My story this week, “Life in the Stacks,” is a bit of an elegy for the way we used to find and absorb culture. It’s a love letter to the Age of Browsing—to Blockbuster, vintage movie stores, record shops, physical media, library stacks, and stomping around cities without smartphones (but with smart friends).
It’s not just that I miss tactile stuff—CDs, liner notes, books, the booklets in Criterion Collection DVDs. I miss the inconvenience of travelling to brick-and-mortar stores. For the record, I do have a smartphone, and the household has Netflix and Disney+. It’s hard to be a Luddite with small kids.
Still, I prefer stuff to streaming. The Age of Scrolling is here—I get it. Content has left the building and is never coming back. The bottle was incinerated by the genie’s afterburner. But some of those buildings were cathedrals: in Toronto, we had Soundscapes, Sam the Record Man, Vintage Video. Our lives are poorer
without them.
