Coffee Shops, Instagram, and Good Taste
A glass-shattering moment
While in Amsterdam a few months ago, I went to a very good, very Dutch, very mid-2010s Instagram coffee shop. The latter is not a knock on their aesthetic at all – clean lines, wood finishes, dark accents – I found it beautiful enough to follow them on Instagram. But after a few similar-looking posts of a latte on a black table with an accompanying pastry, I realized my taste is changing faster than I can keep up with.
In 2019, we moved the Atoms office to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and subsequently discovered the then-new Head Hi coffee shop. Quickly, it became a favorite spot for everyone at the company. Great coffee, unmistakably cool owners, charmful DIY decor, and a masterfully curated selection of art books and zines. We were early in our praise, but not alone.
Working for a coming-soon DTC shoe company, I was very interested in crafting a thoughtful online persona. Head Hi was our internally-stated target demographic: creative, kind, independent, Brooklyn. Not that this is at all an indicator of the merit of a coffee shop is, but I personally wasn’t the biggest fan of their Instagram presence. Perhaps I didn’t think it was serious enough or overly-designed enough? How great I knew it was in real life, did not match what I thought it should be online. I had not yet been to the aforementioned Dutch coffee shop, but that was exactly what I had in mind.
I got back to Brooklyn in October and saw an Instagram story from Head Hi, looking exactly how it’s looked since I first followed in 2019. Only this time, I loved it. More than the capital-C capital-S Coffee Shops I was sure they should have looked like in the past. It had PERSONALITY. It said something. It was not like most other g̶u̶y̶s̶ coffee shops. But what does that say about me and my judgment of good taste? I was wrong about what I thought Head Hi should be. Not merely a difference of opinion. I was wrong.
The glass-shattering part here is not that I was wrong three years ago about how a coffee shop in Brooklyn should be posting on Instagram, it’s just how quickly my opinion on it changed – how quickly my opinions on so many things change. How I can be so sure of one thing one day, and so sure I was wrong the next. Can good taste change as often as mine seems to? Can it be this ephemeral?
I suppose you’d first need to decide if good taste even exists. Paul Graham recently tried to set the record straight by using some convoluted physics and vaccine analogies (ironic, from the guy who wrote an essay about writing simply). Saved you a click: he thinks it does. Despite agreeing that good taste exists, I think Paul is misconstruing talent for taste here. We differ on how to define good taste.
I recently sent a post, about stashing things you’re no longer into for when they’re back in style, to a very good friend of mine, who I’d consider to have very good taste. His response was a valid critique of the approach and relevant commentary on good, personal taste.
This view resonates more closely with those who dress to satisfy adherence to a moment or a trend rather than slowly trying to discover the things that align with you or that speak to you or that help you form a personal identity, which is a more gradual process. But I think ultimately very worth it because that defines the difference between your style changing vs. your style evolving. With the latter, there’s less of a chance that you just completely abandon shit for new shit, and more of an opportunity to appreciate what you have and its place in your wardrobe over time. Like it’s interesting to me to see the evolution of how x might lead to y and how they might interact rather than just cold swapping x for y when times change.
To bring this back to my coffee shop chronicles, Head Hi formed a personal identity, while I completely abandoned “shit for new shit.” And it is interesting now to see the evolution of how x, the highly-curated feed (the Instagram-friendly Dutch coffee shop), lead to y, the less-obvious carousel of photos (Head Hi). A few things are clear: good taste has no consensus, though it seems to be marked by independent thinking and conviction, in that order.
Casa Magazines Has Seen It All
During that in-between period where you’re too young to stay home alone and too old to have a babysitter, I would sometimes spend those school holidays that aren’t work holidays at my mom’s office. At the time, she was an editor at National Geographic. One of the highlights of those days was going on walkabout within a few-block radius of their office in D.C. Inevitably, I would end up in the magazine store that faced Farragut Square. My mom used to say, “Whatever you’re into, there’s a magazine about it.” That isn’t as true these days, but I still love magazines. And I still love magazine stores. Unfortunately (and not surprisingly) the magazine store business has followed the magazine business in its decline. But Casa Magazines is a beautiful outlier. Situated in the West Village, it has all those weird European magazines that cost double digits as well as your more standard fare. As this Times story details, the store has also grown from neighborhood institution into hipster hangout.
—Justin
Mark Suciu, “Blue Dog”
All pro skaters do a good job of making hard things look easy. But Mark Suciu does it better than most. I’m not always the biggest fan of tech skating. I love Rodney Mullen and Daewon Song as creative individuals, and I have a deep appreciation for their skating. But it’s not always the first thing I want to watch. I prefer speed and flow over trick difficulty. (Think Mason Silva, Omar Salazar, Julien Stranger—to go in reverse chronological order.) But Suciu has a unique ability to make tech skating flow and this new part is an amazing example of that.
—Justin
Checkmate (Chrome Extension)
Honey, but better and built by my friends! The story of how Checkmate began starts with a bit of arbitrage of some Patagonia sale items in San Francisco, 2018. But I’ll save that story for another time. SPEAKING OF SAVINGS!!!! Per Rory (Checkmate co-founder), Honey publishes on their website that they save users an average of $16 per transaction and their Alpha and Beta users have been saving a little over $30 per transaction. Add it to Chrome today to start saving money on some shit you didn’t even need in the first place, but were going to buy anyway.
—Andrew