I've Got a Fever, and the Only Prescription is More Philadelphians

 

First of all, let me give credit where credit is due: the case for more Philadelphians in Philadelphia has been forcefully made before. See for example Philadelphia 3.0's article, "The Next Mayor Should Set a Goal for 2 Million Philadelphians." I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment. Here's my reasons:

1. Economically, much of City government's annual operating expenditures are fixed in nature. We pay the mayor's salary, take care of roads, and pick up the trash no matter if we have one million or two million residents, so we might as well as have more people, more jobs, more activity, and more tax base within city limits to generate funds for those expenditures.
2. Cities are not for everyone, so if you prefer a suburban or rural existence, go in peace. But, there is a way in which the density that you find in cities is a catalyst for commercial innovation, artistic flourishing, and social tolerance. And that's because human creativity is stimulated by ideas, interactions, and differences. Our great research and cultural hubs tend to be in cities. And, the larger the population and the denser the opportunity for circulation, the greater the dynamism. 
3. And, ideally, the greater the push for and accomplishment of inclusion. More tax base creates a flow of resources to support public services that are essential for our most marginalized households. And more contact across walks of life ideally creates more empathy, more of a sense of our shared humanity, and more of an opportunity to help.
4. Fear of growth, unless it is stoked by racist/nativist/reactionary impulses, usually comes from a fixed-pie mindset. Sure, if population goes up without more new housing and jobs, then existing households will suffer from housing unaffordability and from unemployment. But that's the point of growth, is to create the demand for and then the supply of new housing and new jobs, in response to and in many cases produced by newcomers.

OK, so having established why Philly should grow, let's get to how. Which I'll just touch on today, by taking a quick look at the different ways a city can grow:

1. More births than deaths. Not suggesting we import a bunch of babies and shove out elderly folks! But, given that this is one mechanism by which a population grows, how can we take care of our youngest and oldest? How can we create a city in which people want to have and raise babies? How can we create a city in which the oldest among us are supported in their health and wellness? There are some obvious solutions here that just require persistence and focus, which an agreed upon goal can provide clarity of purpose towards.
2. More domestic in-migration than out. This is typically where cities lose, which is that people move to the suburbs. The familiar reasons are schools, crime, and a front lawn, all of which can be addressed by a City government committed to stemming the outflow of residents and even attracting a higher rate in.
3. More non-US in-migration. Hat tip to my friend Anuj Gupta who runs the Welcoming Center and who has been a long-time voice for the power of welcoming the world to our city. Look, I get the impulse to be unwelcoming, as if we are enjoying a hole-in-the-wall place and don't want the world to encroach upon our secret haven. But, we are all better if we have more people around, even and especially if they come from different countries and have different customs and speak different languages. The best of Philadelphia's future, I suspect, will be defined by international diversity, whether it is a championship sports team or an amazing foodie scene or a world-beating industry cluster. 
4. Annex adjacent jurisdictions. Sounds crazy, just like the great annexation of the 1850s must've been back then. But I suspect that if we start humming on the other 3 things, neighboring inner-ring suburbs will at least entertain the conversation. To be determined...

Let's get to it! More Philadelphians!

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Being Henry: The Fonz . . . and Beyond," by Henry Winkler.

This Fonz was supposed to be a knockabout guy, a man of few words, rough around the edges. Confident. A guy who could make things happen with a snap of his fingers. Someone his fellow teenagers would listen to and obey unquestioningly. If this wasn’t the diametric opposite of who I was in the fall of 1973, it was pretty close. I was twenty-seven years old, soon to turn twenty-eight, a short Jew from New York City with a unibrow and hair down to my shoulders, confident about next to nothing in my life. 

The one exception was when I was acting. 

When I was on a stage, playing someone else, I was transported to another world, one where pretending made you successful. What I was miserable at was being myself.

Harry and Ilse Winkler were refugees from Berlin. They managed to get out in 1939, just under the wire, with a subterfuge: my father, an executive in a company that imported and exported lumber, told the authorities that he had to go to the USA for six weeks, on business. He had a letter from two companies in New York wanting to buy the trees owned by the company he worked for, Seidelman. He told the same story to my mother, knowing she would never agree to leave Germany for good if her family couldn’t come with her. Her parents and brother stayed behind, as did my father’s brother and business partner, Helmut, who’d been just about to go with Harry and Ilse but changed his mind at the last minute. The Nazis murdered him, just as they murdered my mother’s and father’s whole families and millions of other Jews. I mourned that I never had relatives: my only relatives were faux—members of the German refugee community in New York. 

There were a lot of lies in my family; this big one that my father told my mother to get her to the United States was the most benign. Benign as it was, though, my mother never got over it.

Sometime that year Joan Scott went to Los Angeles to open an office there, and I had a career talk with John Kimball, the agent now running her New York office. John was glad for my success, but he had a different idea. “If you want to be known to New York, stay here,” he told me. “If you want to be known to the world, go to California.”

After Disney, we sent the books around to every children’s-television outlet in the country, but we met the same kind of resistance everywhere: the nitty-gritty of Hank in the trenches, dealing with his challenge in all kinds of humorous ways, just wasn’t aspirational enough. Not uplifting enough. But apparently the books’ fans felt differently. Lin and I wrote the twenty-eight Hank novels to be entertainment reading for the reluctant reader. And the greatest compliment I ever got came from the many, many fan letters we received. Children wrote the same thing, over and over, in seven languages: “How did you know me so well?”

Very early in my treatment, I asked my new shrink in a casual way if she had children. 

She looked me in the eye. “How would my telling you help what you and I are doing here?” she asked. 

That was an interesting moment. I am famous, I am charming—famously charming. How could she resist answering this perfectly normal, perfectly innocent (I thought) question from me, the charming Henry Winkler? 

She resisted. And by resisting, she was showing me that she wasn’t going to be impressed by my being famous and charming—nor was she going to hold it against me. She was simply showing me that she was there to work—to really help the human being in front of her—and that I had to be willing to work, too. Without deploying any of my usual crutches. I slowly realized there was still a lot of little boy in me, desperately trying to make everyone in the world love me, because my parents didn’t seem to. The little boy who knew less than everyone else.

A few years back I was the honorary chairman of the Very Special Arts Festival, at the Music Center. All the mentally and physically challenged students from the Los Angeles school system converged there for two days, singing, acting, painting, dancing with and without wheelchairs. It was the most amazing event. And one afternoon I was standing there, and I heard a little voice behind me say, “Fonz.” I turned around to see a little girl with her mother, and the mother was weeping and shaking. “What’s happening?” I asked. 

“My daughter is autistic,” the mom told me. “She just said her first word, and it was ‘Fonz.’” 

I gave that little girl my very best hug.

When I go around the country speaking publicly, a lot of children with challenges come with their parents, and especially if I see them in the audience, I speak directly to these kids and the parents about the universes we all have inside, and how people so often focus on the outside instead of the inside. I pose for pictures everywhere. At one of these events I put my arm around Richard, who was in high school and taller than me. Everybody’s taller than me. His father was very emotional. I said, “Tell me what’s going on.” And the dad said, “My son doesn’t allow people to touch him. Even the family really can’t touch him, except on very rare occasions. And you, without a blink of an eye, put your arm around him and he put his arm around you.” 

It was the Fonz who unlocked that moment, and it was moments like that that unlocked me.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Thicker Than Water: A Memoir," by Kerry Washington.

 

At times, I felt unhappy and alone. I hungered for siblings; I noticed in other families that having a sibling relationship made people feel less lonely and more able to make sense of the homes they shared and the parents who raised them. One afternoon, when I was about ten years old, I asked my mother why my parents chose not to have more children. 

“You were a long–wished for child,” she said. “You were not easy to conceive.” 

And then, as if to silence me and end the conversation, she shared, without emotion and very matter-of-factly, that she had given birth to another child, a half sibling (though she left that detail out), but that child had been stillborn. I had no follow-up questions. I could tell that this was not an easy topic to talk about, and I felt like the proper response from me was to just be grateful that I existed.

Like so much of the information that was exchanged in my household, this truth seemed to be delivered reluctantly and was wrapped in an implicit warning—almost an entreaty—to not ask any further questions.

I remember being in the pool, surrounded by crystal blue threads of light shimmering all around me; I remember the sounds of other kids laughing, playing, splashing. I remember a whistle blowing in the distance because someone was running, much to the annoyance of a lifeguard. I have no memories of not being able to swim, no recollection of learning how to move underwater. Being in water, moving through water, has always felt more natural to me than walking on land. When I am in the water, I am at peace, and when I am submerged, between breaths, I feel most at home with myself, in my body. As a child, even when I hated my body, I loved being in the water. I remember going to my mother one day in my bathing suit and pointing out the protruding shape of my belly as a flaw I wanted to fix. She said, “Just hold in your tummy. That’s what everyone does.” 

So, on land, in my bathing suit, I learned to restrict my body, to hold my breath, and to pretend. But in the water, I could be free. 

I have always loved the ways in which water manipulates sound. The way noise races across the surface, amplifying sound for miles, and then the muffled distance created by being underwater. This so often feels like an escape to me because the world gets quieter, my heartbeat grows louder, and my thoughts and feelings become precise, clear. When I’m stressed, swimming allows me a safe route out of myself, helping me to escape my thoughts and then return to a calmer, more centered version of me.

If my life as Kerry Washington was relegated to chasing safety and love through the performance of low-maintenance, good-girl perfectionism, then the characters I played became my necessary escape into messy creativity, big bold feelings, and living out loud. In every character, I got to be somebody else. And that person got to be a real human being—in fact, it was my job to try to make her so. Each role I took on gave me permission to escape the trappings of my family’s dance and explore what being human could feel like. Each character needed me to feel deeply, to take risks, and to tell their truth.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet," by Taylor Lorenz.

 

When looking at what the internet has wrought in the last twenty years, we tend to focus on Big Tech: the massive corporations, the founders behind them, their visionary innovations, and the power they wield. But that’s only half of the story. For all the platforms that Silicon Valley has created and algorithms they’ve tested, the real transformation has occurred closer to the ground. The business of Big Tech doesn’t hinge on what they’ve invented but on what they’ve channeled. From the first amateur blog to the newest TikTok sensation, it has been users and those in their periphery who’ve brought the creative energy, the tech companies rising around them, fueled by the rich content and collective attention. It’s users who revolutionized entirely new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the twenty-first century.

Reading blog posts from that era today, it’s shocking how mundane much of it was. Venting about a bad mealtime or stressful playdate was revelatory, but now, over a decade later, the chatty, swear-laden, unfiltered style seems completely normal—because mommy bloggers were the first to bring that honesty to the public sphere.

“There’s a particular kind of fame that’s very normal now,” [Julia] Allison told me. “But no one was prepared in that era. They used to call it micro fame, and it’s this experience of blowing up when you don’t expect to. You’re not blowing up the way Taylor Swift blew up. Instead, you get a lot of attention and become a big celebrity—but only in a select niche. It creates a bizarre juxtaposition of being both super famous and unknown, all at once. The way people got well-known online, on the internet, was very new to everyone, including me.”

That same year, the video app pack was joined by another one: Musical.ly, the app that eventually became TikTok. 

Originally founded as an educational platform called Cicada, Musical.ly was meant to offer students three-to-five-minute videos on various subjects. After burning $250,000 only to learn that the app’s target demographic resisted anything that smacked of school, founders Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang pivoted. Zhu had been impressed by the video revolution that Vine had launched. One day, on a train ride through Mountain View, he had a moment of inspiration. 

As Zhu observed a group of kids on the train, he noticed that half of the group was listening to music, while the other half was snapping and sharing selfies on social media. What if, Zhu thought, you could combine the two?

What traditional Hollywood (which almost uniformly continued to think of TikTok as a teen dance app) still didn’t realize is that social media is itself a 24/7 reality show, delivered to young people in a format they’re far more interested in consuming than traditional TV. With TikTok, the reality show culture of the aughts and traditional fame had finally merged. Young viewers weren’t interested in ham-handed storylines about their favorite influencers delivered on a streaming service six months later. They could watch it all play out in real time on the internet, for free.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Look at Me," by Jennifer Egan.

Why didn’t I urge my friends to bring me casseroles and groceries and lounge with me on my sectional couch? Because I was weak. Oh, yes, that is the time when you need people most, I assured myself as the silence thumped at my ears. But you have to resist. Because once they’ve seen you like this, once they’ve witnessed your dull, uneven hair and raspy voice, your hesitancy and cringing need for love, your smell—the smell of your weakness!—they’ll never forget, and long after you’ve regained your vitality, after you yourself have forgotten these exhibits of your weakness, they’ll look at you and still see them.

“I’m interested in the relationship between interior and exterior,” she said, “how the world’s perceptions of women affect our perceptions of ourselves. A model whose appearance has changed drastically is a perfect vehicle, I think, for examining the relationship among image, perception and identity, because a model’s position as a purely physical object—a media object, if you will”—she’d risen out of her slouch and was sitting up straight, a spot of red on both her cheeks, discharging words in a cannonade—“is in a sense just a more exaggerated version of everyone’s position in a visually based, media-driven culture, and so watching a model renegotiate a drastic change in her image could provide a perfect lens for looking at some of these larger—”

As a teenager, I first became aware of people’s eyes catching on me as I walked down Michigan Avenue with my mother and Grace during shopping trips to Chicago. They glanced, then looked—each time, I felt a prick of sensation within me. I knew how transistors worked; my father had shown me a picture of the very first one, at Bell Labs, a crusty, inauspicious-looking rock that had performed the revolutionary feat of transmitting and amplifying electrical current. The jabs of interest I provoked in strangers struck me as an unharnessed energy source; somehow, I would convert them into power.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Family Chao," by Lan Samantha Chang.

You could say the community ate its way through the Chao family’s distress. Not caring whether Winnie was happy, whether Big Chao was an honest man. Everyone took in the food on one side of their mouths, and from the other side they extolled the parents for their sons’ accomplishments. Heaping praise upon the three boys who grew up all bright and ambitious, who earned scholarships to good colleges. Commending them for leaving the Midwest. Yet everyone was thankful when the oldest, Dagou Chao, returned to Haven. Dagou coming home to his mother, moving into the apartment over the restaurant, working there six days a week. Dagou, the most passionate cook in the family. Despite the trouble between Winnie and Big Chao, everyone assumed the business would be handed down fairly, peacefully, father to son. 

Now, a year after the shame, the intemperate and scandalous events that began on a winter evening in Union Station, the community defends its thirty-five-year indifference to the Chao family’s troubles by saying, No one could have believed that such good food was cooked by a bad person.

Years ago, Ming swore to everyone that he would never again spend Christmas in Wisconsin. He would never again deplane into a white tarmac of nothingness; never again slog knee-deep without boots across the airport rental lot under the frigid sky. Never again lay eyes upon his childhood street in winter, with its modest houses feebly outlined in strings of colored lights. He told everyone he would rather spend the holiday in New York, alone in his apartment, than return to this godforsaken heartland of deprivation.

“We Chaos, who are full of passion and inner chaos! None of us can bear to be in our present lives. We’re charged up with unrelenting ambition for the future; it’s why Ma and Ba came to the States. Or we’re sad about what might have been. Ba says he wishes he hadn’t left China. Ma’s trying to get back to a time without Ba. I’m thirty-three and I want to be nineteen again. We want to travel back in time, but we can’t, and so we want to go to a new place instead. Place is what we have instead of time. No. Not true. Money is what we have now, instead of place or time.” He exhales. “Time is money. Place is money. Love, love is money. And power is money. You’ll see.”

Going to college has split him cleanly in two. There’s no overlap between his college self and his identity as Snaggle, the third Chao brother. Is it possible for either of these two parts to fade away, disappear? Is it necessary to choose between them?