The Joy of Third Place

Friends,

At the end of my last newsletter, I linked to an article about weak ties. That article was written kind of weirdly, but it was spurred by research published in October demonstrating that regular interaction with a variety of people you only kind of know is highly correlated with increased overall happiness. Then, a couple of weeks ago, a great video from the Dutch urban planning YouTuber NotJustBikes about how suburbia erased/erases/is erasing “third places” made the rounds on my feeds. You’ve probably heard of third places, but the basic idea is that you have home and work as the two main places you spend time, but then there are other places where you spend time that are neither of those, and that’s a third place. There are a variety of places that kind of fill that space — libraries, coffee shops, dog parks, bars, churches, etc. — but they often cost money or are inconvenient to get to, especially in suburbia.

Two quick points here: 1) My favorite very intentionally built third place is Etcetera Coffeehouse in Paducah, Kentucky. If you’re in the area and haven’t been or haven’t been in a while, go. 2) Whether it’s urban planning YouTube videos or the now 20+ year old tome on disappearing third places Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, it’s important to discuss how one of the root causes of suburbanization, zoning laws, and the disappearance of third places is rooted in attempts to continue racial segregation. Good overview from The Smithsonian Magazine ’s interview with The Color of Law author Richard Rothstein .

When we lived in the suburbs of DC and Austin, we had third places and weak ties, but they usually involved spending guilt-inducing amounts of money at bars or coffee shops, and in the case of neighbors, often led to regret (I have a strict no-socializing with your direct neighbors policy after An Incident). We could have sought out more, but it’s incredible how much easier it is in a city. When you walk the same blocks, take the same buses, live your life almost completely in the same limited neighborhood, always surrounded by people, you tend to see familiar faces. Who knew! Third places are still rarely free (though I will freely admit to not taking advantage of parks as much as I should), but they are significantly less cheaper and safer when they’re somewhere you can walk to.

A quick gallery of my favorite weak ties:

• The old man in incredible physical shape who is in charge of our neighborhood temple, who regularly goes without a shirt in the summer and lately, with the cooler weather, has taken to wearing a sweater vest over a button-up shirt with pajama pants.
• Our favorite vendor at the local morning market that provides us with pea sprouts, tofu, and spicy peanuts, and who always calls Carolina little sister.
• The elementary-aged daughter of the woman who runs the neighborhood vegetarian buffet, who jumps up from her homework to ring us up at the cash register, giggling as she practices her English.

One of the really nice things about working in academia is that in both the US and Taiwan your workplace has a lot of built-in pockets of what are essentially possible third places (in that they are physically located where you work, but you have no responsibilities as an employee there) and a lot of opportunity for weak ties. I regularly run into the same people over and over again but don’t directly work with them, like faculty members from different departments who teach in the same building as I do and end up in the faculty break room when I am there, or librarians, or student workers. One of the truisms that always comes up in conversations about third places and walkable spaces is that Americans love university life so much because for many people it’s the last time in their lives when they live somewhere they can walk everywhere, spend time with friends without spending money, and really belong to a community if they choose to. And as Ian Bogost put it in his 2020 article about university Covid closures , that idea of university needing to be a place and an experience: “Quietly, higher education was always an excuse to justify the college lifestyle. But the pandemic has revealed that university life is far more embedded in the American idea than anyone thought. America is deeply committed to the dream of attending college. It’s far less interested in the education for which students supposedly attend.”

If I’m being negative then I think this longing for third places and weak ties is a reduction, the repetition a limiting down of life. A simplification. But simplification can be both good and bad, and I guess maybe one of the common symptoms of aging is seeking out the comfort of simplification. We could look at this as a regression, a la the infant that wants the same story read to them at bedtime over and over again because there are no surprises to give anxiety, or we could look at it as a paring down to what matters most, and we can look at simple comforts as something there is no shame in needing.

Each night, I bring our bonsai tree in from outside, spray it with a little water and mercilessly smash any stowaway bugs that make themselves known, then place the tree by the bathroom sink. While brushing my teeth, I check the lock on the front and back door (but not all the locks, because our front door has an absurd number of locks despite being in a card-controlled building). Then I cover the drains of our sinks and shower, hoping this will reduce the chances of a six-legged unwanted late-night visitor. Same order, every time, like a baseball pitcher. But not for luck, instead as a little ritual to let my brain fully know it’s the end of another day. A little dose of simple comfort.

Further reading:

• It’s Christmas music season! I can only a stomach a little bit of the pure stuff (mostly Vince Guaraldi Trio/Charlie Brown and 30 different versions of the best Christmas song, “Carole of the Bells”), tending more towards those versions only verging on traditional like of Sufjan Stevens , Tinashe , or Pearl Jam . Even those are only good in moderation though, so the bulk of my Christmas audio is in the form of lo-fi playlists: Spotify , YouTube . One particular song that stands out is cormac’s “Snowfall” . Yes, I am as predictable as the tide, or as the arrival of Christmas music.
• I’ve cut way, way back on my social media in the last month. Musk’s takeover of Twitter has only barely directly affected me (so far) by allowing a lot more spam through, but it was a good excuse. I’m actually not hoping to stay off though, I’m just trying to find smaller versions of an online network, maybe a digital third place instead of a digital pseudo public square (as coined by Tressie McMillan Cottom ). The reasons are well-articulated in an(other) article by Ian Bogost with the maybe exaggerated premise that “The Age of Social Media Is Ending” . I used to be sad that Bogost transitioned away from primarily writing about video games, but more and more I’m glad to have his voice on a broader range of topics.
• On the topic of smaller spaces on the internet, I loved Dia Lacina’s rumination on PlayOnline , and its early attempt to be a combination of chatroom, message board, and game launcher in a way that didn’t quite work but was also beautiful.
• In one of the many iterative discussions of the toxicity in academia on reddit (translation: I lost the link), someone linked to a Twitter thread explaining the relevance of the Winner’s Curse to academia (nice explanation of the term here , but basically the idea that in an auction the winners are likely to pay more than the value of what they’re bidding on), and it made me think about how similar that situation is to many of the top achieving high school students I’ve gotten to know here, who have been forced to “bid” incredibly highly on universities with a prestigious spot on US News ’ rankings by their parents’/society’s/school’s choices and pressure on their own choices, and how the dissonance between their bid and their winnings will be difficult for many of them.
• Renata Cherlise, founder behind the wonderfully curated collection of photographed Black American life, Black Archives , is about to release her first book . Preordering would be a good gift!
• I’ve loved Anne Helen Petersen’s exploration of “Communities of Care”: groups of people outside of typical family structures providing support for each other. In a recent article, she talked about why it’s so difficult to ask for support from friends, and suggested a really great form to circulate in a friend group to help make helping easier.
• TaiwaneseAmerican announced the winners of their annual writing contest way back in May, but more recently published some of the honorable mentions. I was especially struck by Anastasia Yang’s “Crosswalk・Catwalk” , which seamlessly wove together images of Taipei with snapshots of her interior life.
• Kevin Conroy, the most enduring portrayer of the Caped Crusader, died last month. Read Glen Weldon on his legacy . DC marked the occasion by making “Finding Batman,” a story Conroy wrote for DC’s Pride anthology, free on its site (but not to people in Taiwan, unfortunately).
• Do you think John Prine was watching from above ? With a vodka and ginger ale and a cigarette that’s nine miles long ? Paradise .

Speaking of finding comfort in rituals, taking the long way home from work and checking out a new restaurant once or twice a week has been my new comforting ritual. There is one big stretch of a main road in our part of the city, the southbound side of Jilong/Keelung/基隆 Rd., that I avoid no matter what though. In a two block span there are about ten pet stores, replete with so many pairs of mournful or desperate eyes following you as you walk past. I’m not sure why, but Taipei operates like this a lot, where street blocks are full of the same type of store. While I avoid the pet stores, I like walking past the street near Daan Park that’s all wedding businesses, or the alley near Zhongxiao Fuxing that has six individual flower boutiques packed into a space the size of a small supermarket, or even the dozen funeral service providers that line the street near the library. It’s fun to see the small differences between each and wonder which is the oldest and whether they got upset when new ones opened up nearby, or how prospective customers choose between them, which personalities flock to which. I’m told there used to be a street like this for books, but it’s been gone for a while now.

Who knows what other places will be gone! Go, get out, explore them all before it’s too late. Or, better yet, consider your engagement as part of the reason they stay longer than they might otherwise. They need your presence, you need their presence.

And I’m thankful for your presence, here, as always.

-g

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