Basically The First Building Made Primarily Of Reinforced Concrete

I’ve spent the past week in Illinois, so this is going to be a lightweight (aka skippable) issue.

The photo up top is the Rookery Building, the first modern office building and (supposedly) the first building over eleven stories tall, which also has Daniel Burnham’s office, who designed the World’s Columbian Exposition (aka the White City of Devil in the White City fame). I also got to tour the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Unity Temple, basically the first building made primarily of reinforced concrete and a pretty solid advertisement for Unitarian Universalism (which, as far as I can tell, is essentially “what if American liberalism were literally a religion?”).

You’ve heard of extraverts. You’ve heard of introverts. You may have heard of ambiverts, who are right in the middle of the distribution — they need some social time and some alone time. But have you heard of omniverts?

That’s right — I’m going to start identifying as a whole new, unexplored quadrant of the introvert/extravert axis! Because, as folks have sometimes pointed out, it’s quite odd that I seem completely comfortable with any level of social interaction. I can spend a week going to house parties every night after work none the worse for the wear (assuming I like the people at the parties). On the other hand, I suffered essentially no negative mental impacts from pandemic lockdowns; as long as I walked the dog every day, I was completely fine being alone all day every day.

That feels a little different from ambiversion — most self-identified ambiverts I know prefer some social time and some alone time and get rather upsetty if either is missing. To be indifferent to either seems much rarer.

Since I’m becoming a Menswear Guy™️ (oh no), I’ve been watching a lot of Percia Verlin. She had a pretty interesting video recently where she talked to a bunch of the independent designers at Paris Fashion Week about their new menswear lines. There’s a lot of interesting information tossed off, like that there’s been a move to more interesting / higher quality fabrics, so I recommend the whole video.

But the most interesting part (for which I can’t find a timestamp) is that a lot of these designers might find trouble being in the “mushy middle”. The modern clothing industry, I’ve gathered, has basically three tiers:

• “Fast fashion” a la Zara / Uniqlo / etc, at the sub-$100-a-piece price point
• Slightly elevated brands like Buck Mason at the $100-$200 price point
• Luxury / designer which start at $600 or so (but in practice are much more expensive)

You’ll notice there’s a pretty big gap between those latter two, and that’s the mushy middle. (Percia points out that a similar dynamic holds in the camera industry; either you’re buying a straightforward sub-$500 camera or you’re dropping $2k-plus on a high-end mirrorless, and there’s not really a profitable niche in between.) Anyway, my first thought was: maybe tech yuppies should be spending slightly more on clothes? But, then again, they mostly don’t care (see: Allbirds), even though clothing is a pretty interesting technical field itself. Anyway, I don’t really have a point here, but perhaps expect more clothing-related content here? Dunno.

I love a good single-purpose plain text site, so here’s a site that gathers everything known about the Roman cult of Mithras. It’s delightfully snippy about the state of the relevant Wikipedia article.

I rewatched Fellini’s 8½ (thanks to Your Name Here last week). I love this film even though it’s a little too long and a little too male gazey and the 1960s ADR is terrible. But pretty much every scene in this film launched the career of some major director — both David Lynch and Terry Gilliam cited it as a major influence. And this time I noticed another similarity that I can’t find cited anywhere but seems pretty likely: one of the most famous scenes in 8½ has the main character cracking a whip to take control of his dream harem (did I mention this movie was very Italian-male-gazey?) in a way that feels very Indiana Jones-coded.

I somehow missed that Men I Trust released not one but two albums in 2025. I don’t think they quite reach the heights of their earlier EPs but I still love my funky Quebecois indie dream pop!!