be printed.
Think you need to move to the woods to live off the grid? Joshua Spodek’s successful experiment proves that you can manage just fine on sustainable energy sources in the middle of a huge city.
I started my personal sustainability drive almost accidentally, when I challenged myself to avoid packaged food for a week. I expected deprivation and sacrifice from avoiding Manhattan’s abundant food options. If I’m honest, part of me hoped to find the challenge untenable so I could say the cure was worse than the disease and give up.
But constraints breed creativity. I learned to cook from scratch, which led to more of what I valued in food: flavor, variety, convenience, nutrition, and socializing, while lowering costs and pollution.
The unexpectedly rewarding results motivated me to keep going. I avoided flying for a year and experimented with unplugging my fridge. By May 2022, when I decided to disconnect completely, I hadn’t filled a load of trash since 2019, hadn’t flown since 2016, had unplugged my fridge for eight months, and had electric bills consistently under $2 (not counting fixed connection charges of about $18).
Attitude was more important than technology, though. Attitude made my setup doable. I’m not suggesting that “because I could do it, you can do it,” but I did tell myself that if humans could do without power for 300,000 years, then I could do so for a month.
I’m not able to make friends with Jell-O. Never have, never will. But maybe you’re more adventurous and curious than I am. Like it or not, Jell-O is enjoying a renaissance. At Eater, Bettina Makalintal interviews author Ken Albala about his new book “The Great Gelatin Revival.”
Eater: You write that you don’t choose book topics but that they choose you. What was your relationship to jelly like before you wrote this book?
Ken Albala: I didn’t like it, for one. [laughs] My mother made it when I was young. My parents were on Weight Watchers and they made this parfait that was lots of different colors, Cool Whip with Jell-O, just awful. I told my mother I figured out where Jell-O comes from — that it comes from calves’ feet — and I wasn’t gonna eat it anymore. That got me out of it.
I didn’t like it until a friend dared me to look at Show Me Your Aspics. I got sucked into it and I started making Jell-O here and there and realized that I was doing it every day. Some of them were good, some were not. I thought I might as well just get a book out of this.
They dance with abandon on Friday nights, and they’re always gone by the time the clock strikes 10. Joseph Bernstein’s fly-on-the-wall treatment of the rollicking weekly institution known as “Geezer Happy Hour” — complete with photography that’ll plaster a smile on your face — is the perfect crowd-pleaser to take into the weekend. May we all keep the same energy as we head into our sixties and beyond.
The staff of Live, which transforms into a bottles-and-tables dance club for young professionals around 10 p.m., adores the elderly crowd.
“They have the most fun,” said Chelsea Anderson, a 31-year-old bartender, who has been working the happy hour for six years. “Everybody loves each other. It’s a stark difference from the late crowd, where everyone is upset and barfing.”
This is a highly moving and deeply personal essay on choosing when to die. Robin Williamson carried out the “SWITZERLAND Schedule” — her mother’s assisted suicide at Dignitas — along with her family, after a final month of them all living together, contemplating what is to come.
As unpleasant and difficult and tiresome as it was, much of that month leading up to the event was a kind of idyll. For one, my mother was still alive. And it had been so long since we’d been together as a family. Or the last time ever, depending on how you look at it. I see this period in summary in the image of a family around a television. My father, my brothers and me are spread across the sofas, beers for us, red wine for him. My mother is beside a sofa, sitting on her scooter, a glass of scotch just within reach. An ordinary family in ordinary times.
Andrew Deck and Raksha Kumar | Rest of World | January 10, 2023 | 5,737 words
Justice can mean equality, and it can also mean retribution. In the case of Artsiom Kulik and Ashton Bingham, who have carved out a robust career orchestrating “scambusting” videos, their conception seems to skew heavily to the latter. But Kulik and Bingham’s gleeful payback has a discomfiting subtext. Somewhere along the way, Trilogy Media graduated from simply annoying phone scammers to releasing mice and cockroaches into a Kolkata call center — and as the stakes have gotten bigger, so has the sense that this isn’t really about justice at all. Andrew Deck and Raksha Kumar’s piece is a profile on its face, and an investigation at its core. With the fake Best Picture Oscar on display in their office, the Trilogy duo sees itself as destined for bigger and better things; what they don’t see is that they’ve gone from coming up to punching down. This isn’t the first story to reveal the craven heart of a content creator’s ambition, but it’s the rare example that goes a step farther to tease out the troubling power dynamics at play. —PR
Ryan Lenora Brown | Business Insider | December 30, 2022 | 5,363 words
In 1999, Sergio and Arnold Motsoeneng stunned the running world by cheating in the Comrades, an ultra-marathon in South Africa. The country was barely out of apartheid’s grip, and the twin brothers’ decision to swap clothes in a portable toilet was seen as a betrayal. In the eyes of racists, it was also a harbinger. “It felt to many like it was saying something … about the moral character of Black South Africans generally,” Ryan Lenora Brown writes. “Look, they said, this is who you’ve handed our country to.” Twenty-three years after the fact, Brown found the brothers, and they agreed to be interviewed. The resulting feature is a “where are they now” story, but Brown also considers where they were then. When the brothers cheated, there was serious money on the line — the Comrades winner would receive the equivalent of more than 70 years’ worth of the salary earned by the twins’ father. “Nobody wants to be poor forever,” Sergio told Brown. This is a complicated story, written with grace, and Brown does a memorable job describing both scenes and their stakes. —SD
Kate Evans | bioGraphic | June 4, 2022 | 4,304 words
Stumbling upon this piece, I didn’t expect to find it gripping, never having had a particular penchant for giant snails. I was wrong. The world of the nautilus is fascinating, and Kate Evans’ buoyant writing had me hooked. Only a handful of scientists have studied these creatures, even though they have survived all five of Earth’s past major extinction events; for centuries, writes Evans, their beautiful swirling shape has inspired “art, architecture, and math across many cultures.” These guys are both survivors and influencers. They are also smart: In one experiment, they are taught to navigate to deeper water by a beacon in their tank, but when the beacon moves and the tank shifts, they unexpectedly start to orient themselves using a wall poster of 20th-century chemist Rosalind Franklin, which hangs in the lab. I appreciated Evans taking the time to break from the science and detail their cheeky side — spending time with some nautiluses is akin to hanging out with “a gang of troublesome 12-year-olds.” However, it is not all lighthearted, and the nautilus researchers Evans spends time with have some stark warnings about a warming ocean; climate change may be the one event these cephalopods can’t survive. —CW
Jenny Diski | London Review of Books | July 31, 2008 | 2,791 words
In the last few years, sleep and I have had a strained relationship. I make appropriate advances in the form of a consistent bedtime, dutifully parking my screen for a paperback during pre-sleep reading. My phone remains in Do Not Disturb mode 24/7, yet sleep spurns me. As humans, we always want what we can’t have. That’s why I was drawn to the late Jenny Diski’s 2008 essay at the London Review of Books about her childhood love affair with the process of falling asleep, of lingering in that liminal stage between sleep and wakefulness, confident in the fact that sleep would surely come. (If only!) “Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep. Actually, my speciality is not sleep itself, but the hinterland of sleep, the point of entry to unconsciousness. So I remember it, and so it still is, at its best, the border territory of sleep. The whole point is to extend the unsleeping moment, and to drop into a state where all logic and reason disappears, while I nevertheless retain an essential degree of awareness of the strangeness I’ve achieved. ” —KS
Adam Reiner | Taste | January 1, 2023 | 2,243 words
“Menus provide a window into history, a vital connection to our foodways,” writes Adam Reiner in this fun read about restaurant menus. Frank E. Buttolph, a volunteer archivist at the New York Public Library, amassed 25,000 menus from around the world before she died in 1924. Today, the NYPL’s Buttolph Collection numbers 40,000, dating back to 1843, with most menus from between 1890 and 1910. What was served in the first Japanese and French restaurants in New York? What dishes were considered expensive or high-end or adventurous in the early 1900s? The collection’s menus, writes Reiner, are sources of inspiration for today’s chefs, researchers, and the simply (epi)curious. The scanned ones featured in his story are lovely to look at, and make you want to visit the NYPL yourself so you can pore over these pages. In our era of restaurant apps and QR codes, Reiner has also opened my eyes to the value of a physical, printed menu; I’ve always enjoyed reading the descriptions of dishes and cocktails, but after reading his piece, I realize how much a menu can also illuminate the historical and cultural context of the food they describe. —CLR
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