LOCAL / ST. PATRICK'S COMMUNITY FAIR SAT & SUN

 

FRIDAY FELINE NEWS / NORTH PARK PET ADOPTION FAIR TOMORROW

 

THE FOODIST / TOP U.S. DINING REVIEWER PICKS HIS FAVORITE RESTAURANT.

Chicatana co-owners, from left A to Z: Jose Abrego, Hector Flora and Marcelino Zamudio. Photo: Scott Suchman, WaPo. 

Note: This Blog presents this guest article as part of an occasional series of outstanding restaurant journalism from around the world. 

Food critic Tom Sietsema [Washington Post] has picked--out of all the restaurants in the nation’s capital—a friendly, enticing Mexican spot in Columbia Heights as his year’s best place to eat: 

Welcome to Chicatana. 3903 14th St. NW. chicatanadc.com. 202-481-0511. Indoor and outdoor seating. Mains $13 to $29. Dinner daily and brunch weekends. Takeout and delivery. Sound check: 70 decibels/Must speak with raised voice. Accessibility: No barriers at entrance; ADA-compliant restroom. 

[Sietsema:] Marcelino Zamudio has worked for some admired chefs, notably José Andrés, in some of Washington’s most popular restaurants. 

Up until a few months ago, his mornings were spent at Oyamel in Penn Quarter, after which he’d race to 14th Street NW to cook for dinner guests at Chicatana, the intimate Mexican storefront he and friends opened during the pandemic. 

If you ask Zamudio to identify his best teacher, though, the native of Guerrero, in southwestern Mexico, names his mother. When he was a child, she insisted he learn how to make eggs and salsa in case “your wife doesn’t like to cook,” Zamudio says she told him. Like many immigrants before him, his first job in Washington was as a dishwasher at Rosa Mexicano. 

Co-owner Hector Flora, the face behind the bar and a childhood friend of Zamudio’s, learned his craft early, as well. As a boy, he grew up watching, and sometimes helping, his father make mezcal. Back home, he says, the evening tradition was to enjoy a shot of mezcal before dinner (cheers to that). 

Flora’s clear pride in the spirit is evident on the drinks list at Chicatana, where most of the cocktails are fueled by mezcal and the shelves are stocked with around 120 varieties. 

The third reason for the success of Chicatana is co-chef and co-owner Jose Abrego, the first face I remember from my maiden visit last year. Sitting at one of the stools overlooking his small open kitchen near the entrance, I admired the care Abrego took with everything he touched, including the trompo, or vertical meat spit. 

Abrego met Zamudio when the two worked at the Spanish-accented Boqueria in Penn Quarter, where they dreamed of serving polished versions of Mexican street food, or “tapas in a taqueria,” as Zamudio put it. 

Focus, and teamwork, meant the trio of friends could relocate Chicatana from small quarters to bigger digs on the same block in just three days in August. On opening week, the new version of Chicatana felt like it had been operating for years. 

Follow-up visits find an indoor-outdoor restaurant that’s doubled in size, as friendly and enticing as the original — actually more mouthwatering, since a larger kitchen means a lot more specials. 

There are no finer fried potato cakes than the tortitas de papa here, presented on lush epazote aioli, or more compelling shrimp sopes, their golden corn saucers brushed with haunting mole. 

One meal begot another at Chicatana, a beacon that I wish for every neighborhood. 

As I was eating (and drinking!) here, basking in the charm of owners who also act as ambassadors in the dining room, I was always plotting my next return. 

Beef Tinga from Chicatana

Chicatana is where I’d happily go on my own time and dime. Which is a long way of honoring Chicatana with my Restaurant of the Year award. 

The crew isn’t resting on its laurels. Already, the original workspace has been re-christened La Plaza, with a menu of Spanish and Mexican tapas designed to complement rather than compete with nearby restaurants. 

A good D.C. city block is poised to become greater. 

DESIGN / SOUTH PARK’S OTHER WORLDLY BAR LANDS INTERIOR AWARD

The Mothership bar and restaurant in San Diego's South Park quadrant won the Orchid for Interior Design. The 48-year old Orchids and Onions gala awards Orchids for exceptional architecture and Onions for projects that missed the mark. This year the 48-year-old competition led by the San Diego Architectural Foundation awarded more than a dozen Orchids for exceptional architecture and two Onions. 

There were more than 100 nominations but none quite like this ex-Mexican cafe. Few dining spots in town boast the decor of a crashed space shuttle, but why not? It's not our money, right?

Says San Diego Eater, Mothership is the second project from Kindred restaurant (Beech & Fern Sts.), owner Kory Stetina, in partnership with CH Projects co-founder Arsalun Tafazoli. Designed and built by Ignacio “Notch” Gonzalez of Top Notch Kustoms (SF’s Whitechapel and Smuggler’s Cove).

The Mothership was lauded for its sci-fi interior hiding inside a Mission-style building at 2310 30th Street just north of Juniper. Reservations are suggested, which gets you a 90 minute window to eat. Click here for the menu that's pure out of this world entrepreneural hutzpah.

The Mothership with hits Orchid award hype will no doubt be this year's hot Halloween dining experience.  So make that reservation! 

THE DAY CHE GUEVARA WAS CAPTURED IN BOLIVIA

An American tourist visiting Cuba in 2015 poses in front of a figure of Che Guevera, a larger than life leader of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture.  PillartoPost.org photo.

Photo: Alberto Korda.

Che Guevara (1928-1967), a prominent communist figure in the Cuban Revolution and a South American guerrilla leader. 

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.  

In early 1965, from Cuba he travelled to Africa and eventually to Bolivia to lead unsuccessful attempts to bring Cuban style Marxism overseas.  In 1967 he led forces rebelling against the government of René Barrientos Ortuño. With alleged US assistance, the Bolivian army captured Guevara [see below]and his remaining fighters. 

He was executed on 9 October 1967 in the Bolivian village of La Higuera.

MEDIA MONDAY / GAZA WAR YEAR ONE WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED

 

A resident walks amid the devastation following an overnight Israeli airstrike that targeted the neighborhood of Haret Hreik in Beirut's southern suburbs on October 3, 2024 (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images). 

GUEST ESSAY / By Michael Froman, President of the Council on Foreign Relations--Today marks one year since thousands of Hamas fighters breached the barrier separating Gaza from Israel and launched a deadly coordinated assault on Israel. The October 7 attack not only killed more than 1,000 Israelis (mostly civilians); it also upended Gaza, Israel, and the entire Middle East. For more on the changes of the past year—and what might happen next—I spoke with  Steven A. Cook, CFR’s Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies, who recently returned from a week-long trip to Israel.   

 **** 

Mr. Froman

First some background music. Who is Michael Froman and what is CFR? Michael Froman is president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He previously served as vice chairman and president, strategic growth, at Mastercard, chairman of the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, and a distinguished fellow at CFR.

 The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an American think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international relations. Founded in 1921, it is an independent and nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. CFR is based in New York City, with an additional office in Washington, D.C. Its membership has included senior politicians, secretaries of state, CIA directors, bankers, lawyers, professors, corporate directors, CEOs, and prominent media figures. 

 CFR meetings convene government officials, global business leaders, and prominent members of the intelligence and foreign-policy communities to discuss international issues. CFR publishes the bi-monthly journal Foreign Affairs since 1922. It also runs the David Rockefeller Studies Program, which makes recommendations to presidential administrations and the diplomatic community, testifies before Congress, interacts with the media, and publishes research on foreign policy issues. 

 Michael Froman is the organization's 15th president. 

 **** 

 Mr. Froman: "...Israel has now been at war in Gaza for nearly a year. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed, and yet victory hardly seems close at hand. What is the Israeli government’s strategy?   

The Israeli goal remains “the defeat of Hamas,” though Israeli leaders more likely mean “rendering Hamas unable to threaten Israel’s security.” From what I heard during my time in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the Israelis believe they have realized or are close to realizing this aim. They have all but declared major combat operations over, and as I was departing, they began shifting military units to Israel’s northern border.   

 Israeli officials have said that Hamas fighters remain in Gaza, but they are a disorganized force. As a result, the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] will continue to fight there, hitting small groups of terrorists whenever they have the opportunity. Early in the conflict, Israeli officials declared that after major combat Israel would maintain “overall security control in Gaza.” That seems to be what is happening.   

 How about the Israeli public? What’s their attitude toward the war?    

The Israeli public is deeply divided. The hard right wants victory in Gaza, arguing that if the IDF does not win there, it will not win in the West Bank or Lebanon. By “win,” they mean defeating Hamas and Hezbollah. This is why the right has clearly pushed the government to prioritize the fight against Hamas over the fate of Israel’s remaining hostages.   

 This puts the right at odds with the mushy middle that analysts call “liberal Zionists,” which runs from left of center to right of center. This group deeply distrusts the government and would like to bring the conflict to an end. 

Anecdotally, members of this group seem to be in an internal struggle; they recognize that the hostages make Israel’s battle more difficult, but they also want the government to do everything possible to bring the hostages home, and they simply do not believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu has done that. 

 The left, for its part, fears that the government is slipping into fascism. It wants to end the war in Gaza and would like the government to fall. The problem is that leftists and liberal Zionists do not have a political program to achieve this goal. They are long on outrage, but short on strategy.  

 Q. Set the domestic political scene. How secure is Netanyahu’s position? And what’s the state of the opposition?  

Netanyahu’s coalition is stable, with a 68-seat majority after a number of Likud dissidents agreed to join the government. That will make it easier for the prime minister to weather the constant political threat from his right flank, which will brook no compromise in the fight with Hamas. 

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, for example, are both suspicious of any ceasefire, fearing it would effectively end the war, allowing Hamas to fight another day. 

As long as Netanyahu is careful not to cross this line, he seems safe.    

Q. While you were in Israel, the Houthis launched a missile near Tel Aviv, and the Israelis set off explosives in pagers used by Hezbollah members in Lebanon. The war in Gaza has escalated well beyond Gaza. Since you returned, Israel has sent ground forces into Lebanon, and Iran has again launched missiles at Israel. When you think about how the conflict could intensify and spread further, what worries you most?   

 Indeed, I slept through the air raid sirens when the Houthis attacked. That was my first morning in Israel. In rapid succession, Israel attacked Hezbollah with exploding pagers and walkie talkies, and then, when the group’s commanders met because they could not otherwise communicate, killed them in an airstrike. 

A week later, of course, Israel killed Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The Israeli escalation is clearly intended to intimidate Hezbollah (and its patron, Iran) and re-establish the deterrence it lost on October 7.      

 Certainly, Hezbollah is back on its heels, and it remains an open question whether it can muster an effective response to Israel, at least in the short run. My concerns are twofold. First, I worry that Israel's determination to launch a significant retaliatory strike against Iran will not deter Tehran, which may then order another round of (possibly larger) ballistic missile strikes on Israel. 

If that were to happen, it would be hard to control the spiral, and the Israel-Iran war that everyone has worried about will be upon us. This would likely draw the United States and others into the conflict. 

Second, I worry about the Israelis getting stuck in Lebanon. The Israelis are determined to change the rules of the game with Hezbollah and press their advantage. Fair enough, but if they go in on the ground, as they are poised to do, how do they get out?   

 We have seen this before: in the early 1980s, when Israel undertook Operation Peace for Galilee and drove all the way to Beirut. Israel ended up occupying a “security belt” in southern Lebanon between 1985 and 2000. About 250 Israeli soldiers were killed in those years. The difference between then and now is that the Israelis had help in the 1980s and 1990s from Lebanese Christian militias. Today, they would have no such allied help.  

SUNDAY REVIEW / HELLO, TALKIES!

On this day in 1927, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, premiered in New York City, Debuting the sound era of motion pictures. 

 And, what were the first words uttered on the motion picture screen? 

Al Jolson as Jack Robin: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet! Wait a minute, I tell ya! You ain't heard nothin'! You wanna hear "Toot, Toot, Tootsie"? All right, hold on, hold on...” • [then he walks back to one of the band members] 

Jack Robin: “Lou, listen. Play "Toot, Toot, Tootsie", three chorus, you understand. In the third chorus, I whistle. Now give it to 'em hard and heavy, go right ahead.”

Al Jolson and May McAvoy in a scene from
the first “talkie” movie The Jazz Singer.

COFFEE BEANS & BEINGS / NINETEEN COFFEE MAKING OPTIONS IN ONE MACHINE.

PillartoPost.org is a magazine-style blog that has posted daily since 2011. Like all journalistic efforts around the world, P2P is fueled y  blood, sweat, tears and  espresso coffee. Six months ago we decided leaving the company high rise in San Diego to find coffee was too time consuming. 

Ergo, we made an investment in a multi-brew machine that was offered in San Diego and available via the Internet. The maker is Café Bueno. Click here for more info.

This unpaid shout-out is something that works for us. Yes, it’s a pricy investment compared with the pod machines but it hasn’t let us down and we figure we’ve saved manhours and bucks trekking out of the office for coffee. 

Below is straight out of Café Bueno’s FAQ post: 

Q. What is a Cafe Bueno Super Automatic Espresso Machine (CB-3000)?

A. Cafe Bueno is a fully customizable coffee experience offering 19 options to select from. Our built-in grinding technology ensures you get the freshest, most flavorful cup of coffee each time. It is like having a barista in your home. 

Q. How many drink options does a Cafe Bueno CB-3000 have? 

A. Nineteen! 

Q. Do I have to purchase the option milk container if I want milk in my coffee? A. No. The Cafe Bueno CB-3000 comes with a tube that you can put into the milk container or a glass of milk. The optional milk container just makes it more convenient. The milk container is not compatible with the CB-2000. 

Q.  I am getting a fill beans error even though the bean container is full on my CB-3000. 

A.  Different coffee brands and beans can have slightly different sizes. In order to adjust this sensitivity, please go to the menu and select the "Calibrate" option. Enter code 67 and click "OK". You will see an output message that is formatted like: [4]R-S(0-9). In this example the current setting is 4. To increase the current setting by one you would enter, in this example, 5 and then hit "OK". If you see the fill beans light again while using these beans, please go back in and increase the setting by one. Please be careful not to adjust this higher than one step at a time, and you may have to readjust back down if you switch coffee beans. Also, please never set it to 9 because this could cause damage to the machine. 

Q. My milk frother is not working on my CB-3000. 

A.  If you are using the milk container please loosen the lid slightly. This will let some air into the container and fix the problem 99% of the time. Also, you can remove the milk frothing mechanism from the spout of the machine and make sure that the knob is pointing towards the "+" sign. 

Q. Will a Cafe Bueno save me money? 

A.  Yes, and it will also save you time! We estimate that the normal coffee drinker has more than one cup a day. If you bought only one of these cups at a coffee shop, then you would break even in only a couple of months! 

Q. What makes a Cafe Bueno better than a pod style coffee machine? 

A.  Cafe Bueno isn't stuck making the same drink each time like a pod style machine. Also, your coffee is freshly ground only seconds before it is brewed. This helps to extract the maximum flavor profile. Yet another reason is that pods can be extremely wasteful due to that fact that you have to throw the pod away after each cup. 

Let's get technical.

Q. What is the bar pressure of the CB-3000? 

A. The CB-3000 delivers up to 19 bars of pressure with a 19 Bar Italian pump system for optimal flavor extraction of your espresso. This pressure ensures rich, crema-topped, milk-infused coffee drinks. 

Q. Does the CB-3000 come with a user manual? 

A.  Yes! Our CB-3000 comes with a guide to get you up and brewing. We also have a PDF copy of the user manual that you can request from contact@shopcafebueno.com or by filling out a request on our contact us page. 

Q. How does the CB-3000 grind whole beans? 

A.  Our conical burr grinder can be adjusted with a knob in the bean container from sizes 1-4 (with 1 being the finest) to modify the coarseness of the grind and match your preferred coffee style. The CB-3000 is made to grind to precision over the lifetime of the machine. Remember to only adjust the dial when the grinder is actively grinding the beans. 

Q. What is the CB-3000's water tank capacity? 

A. The CB-3000 holds .48 gallons (approximately 61.5 fl oz. or 1.817 liters). 

Q. Why is my CB-3000 turning off automatically? 

A.  It is likely that you have the sleep mode timer set. The timer will automatically put the machine to sleep to conserve energy. You can adjust the frequency of sleep mode or turn it off completely. 

Q. How do I make milk-based drinks on my CB-3000? 

A. There are two ways to make a milk-based drink. First is to use the optional insulated milk container. Simply hook up the provided hose to the machine, and the other end in the insulated milk container. Ensure that you have sufficient milk in the container and that the connection points to the container and machine are snug. Then brew a milk-based drink or use the standalone hot milk/foam button. Second is to use the included clear milk tube. Simply insert the end with the black fitting into the CB-3000 and then put the open end of the hose into a milk container or glass of milk. Ensure that you have sufficient milk in the container and then brew a milk-based drink or use the standalone hot milk foam button. 

Q: How do I use preground coffee with my CB-3000? 

A.  Do not use pregound coffee for the first use of the machine. However, after you have used the machine once, you can use the supplied coffee scoop to accurately measure the amount of preground coffee. Open the lid to the coffee bean container, and then remove the small lid that is near the bean adjusting knob. Dump the coffee from the supplied scoop down the opening and replace the small lid, and finally replace the large coffee container lid. Then select the scoop icon on the bottom right of the touchscreen. Now you are ready to select whichever drink you would like to brew. 

Q.  Can I make an iced coffee with the CB-3000? 

A.  Like all super automatic machines, the CB-3000 does not have a dedicated cooling block, so it cannot make a truly cold beverage. However, we recommend lowering the temperature of the drink you want to make and brewing your drink over ice cubes. 

FISCAL FRIDAY / U.S. ADDS WHOPPING 254,000 JOBS IN SEPTEMBER

 The US economy added a staggering 254,000 jobs in September, blowing past economists’ expectations of 140,000 job gains. 

GUEST BLOG / By CNN Business reports--Stocks gained today as investors parsed the eye-popping figures in the latest jobs report. 

 In early morning trading, the Dow rose 243 points, or 0.6%. The S&P 500 gained 0.8% and the Nasdaq Composite added 1.2%. 

 The US economy added a staggering 254,000 jobs in September, blowing past economists’ expectations of 140,000 job gains. 

The unemployment rate ticked lower to 4.1%, below projections it would remain steady at 4.2%. The strong picture of the US job market has boosted optimism on Wall Street that the US economy is headed for a soft landing, or a scenario in which inflation comes down without a recession. 

 The Federal Reserve last month cut interest rates by a jumbo half point, and investors have waffled over whether the central bank will cut rates by a quarter- or half-point next month. 

 Bets for a quarter-point cut in November rose following the latest jobs report, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.

LOCAL / UP COMING FOOD FEST IN NORTH PARK

 

THE FOODIST / NORTH PARK IS HOT STUFF SAYS TRAVEL MAGAZINE

 

GUEST BLOG / By Amber Coakley, Reporter KUSI/San Diego-- One San Diego neighborhood is among the most “up-and-coming” in the country, according to TravelMag. 

 Researchers with the publication sought to determine the “most appealing” districts in the U.S. by using specific criteria. To do this, TravelMag curated a list of 16 “up-and-coming” places, with 16 major cities represented, including San Diego. The idea was to narrow down areas that could be considered “hip districts.” 

 Some deciding factors included things like the number of “cool” cocktail bars, “fancy” coffee houses, “trendy” eateries that have popped up in the past few years, LGBTQ-friendly and vegan spots, as well as “eclectic” boutiques in these neighborhoods. 

 When it comes to San Diego, one neighborhood was singled out as the most “up-and-coming,” based on TravelMag’s criteria. North Park took the crown, with the publication noting, “As much a place for families as it is for singles, this San Diego parcel offers an eclectic mix of restaurants, coffee houses, boutiques, and bars.” 

 TravelMag also highlighted North Park’s ideal location, explaining that it’s “centered on the brewery-studded intersection of University Avenue and 30th Street.” Also mentioned was the neighborhoods culinary scene with dining options like Mabel’s Gone Fishing, The Smoking Goat and City Tacos.

 “We are immensely proud to receive this recognition from Travel Mag,” said Mark West, executive director of North Park Main Street. “This honor reflects the passion and perseverance of our community. We remain committed to fostering an environment that promotes creativity, inclusivity, and economic growth, ensuring North Park continues to shine as a beacon of progress in San Diego.” 

 TravelMag also pointed to North Park’s popular Verbatim Books, San Diego’s largest independent bookshop, as well as music venue The Observatory as hip places in the neighborhood. 

 William Lopez, board president of North Park Main Street, added, “Our efforts to enhance North Park’s appeal through various community initiatives, events, and support for local businesses are truly paying off. This accolade not only celebrates our achievements but also motivates us to keep pushing forward, making North Park an even better place for everyone.” 

DESIGN / FOLLOW THE MUSIC INTO THE SHOWER

 

There are 13 color options you can choose for the Clip 4,
from black to white to camouflage to red.

Editor’s note: Esquire Endorsement is a regular feature in the venerable quarterly magazine. Editors research and vet products that are quality and creative. Here’s the latest: it’s a small shower speaker with a big sound written by an uber fan of the device. The JBL Clip 4 is waterproof, portable, and more compact than your iPhone. It is priced at $60.

Photos: Joe Lingeman. 

GUEST BLOG / By Trishna Rikhy, Esquire Magazine--I’m the kind of person who likes to have a soundtrack to my life. I don’t just mean I have headphones on when I’m walking around town (I do, but that’s the bare minimum); I want music in the background when I’m cooking, when I’m cleaning, when I’m working. 

I play kitschy pop when I’m getting ready and classical playlists when I’m reading—and loud. The music always comes from a source I know will sound good—from a speaker to my laptop—because, let’s face it, turning your phone volume all the way up and hearing music emit from your tiny speakers doesn’t cut it. 

And when it comes to showering, that used to be the worst. For most of my life, I would prop my phone up against my bathroom counter to try and project the best sound I could. You already know this move sucks. 

Esquire's Trishna Rikhy 

A few weeks ago, I had perhaps my brightest Shower Thought yet—why don’t I just get a shower speaker? I got to researching, and what I found seemed too good to be true. A speaker that boasted Bluetooth compatibility, a totally waterproof shell, and a small portable design, all for less than 100 bucks. 

The JBL Clip 4 has it all—and that’s just the beginning. It goes wherever I go. This speaker is the definition of “small but mighty.” It’s literally smaller than my iPhone (and lighter in weight, too), but the sound is absolutely incomparable—that might have something to do with the fact that this entire thing is a speaker, whereas on an iPhone, we’re just dealing with those six tiny-hole speakers at the bottom of the device. 

And whereas most of the speakers this small that I’ve used before still have a slightly static, tinny sound when the volume is all the way up, this one does no such thing—even when it’s fighting to be heard over the water of my shower, it projects a rich, clear sound. 

I’ve had portable speakers in the past, but none are as truly portable as this. The entire speaker is embedded into a giant carabiner-esque clip (it’s super wide but not as long), so if you don’t feel like holding it, you can clip it to anything from a belt loop to a backpack strap to a showerhead and just let it come seamlessly along for the ride, playing tunes the whole way through. 

Plus, thanks to its Bluetooth capabilities, you don’t have to fiddle with your phone to do things like change the song, adjust the volume, and hit play or pause; there are huge buttons (like, think of the buttons on a TV remote at a nursing home) on the speaker itself that allow for easy access and seamless functionality. 

It’s tougher than it appears. 

This speaker claims to be waterproof and dustproof, so naturally I had to put it to the test. I knew from the first use that I could clip this to my showerhead and enjoy incredible sound whilst the speaker got only minimally wet, but for it to be truly waterproof, I kicked things up a notch and submerged it completely in my tub. The sound wasn’t clear underwater—perhaps the bluetooth connection was severed—but when I lifted it out of the tub, completely and thoroughly soaked, it still performed good as new. 

No glitches. 

No sound skipping. 

No static. 

A miracle, eh? 

To let it get dusty, I brought it to a day at the park with my friends. I’m not gonna lie—I kicked it around in the dirt a little bit. Let it roll through a small puddle or two. Passersby were likely wondering what this poor, innocent speaker had done to deserve such abuse, but trust me—this speaker can take it. 

Again, the performance when I tested it after was pitch-perfect. 

So yes, this speaker is great for some shower tunes, but it’s much more versatile than that, too. In summer, I’ll take this to the pool and the beach without fear of water or sand destroying my sounds. If you’re the kind of person who likes to hike, clip it to your backpack and carry on, fear free. 

On the back of the speaker are grippy rubber lines, so you can even let it rest on a slippery surface (like, say, poolside) without worrying about it sliding around. 

It sounds as good as it looks. 

The entire device itself is the speaker, so you get double-sided sound that’s just richer than what a phone, laptop, or speaker projects from only one surface. 

Plus, it certainly helps that JBL is a premium speaker company—they’ve been perfecting the art of sound since 1946, and it feels like all those decades of craftsmanship have culminated in this small, powerful wonder. 

This little speaker goes a long way, too. Every charge provides up to ten hours of listening time, and if you lose the charger the speaker comes with, fear not; it’s a simple USB to USB-C wire that I’m sure you have lying around in one junk drawer or another. (Keep in mind that your AirPods only have half that much listening time, so however often you charge those is twice as much as you’ll need to charge the Clip 4.) 

SHOP $60, amazon.com

AMERICANA / RING IN THE SPOOKY SEASON

 "Stranger Things" and "Ghostbusters" actor Finn Wolfhard is among a panel of judges who will decide the winner of Ring's take all prize. Also judging is paranormal Investigator Katrina Weidman.

In a clever mix of advertising and editorial presented by USA Today’s Anthony Robledo reported that Ring, the home security company will award $100,000 to a U.S. citizen (only) for submitting the most compelling paranormal activity logged by Ring surveillance cameras. 

 The hype continues with USA Today pointing out Ring’s popular front door/porch cameras aren’t just for monitoring the living. As spooky season commences, "I would encourage folks to really keep an eye on things that are happening in front of their cameras," Ring Chief Commercial Officer Mimi Swain told USA TODAY. 

"We've seen just incredible things of floating orbs or shadows or ghosts show up on footage. And so we're really encouraging our Ring customers to have a little bit of fun with this one." Ring’s "Great Ghost Search" comes over a year after another unearthly contest when Ring asked users to submit footage of extraterrestrial beings. 

Swain said this year's competition held during the busiest doorbell season of the year is another chance for users to "capture these moments that you otherwise wouldn't be able to to notice." 

 How to enter Ring’s Great Ghost Search 

Ring users can submit their videos at www.ring.com/ghostsearch through 11:59 p.m. PDT Nov. 1. Only the first 5,000 submissions will be considered, according to Ring. 

A brief description of at most 100 words is also required, explaining what is being depicted in the video. 

 Both unaltered suspected evidence as well as silly ghost creations are welcomed, but only one will win the $100,000 check. 

Repeat: entrants must be Americans 18 years old or older. 

 Contest entries will be judged on the visibility and clarity of the ghost as well as uniqueness, entertainment value and engagement. 

 "Stranger Things" and "Ghostbusters" actor Finn Wolfhard is among a panel of judges who will decide the winner of the winner take all prize. Also judging is paranormal Investigator Katrina Weidman. 

 "Ring is known to catch all kinds of activity – but I know if I saw a ghost on my Ring camera, I’d want to move out as fast as possible," Wolfhard claims in a news release. "This Halloween season, I'm relying on my Ring camera to alert me of any such activity happening.”  

MONDAY MEMO / BE POSITIVE!

SUNDAY REVIEW / INDIE BOOKS EMBRACE NEIGHBORHOODS

GUEST BLOG / By USA TODAY, Phaedra Trethan, staff writer--Giovanni's Room has been a fixture in the Philadelphia region's, and even the nation's, LGBTQ+ community since it opened in 1973. 

 But in 2014, its survival was in doubt. Under pressure from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and big box retailers, the bookstore in Philadelphia's "Gayborhood" wasn't making money, one of many independent bookstores in the country struggling as the retail landscape changed and readers moved online. 

 Today, though, what is now Philly AIDS Thrift @Giovanni's Room is thriving, one of many small bookstores across the U.S.. making big impressions. Indie bookstores aren't just places to buy books; they have evolved into communities' cornerstones, embracing the diversity of their neighborhoods. 

 "We've seen tremendous growth since the beginning of the pandemic," said Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association. "That has been a pleasant surprise for us here at the ABA, and for bookstores and their communities." 

The organization, founded in 1900 and representing more than 2,500 independent bookstores, saw its membership grow by 11% in 2023 as 291 bookstores opened, including 230 brick-and-mortar stores, 34 pop-ups, 18 online and nine mobile stores. Of those, Hill noted, 58 bookseller businesses are owned by Black, Indigenous and other people of color. "There is a lot more diversity, in terms of race, ethnicity and other identities, and a lot of innovation in the format of these stores," Hill said. "And all of those things are signs of a healthy ecosystem." 

In 2014, Giovanni's Room owner Ed Hermance (pictured, above) was ready to leave the business but not just searching for the highest bidder. He was looking for someone with a sustainable plan who would respect the bookstore's legacy, who knew the store was far more than a place to buy otherwise hard-to-find books. 

"The prospect of closure made national news," said Christopher Cirillo, now the manager at Philly AIDS Thrift @Giovanni's Room. "It was really upsetting to the entire LGBTQ community here in Philly and elsewhere that this store might close." When founders Tom Wilson Weinberg, Dan Sheron and Bern Boyle moved the store to its current location, Cirillo said, "members of the (LGBTQ+) community didn't just support this, they helped build it," fixing up the former antiques storehouse, installing bookshelves, painting and prepping the space for retail. 

COFFEE BEANS & BEINGS / CRANKY BRIT CONNAISSEUR JUST DOESN’T GET ALL THE FUSS ABOUT COFFEE

 

Editor’s Note: This is part of an occasional series by CNN Travel called, “I Just Don’t Get It,” a contrarian look at a popular person, thing, activity or cultural phenomenon. 

 GUEST ESSAY / By Barry Neild, CNN Travel Writer--I get that you all love coffee. I get that you think it tastes delicious and that the day only begins after your first cup. 

It’s a hug in a mug! 

It’s coffee o’clock! 

I get that some people enjoy it so much they’re willing to splash at least 17.5% of their disposable income on it. I get that you probably have your favorite coffee shop and your own reusable coffee cup (if you can stop at just one). 

I get that you have a specific order that rarely changes. 

Knowing what you’re like, you coffee fiend, you probably even have a preferred hectare of rainforest to source your coffee beans from. And I get that too. I wish I felt the same way. 

 Here’s the thing: I like a lot of things associated with coffee. I adore the smell of coffee. I like the vibe in some coffee shops. I like those machines with chrome pipes and pressure dials that hiss and splutter out their tantalizing dark liquids. I like the energy of the tattooed baristas who angrily bang out the spent grounds from the previous cup before lovingly drawing a portrait of your face in the foam of your cappuccino. I like the paraphernalia – the French presses, the glass jugs, the filters, the tamps and those delicious little Lotus biscuits that often come on the side. I love it all, I really do. 

I love it all right up until the moment I take a sip, at which point I confirm once again what I’ve always known. 

Coffee is utterly disgusting. 

 Yes, everyone seems to have unfiltered views on which is the world's best coffee. I have tried to enjoy coffee. Evangelical coffee snobs of various stripes have sat me down over the years with the instruction to “forget all the bad stuff you’ve tasted before, try this!” 

Gamely, I’ve opened my mind, dispelled my prejudices and slurped long and deep. And then, more than likely, sprayed it all over the table. Awful stuff. Before you brand me a Philistine, please know I have more coffee cred than the average Joe. (Does a coffee pun win me any points?) 

I spent a couple of years in the mid-noughties living on the Indonesian island of Java, where Java coffee originates. During my time there, I traveled deep into the eastern reaches, south of Surabaya, where ruby red robusta beans are harvested in plantations on tropical hillsides, then dried and roasted. 

There, the sense of what the French call terroir – character gained from a particular place – was buzzing in the humid air like escaped caffeine. The red earth was damp and pungent, the sunlight was hazy and heavy. Right at its point of origin, here was a chance to taste coffee as nature intended, unspoiled by industry. Blergh! 

 In Indonesia they also have a rare and expensive coffee made from beans that have passed through the digestive system of a civet cat. I didn’t try it, but maybe I should’ve. I don’t see how being swallowed and excreted by a nocturnal forest mammal could make coffee any worse. 

A couple of years ago, I visited Colombia and was taken to what I was told was one of the city’s best coffee shops in Bogotá. Here, in the cosmopolitan capital of one of the great coffee-producing countries of South America, I was told one again: “Forget all the bad stuff you’ve tasted before, try this!” Abysmal. I’m sorry, I really am. Incidentally, in the cafés of Bogotá, it’s also traditional to drink hot chocolate alongside a slice of cheese, which can be dunked in the mug. Now, that’s more like it! Of course, I soldiered on with my cup of Colombian out of politeness. As I have in similar situations where I’ve been served the “world’s best coffee” in Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Morocco, the Arabian peninsula (cardamom is a nice touch, but still no) and Australia. I don’t think it’s my tastebuds. 

I like to eat and drink almost everything else and have an adventurous palate. Sweet, savory, sour, spicy – it’s all good. 

Of course, I am British, so I do have a natural inclination toward drinking tea instead. 

But Brits love their coffee, too. 

Coffee houses were a big deal in 17th century London long before tea hit the scene. And today, my UK friends and colleagues love coffee as much, if not more, than a cup of Earl Grey or English Breakfast. 

And that’s a problem, because British caffeine habits have become regrettably coffee-fied in recent years. Traditional cafes where once you’d be charged pocket change for a pot of tea have vanished as corporate coffee shops advance. And while Starbucks and others still sell tea, they sell it at coffee prices. 

Five dollars isn’t unheard of for what amounts to a cup of hot water, a small bag of leaves and a splash of milk. It’s worse in the United States of course. When I travel there, I usually bring my own supply of teabags (PG Tips or Yorkshire Gold, if you’re asking – we rarely drink Lipton over here). 

I’ve seen tea on the menu, but my god, the wretched, lukewarm brews I’ve been served! If that’s what passes for tea, no wonder everyone has resorted to drinking coffee. 

But I know it’s me who’s the problem, coffee, not you. I’ve seen how you get on so well with others and I’m still jealous. Why can’t it work for us? Maybe, if we just spend some time apart, we’ll be ready to give it another go. 

Here's the problem, Barry
Neild, CNN Global
Travel Editor

FRIDAY FOR THE FANS / THE BASEBALL PLAYER WHO DIDN’T STRIKE OUT FOR AN ENTIRE MONTH.

NOT OK TO K. So far this MLB season Luis Arráez had 141 consecutive plate appearances without a strike out, the longest MLB streak in 20 years.

Luis Arráez has struck out just 28 times this season. The San Diego Padres have MLB’s best record since his arrival. 

GUEST BLOG / By Jared Diamond, Washington Post, Sports Writer--The San Diego Padres knew they were improving their lineup when they traded for Luis Arráez at the beginning of May. They didn’t know they were acquiring the second coming of Tony Gwynn. 

It turns out Arráez has a superpower so extraordinary that it would impress Mr. Padre himself: He never strikes out—and that’s just barely an exaggeration. 

As of last week, Arráez has whiffed all of 28 times this season, an inconceivably small number in an era when strikeouts are as prevalent as overpriced hot dogs and lukewarm beer.And that doesn’t even tell the entire story. 

 On Monday, Sept. 16, Arráez struck out for the first time since San Diego’s game on the 10th. That’s the 10th of August. His streak of 141 consecutive plate appearances without a punch out is the longest in the major leagues since Juan Pierre 20 years ago. “Who likes to strike out?” the 27-year-old Arráez said. “I hate strikeouts.” Arráez’s otherworldly knack for making contact is more than a trivia question. The Padres have MLB’s best record since his arrival, surging into playoff position and emerging as a legitimate World Series contender. And they have done it by striking out less frequently than anyone else in the sport. 

 There’s reason to believe that is no mere coincidence. As it happens, the five teams with the lowest strikeout rates are the Padres, Kansas City Royals, Houston Astros, Cleveland Guardians and Arizona Diamondbacks. All of them are on track to make the playoffs. The 12 teams that strike out the most are all on the outside looking in. 

 None of this is to suggest that simply avoiding strikeouts is the secret to October glory. But at a time when strikeouts have risen to unimaginable levels and players like Arráez are an endangered species, there’s still value in excelling at the sport’s most fundamental objective: putting the bat on the ball. 

 “When you put the ball in play with two strikes, anything can happen,” Padres hitting coach Victor Rodríguez said. “If you strike out, how do we know?” 

 That was exactly the way everyone in baseball thought for more than a century. Strikeouts were seen as shameful and an outcome to avoid at all costs. For much of the sport’s history, Royals general manager J.J. Picollo said, “You were embarrassed to come back” to the dugout after striking out. 

 In the age of analytics, however, that philosophy changed. The pursuit of power became the ultimate goal, to the point that many teams began instructing their batters to disregard the fear of striking out and to swing for the fences even with two strikes. Strikeouts, once a taboo, were viewed as an unavoidable trade off in the name of the al- mighty home run. 

 The shift in approach has shown in the results. In 1984, for instance, 27 players struck out 100 times. Forty years later in 2024, 133 players have already reached the 100- strikeout threshold, and one—Elly De La Cruz of the Cincinnati Reds— has fanned 200 times. In 1984, the Philadelphia Phillies had the highest strikeout rate in MLB at 17.3%. In 2024, the Padres are striking out 17.4% of the time, and it’s the lowest of any team in seven seasons. 

 Mike Shildt, the Padres manager, says, “That’s how the game should be played.” And teams are taking notice. 

 “We know there’s an advantage when you make a player make a play,” said Picollo, whose Royals have the second-lowest strikeout rate in MLB and are on the verge of returning to the playoffs for the first time since 2015. 

 The Royals explicitly set out this winter to strike out less. They had the worst offense in baseball by a wide margin in “high-leverage” situations last season, according to the statistics website FanGraphs. In low-leverage situations, they were just shy of average. The biggest culprit was strikeouts with runners on base. Picollo was convinced it was a shortcoming that could be fixed. 

 So early in spring training, the Royals had a meeting where they laid out their mission to emphasize contact with two strikes and focus on situational hitting. The Royals have seen their strikeout rate drop this year from 23.3% to 18.9%. It’s one thing to prioritize contact. It’s a lot harder to actually execute that goal against pitchers who have 100 mph fastballs and sliders that seemingly defy the laws of physics. That’s why the entire league is marveling at Arráez. His strikeout rate is a microscopic 4.4%. Only one other player in baseball has a single-digit strikeout rate: Steven Kwan of the Guardians, at 9.4%. 

 Arráez says he was born with elite hand-eye coordination and almost never struck out as a child. But he also approaches hitting differently than most of his peers. “I know I can hit homers,” he said, “but that’s not my game.” 

 When Arráez reached the majors with the Minnesota Twins in 2019, Rodríguez was a coach in Cleveland. A few weeks later, Francisco Lindor promised Rodríguez that at some point, this rookie infielder from Venezuela would one day win a batting title. 

 Rodríguez was incredulous. “He just got up to the majors!” he responded. It turns out Lindor didn’t know how right he was. Arráez, the man who doesn’t strike out, is hitting .320 this season—and is about to win the batting title for the third consecutive season. 

 

SNUBS & PUBS

As many European locations are claiming to be fed up with overwhelming tourism then maybe this is the year we stay in America. Stay U.S.A. In the meantime, here are a few fun photos of Euro pubs and cafes to hold us over until the Old World becomes a bit more welcoming. 

Au revoir, Paris

Thanks, anyway, Ukraine (Lviv)

Croatia Farewell

Brussels bye-bye

LOCAL. GREAT VIEWS FLYING EAST FROM LINDBERGH FIELD

All the years that we’ve flown out of San Diego International it has aways been hard to see much while strapped to a airline seat. But thanks to YouTubers here’s a great view taking off from Lindbergh Field then circling from west to east. Outstanding day that provided a dramatic view of the region before leveling off at 10,000 feet.

 CLICK HERE. 

AMERICANA / TWO CENTS WORTH ABOUT PENNIES

The Lincoln cent is a one-cent coin that has been struck by the United States Mint since 1909. The obverse or heads side was designed by Victor David Brenner, as was the original reverse, depicting two stalks of wheat.

Longest one topic article since Gutenburg invented the printing press 

 GUEST BLOG / By New York Times Magazine, Caity Weaver, staff writer-- I was disappointed to learn, recently, that the United States has created for itself a logistical problem so stupendously stupid, one cannot help wondering if it is wise to continue to allow this nation to supervise the design of its own holiday postage stamps, let alone preside over the administration of an extensive Interstate highway system or nuclear arsenal. It’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. I have come to think of it as the Perpetual Penny Paradox. 

 Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies (i.e., any concluding with a sum whose final digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled. 

Because these replacement pennies will themselves not be spent, they will need to be replaced with new pennies that will also not be spent, and so will have to be replaced with new pennies that will not be spent, which will have to be replaced by new pennies (that will not be spent, and so will have to be replaced). 

In other words, we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint. A conservative estimate holds that there are 240 billion pennies lying around the United States — about 724 ($7.24) for every man, woman and child there residing, and enough to hand two pennies to every bewildered human born since the dawn of man. (To distribute them all, in fact, we’d have to double back to the beginning and give our first six billion ancestors a third American penny.) 

These are but a fraction of the several hundreds of billions of pennies issued since 1793, most of which have suffered a mysterious fate sometimes described in government records, with a hint of supernaturality generally undesirable in bookkeeping, as “disappearance.” 

As far as anyone knows, the American cent is the most produced coin in the history of civilization, its portrait of Lincoln the most reproduced piece of art on Earth. 

Although pennies are almost never used for their ostensible purpose (to make purchases), right now one out of every two circulating coins minted in the United States has a face value of 1 cent. A majority of the ones that have not yet disappeared are, according to a 2022 report, “sitting in consumers’ coin jars in their homes.” 

It’s crucial that they remain there. Five years ago, Mint officials conceded that if even a modest portion of these dormant pennies were suddenly to return to circulation, the resulting flow-back would be “logistically unmanageable.” There would be so unbelievably many pennies that there most likely would not be enough room to contain them inside government vaults. Moving them from place to place would be time-consuming, cumbersome and costly. (Just $100 worth of pennies weighs a touch over 55 pounds.) 

With each new penny minted, this problem becomes slightly more of a problem. The United States government has willfully ignored this nonsensical math problem for decades. 

Forty-eight years ago, in letters to Congress, William E. Simon, then the Treasury secretary, begged lawmakers to “give serious consideration” to abandoning 1-cent coins as soon as possible. 

The frantic tempo at which pennies were plummeting out of circulation, a Treasury report warned, would soon plunge the Mint into “a never-ending spiral” of “ever-increasing production” as it flailed to replace unused pennies with more pennies that would likewise remain unused — a bit like deploying a bucket to combat a dripping ceiling leak, and it turns out the leak is the ocean because the room was built under the sea, and the only way out of this anyone can think of is to engineer increasingly large buckets. The coin should be eradicated, the report reasoned, “no later than 1980.” 

Twenty-five years ago, Philip Diehl, then the director of the United States Mint, stated that “two-thirds of the pennies produced in the last 30 years” — 1969 to 1999 — had “dropped out of circulation.” So even at a time when three-quarters of Americans’ payments were still settled with cash, pennies were not being spent. 

A 2022 Federal Reserve survey found that Americans paid with cash just 18 percent of the time. It’s impossible to know how many of those transactions might have involved coins, let alone pennies; the Fed doesn’t even try to track this. 

One thing we know for sure about America’s 1-cent coins, however, is that just one of them costs more than 3 cents to produce. Why, in 2024, does our nation still spew out so many pennies?

The people I asked (government officials, numismatists, economists, scientists, scrap-metal industrialists, souvenir-elongated-penny machinists, historians, businesspeople, poverty researchers, Canadians) assigned blame widely: to an uninterested Congress; to highly interested lobbyists; to the sentimental; to people bad at math; to a populace willing to provide, in perpetuity, free private storage for pointless copper-plated tokens. (This last group encompasses every person currently possessed of at least one penny.) 

But the truth about why Americans are doomed to trudge eternally through a blood-scented bog of pennies-as-currency may be simultaneously the most dispiriting and encouraging reason imaginable: We may have forgotten that we don’t have to. [much like suffering through the length of this article--Pillar to Post blog].

The necessity of abolishing the penny has been obvious to those in power for so long that the inability to accomplish it has transformed the coin into a symbol of deeper rot. Eleven years ago, President Barack Obama called the penny “a good metaphor for some of the larger problems” of the U.S. government. “It’s very hard to get rid of things that don’t work,” Obama said, adding that eliminating the penny is something a president (for example: Barack Obama, 11 years ago) would “need legislation” for. 

When Robert Whaples, an economist at Wake Forest University, published an article in 2006 about the imperative to eliminate America’s 1-cent coin, he received a personal note: “Get it done, and you will deserve the Nobel Prize!” The note was from Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, in which capacity he technically oversaw the annual ordering of billions of pennies from the Mint for distribution among the American populace. 

“At the policy level,” Philip Diehl, who served as the 35th director of the Mint, from 1994 to 2000, told me by phone, “I think everybody agrees this is ridiculous.” 

“I went to Congress saying, ‘Listen, I’m losing $90 million a year on pennies,’” recalled Edmund Moy, the Mint’s 38th director, from 2006 to 2011. “I said, ‘You guys need to pass a law forcing me to change it.’” 

Steve Stivers, a congressman from Ohio’s 15th District, led multiple unsuccessful attempts to revise coinage laws while serving in the House from 2011 to 2021. (He hoped to enjoin the Mint to make pennies out of cold-rolled American steel, something they happen to produce a lot of in Ohio.) Stivers attributed his bills’ failures to “a reluctance to change, and this idea that we had to study every little thing before they would even think about a change.” He was particularly irked that a Mint-commissioned study on alternative cent compositions concluded, in part, that there would be no major savings if pennies were minted from stainless steel. “We weren’t proposing stainless steel, for God’s sake!” Stivers exclaimed from his office in Columbus. (He is now the president of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce.) “Stainless steel is a lot more expensive!” 

I consulted Andrew Von Ah, who, as a physical-infrastructure analyst for the Government Accountability Office, has examined our physical-currency program in scrupulous detail and is better positioned than most to explain why the United States still makes pennies. “There’s no great reason why,” he said. 

The recursive and maddening logic of penny-making is embedded in the coin’s very name. The value represented by what modern Americans now call “pennies” was counted by English colonists in “pence”; “pence” was a contraction of an older English word: “pennies.” 

Officially, American colonists followed the British system, which divided a pound into — sure, why not? — 240 parts. 

In practice, though, America’s “money” was a mutating mishmash incorporating Spanish silver dollars (known as “pieces of eight”; they could be physically chopped into — sure, why not? — eight equal “bits” to make change), beaver skins, tobacco leaves, wampum and (frequently worthless) slips of paper. 

Years before America inaugurated its first president, Thomas Jefferson urged that the denominations of a nationwide currency be reconfigured until they were as moronically easy to understand as possible: Everything done by tens.

Don't ask Caity Weaver, author of
this article "a penny for her
thoughts" because no one can
afford it.

In 1784, he proposed a dollar for the nation’s base unit, because Spanish silver dollars were so popular that people already understood how much a dollar bought. (As Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton recommended decimal coin names: “disme” from the Latin decimus for the one-tenth; “cent,” from centum, for the one-hundredth.) 

Spanish influence survives in our 25-cent piece, a denomination representing “two bits” — one-quarter — of a Spanish dollar. One or two bits — 12½ cents or 25 cents — were, for many years, “extremely popular” prices for little items like hairbrushes or handkerchiefs, says Jesse Kraft, a curator of American numismatics at the American Numismatic Society. Ultra-inexpensive stuff cost a couple of pennies — or would have, if there had been enough to go around. But a lack of small change circulating during the country’s infancy made it tricky to buy or sell individual items cheaply. 

So urgent was the crisis that the Mint was the first public building erected by federal law, on the site of an abandoned whiskey distillery in Philadelphia. It was guarded at night by a sword-bearing man and a “savage” dog (cost: $3) that no one but he was allowed to feed, lest it become sweet. 

 The Philadelphia Mint made 85,092,703 pennies in 1903 — less than 2 percent of the circulating pennies the U.S. Mint struck in 2023.

Today pennies are still minted in Philadelphia and in Denver. 

The Mint’s official reason for minting pennies is that the Federal Reserve orders them. Specifically, the Federal Reserve “buys” coins from the Mint at face value and stores them in bags all over the United States for distribution to banks. 

I gleaned even more substantive details from a retired Mint spokesman: Tom Jurkowsky, who led corporate communications for the Mint from 2009 to 2017. 

Jurkowsky felt that, during his tenure, the public-relations strategy within the Treasury Department, which oversees the Mint, was to avoid drawing attention to the penny’s zombie survival. Officials dreaded public ire if a critical mass of Americans should ever notice the irrationality of the production statistics and come face to face with the truth: “How silly it is,” he said. “How much money it costs to produce pennies.” 

Nearly every former federal official I interviewed about America’s interminable penny production pointed a finger at a small private company in Greeneville, Tenn., called Artazn. For 43 years, Artazn has held contracts with the Treasury Department to manufacture the zinc “blanks” that the Mint stamps into 1-cent coins. 

These contracts have earned it more than $1 billion in revenue since 2008 alone. Jurkowsky cited the company’s lobbying efforts as the No. 1 reason that coin-reform bills die in Congress. That may be true in terms of explicit dollar allocation, but political inertia has done even more to help Artazn’s cause, for free. 

According to the government transparency group OpenSecrets.org, since 2006 the company has spent less than $3 million — a charmingly modest amount — on coin-related lobbying. The story of the Artazn contract begins in an age of spiking copper prices: the early 1970s. America’s pennies, then still 95 percent copper, suddenly began vanishing — though not for the accepted reasons (worthlessness, pointlessness) pennies disappear today. These were vanishing because they had suddenly become valuable and even useful. 

The Secret Service confiscated a cache of cents from a General Electric plant in Kentucky, where they were being punched through and sneaked into appliances as cheaper substitutes for copper washers. 

McDonald’s paid customers to bring them in; at some locations, a person could trade in 100 pennies and receive a dollar, plus a dime and a nickel. Fearing endless cycles of hoarding and penny ransom, Congress sought a new base metal for the coins. It would have to be cheaper than copper. It would need to withstand the trauma of being near keys in a pocket (a condition researchers dutifully replicated by rotating coins and keys inside a cotton-lined drum). Because a portion of America’s children will, inevitably, swallow her currency, it should be detectable by X-ray. The new coins, it was suggested, could be almost 98 percent zinc, with a copper coating to ensure that they still looked like pennies. The zinc industry loved this idea. 

The Copper and Brass Fabricators Council sued the Department of Treasury — unsuccessfully — to prevent its implementation. The camps clashed over whether the proposed coins would, essentially, self-destruct. Copper is exceptionally resistant to corrosion. In theory, then, a zinc object that is entirely and perfectly encased within copper will corrode slowly. But pennies’ thin copper plating is easily scratched — and, for esoteric but indisputable metallurgical reasons, exposed zinc that is adjacent to copper can corrode rapidly. “From a corrosion perspective,” said Suveen Mathaudhu, a professor of metallurgical and materials engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, “it doesn’t make much sense.” 

Online forums whose bailiwicks are the diverse manifestations of humans’ eternal pursuit of shiny items (metal detection, coin collection, etc.) are littered with images of modern pennies disintegrating from the inside out. 

Gathered from backyards and beaches, they are pitted, covered in chalky scabs or possessed of an element foreign to most circles: corners. Some have holes clean through them. Aficionados employ a derogatory term for the post-1982 pennies that often resemble artifacts dredged up from Aegean shipwrecks. They call them “zincolns.” 

 We were warned about all of this. In March 1981, an engineer from the Copper Development Association told Congress that the proposed apposition of copper and zinc in pennies represented “the worst possible arrangement” from a corrosion standpoint. 

Congress approved it anyway. But because the U.S. Mint, which had made all coins in-house since 1792, was unequipped to produce zinc discs electroplated with copper, the manufacture of penny blanks was outsourced. In July 1981, the Treasury awarded its first multimillion-dollar contract for this work to the metal and chemical division of the Ball Corporation, makers of the famous glass jars (crowned with less famous screw tops, made from zinc). 

Today’s coin-blanking operation is a division of a private-equity-owned portfolio company that was sold off after becoming part of a conglomerate after being spun off from a previous Ball subsidiary into an independent company; names along the way have included Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing (in the 1880s), Jarden (named after jars) and, today, Artazn (climaxing with the chemical symbol for zinc). Artazn largess has helped secure the URL “pennies.org” and finance the creation of the official webpage of “Americans for Common Cents,” a self-styled “organization” that essentially consists of just one man, a Washington lobbyist named Mark Weller. 

In Weller’s capacity as executive director of Americans for Common Cents, he has testified before Congress, been cited in government reports and written nationally circulated editorials. He declined to be interviewed for this article, but the arguments he makes in favor of continued penny production are well represented on the Americans for Common Cents website, an invaluable propaganda armory for penny-manufacture zealots. 

The website’s “Penny Myths and Facts” page reproduces one of the organization’s most passionate assertions: “The penny aids charities in raising hundreds of millions of dollars each year for important causes.” I contacted the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, which Weller describes as relying “significantly on small, yet critical penny contributions,” to inquire about its coin dependence. Coker Powell, the organization’s executive vice president and chief revenue officer, told me that the society has discontinued physical coin-collection programs, which had become increasingly costly. 

Donations of spare change had slowed in recent decades, she said. Fortunately, despite a dearth of pennies, the nuclear winter for charity forecast by Americans for Common Cents did not crystallize. 

Soliciting donations in the form of “roundups” (and add-ons) to credit-card transactions, Powell said, has proved “much more lucrative” than coin gathering ever did. So who really needs these coins? 

The poor, Weller claims — “people with relatively low incomes (particularly the young, elderly and minorities),” who use cash more frequently than high-income earners; also, “‘unbanked’ Americans” who “have no other option.” 

Sociologists I consulted whose fieldwork examines the economics of American poverty challenged this notion. Carrying around “bundles” of hundreds of pennies to purchase, say, a beverage “doesn’t seem feasible,” said Jacob Faber, a professor at New York University who studies inequality. And the cashless economy has ballooned in the last decade. Sarah Halpern-Meekin, a sociologist at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me that “the majority” of people with low incomes make cashless transactions — on apps like Cash App, for instance. 

Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, pays employees who do not provide banking info with Walmart-branded debit cards. Plasma banks often distribute payments in the form of prepaid debit cards. It’s true that cash usage is highest among households with the lowest incomes; neither expert suggested that it was obsolete or unpopular. 

But if significant numbers of Americans rely on penny coins to make purchases, there is little evidence of it. 

Since debuting in 1992, Coinstar machines have processed over one trillion little metal discs. About 40 percent of America’s recirculated coins (worth $2.3 billion) have rattled through a Coinstar kiosk.

If the importance of a money-furnishing institution correlates with the quantity of money it furnishes to the public, the U.S. Mint matters far less to Americans than the private company Coinstar, whose kiosks annually disgorge about twice as many coins into circulation as do government coin presses. 

Yet Coinstar not only exists but thrives — and not only thrives but is indispensable to the American money supply chain — solely because, every year, the United States elects to issue a portion of its currency in a format that a majority of Americans deem inconvenient for most uses: little metal discs. 

For a fee, Coinstar transfigures these discs into the other, more popular formats in which the bulk of U.S. currency is issued: paper bills or electronic payments. The setup works basically the same as if the United States issued a portion of its legal tender encased in an inch-thick layer of Saran wrap and Coinstar’s machines provided an instantaneous Saran-wrap-removal service that anyone could pay to use. Since debuting in 1992, Coinstar machines have processed over one trillion little metal discs of various denominations, worth a whisper under $67 billion. 

Say an American upends a Big Gulp of coins worth $25 into a kiosk at a Fiesta Mart in Houston. Each dumped coin flashes before a sensor that, in a fraction of a second, analyzes its metal content; this compositional analysis reveals its denomination, which the machine tallies before plinking it into a bin at the kiosk’s base. After every coin has plunked, Coinstar takes a service fee (say, 12.5 percent) and maybe a transaction fee (say, $0.59) to return something like $21.28 in (mostly) bills. 

Over the course of roughly 22 days, about 550 pounds of loose coins will plonk into the belly of the Fiesta Mart kiosk, at which point — once it is at least 90 percent full — the machine will alert dispatch: Time to harvest the coin crop. 

From Fiesta Mart, the coins are trucked to a regional processing center, where they are divided by denomination. Most end up inside enormous white cubes, called ballistic bags, many of which are distributed into locked cages designated by bank. 

When a ballistic bag of pennies is deposited into a, say, Bank of America cage, Bank of America sends Coinstar an electronic deposit equal to the value of its mammoth coin cube. 

Now say a store in Katy, Texas, needs pennies. It can call its bank, say, Bank of America, to request a delivery. Bank of America calls them up from the cube and has them sausaged into 50-penny rolls and dropped off. Upon arrival at the store in Katy, the rolled pennies are dumped into a compartment of a register’s cash drawer, where they will remain piled until they are handed over as change in a cash transaction — whence, statistically speaking, they will most likely find their way into another cup, cup holder or other theoretically accessible (but, in practice, rarely accessed) location. 

Counting their initial trip in the Big Gulp, these pennies will have changed custody five times, and taken multiple car rides, to facilitate the absolute least important part of one transaction. The pandemic annihilated this cycle. Erstwhile commuters had no reason to feed coins into parking meters, bus fare boxes and tollbooths; even when they did leave the house, millions of people, determined to spend as little time as possible in enclosed public spaces, stopped pausing on their errands to redeem their change at Coinstar machines. 

Coinstar deposits dropped by 60 percent at the start of the pandemic. As a result, banks, which rely on Coinstar to choreograph the nationwide coin-recirculation ballet, received 60 percent fewer coins than usual. Signs soon bloomed along the windows and checkout lanes of American businesses, prevailing upon customers to pay with either credit or debit cards, or exact change, because of a nationwide “coin shortage.” 

In fact, the country still had all the coins it needed for making change. The problem was that they were sitting in jars and pockets and cup holders. Pennies, in particular, were not returning to businesses. This is because Coinstar is practically the sole medium by which the pennies churned out with trochilidine vigor by the Mint migrate around the United States. 

Coinstar’s Kelly green kiosks could already be found in most major American cities when its current chief executive, Kevin McColly, joined the company more than 20 years ago. McColly’s job, he said, was to figure out “how to get to Scranton, Pa.; how to get to Chattanooga, Tenn.; how to open Alaska.” 

Today, 92 percent of Americans live within five miles of one of some 18,000 Coinstar machines. The early genius of Coinstar was that it charged people a little for something they could get for free: their own money, counted. 

Dealing with coins was enough of a hassle that people were willing to pay a machine to do it on their behalf. So, it turned out, were banks. Myriad financial institutions that previously processed customers’ coins directly, gratis, now outsource that time-consuming task to Coinstar. (Except in Minnesota, which McColly described as “historically a bad state” for Coinstar; owing to their ferocious commitment to Midwestern friendliness, he said, a disproportionate number of Minnesotan bank locations still handle coins for free.) 

But even people who bother to deposit the spare change they accrue — who represent only a portion of people who accrue spare change — are losing interest in redeeming 1-cent coins. Every year, McColly said, the value of the average Coinstar deposit creeps up, because people are depositing fewer pennies. 

Pennies still constitute the plurality of coins in a deposit — most recently about 49 percent of the average jar — but 15 years ago, the jars were more than half pennies. Pennies in any quantity occupy disproportionate space; at 49 percent of a jar, they contribute only about 6 percent of its value. For one person, that’s annoying. For Coinstar, it’s a major expense. Half the haul it’s schlepping from the Fiesta Mart kiosk — i.e., 225 pounds, out of 550 pounds of coins total — is just pennies. 

Coinstar makes the same amount of money counting the same coins over and over as it does counting brand-new coins for the first time. It doesn’t help Coinstar if the Mint makes shiny pennies that no one troubles to keep track of; it’s much more important, for Coinstar, that people save (and then exchange) their coins. Nevertheless, if the United States simply stopped making pennies, McColly said, “there would be hardly any impact on Coinstar.” 

McColly has even proposed to people within the government that his network of machines could eliminate the hassle and expense of making new pennies, by helping existing ones circulate more easily, for a fraction of the production cost. “I’ve had very frank conversations with both the Mint and the Fed,” he said. “And they are so — I don’t know what the right way to say this is, because I know I’m talking to a reporter.” He paused. “It’s just not very efficient, how they manage that process.” 

  Americans accumulate pennies not because we desire them but because we are entitled to them. 

If we pay for something in cash with more than exact change, we expect to receive back the difference; if the difference ends in any number other than 0 or 5, we will receive at least one penny. 

We are entitled to pennies because they exist. 

But imagine a world where they didn’t. 

Imagine a world where it was Canada. 

Many Americans will be surprised to learn that Canada eliminated its 1-cent coin more than a decade ago. Canadians are aware of this — how little Americans know of their world, and how bewildering it must seem in the rare instances we contemplate it. 

When I interviewed Canadians about their abolition of the penny, I often sensed from their responses that they were handling me gently. “Our country,” one official from the Royal Canadian Mint informed me with an almost apologetic smile, “is just as big as yours.” For all I know, he could be right. 

Canada got rid of its penny in 2013 because it cost 1.6 cents to produce and had, like its American cousin, become essentially worthless. Here is the most important detail to understand: Canada eliminated only its physical coin, not the mathematical concept of 1 cent. Payment by credit card, debit card, mobile phone or check — any kind of noncash transaction — is calculated exactly as it was before the penny was abolished. 

If, after tax, a bill comes to, say, $20.11, a Canadian paying by credit card will be charged $20.11. A Canadian paying by cash can expect to pay $20.10. The final digit of Canadian cash transactions is rounded to the nearest nickel: 1 and 2, nearest to 0 nickels, round down to 0; 3 and 4 round up to a nickel — 5; 6 and 7, also nearest to one nickel, round down — 5 again; 8 and 9, nearest to 10 cents, round up. I admit that the thought I might be asked to pay, say, $3.80 (cash) for something that, according to the laws of God and man, has been calculated to cost $3.79 (cash) is not only reflexively infuriating to me but a potential source of permanent confusion. 

The Canadian government mitigated one of those problems (no hope for the other) with an information campaign that included signs with simple charts dividing potential prices into two columns: “Round down” and “Round up.” I asked Karl Littler from the Retail Council of Canada if there were still signs at cash registers explaining the rounding. “It’s 10 years now, so even the most obtuse people have pretty much figured it out,” he said, and laughed. Although they hardly ever use penny coins, fears of being deprived of one to two per transaction are a knee-jerk concern for Americans invited to contemplate a hypothetical world without them. 

Rounding opponents point out that a disproportionate number of prices end in double nines, e.g., a $5.99 gallon of milk. Retail legend claims that the “odd cents” pricing strategy (a Parisian trick imported by Rowland H. Macy to his New York City dry-goods store) proliferated after the cash register’s invention in 1879, as a tactic to prevent sales clerks from stealing. If a customer paid $3 for a $3 item, the logic went, a cashier could stealthily pocket the bills; if the price was $2.99, the customer would be owed a coin; to open the register, the cashier would need to key in the sale, thus creating, within the register’s hidden recesses, an incorruptible record of the transaction. 

That consumers tend to associate these prices with better deals (incorrectly, according to studies) was an added benefit. 

But while it is theoretically possible that a retailer could see a surplus profit of up to 2 cents on every transaction, the number of variables that need to be precisely manipulated to pull off the feat would require such convoluted mathematical and psychological calculations that it stretches credulity to suppose anyone would bother. 

In 2007, Robert Whaples, the Wake Forest economist, analyzed tens of thousands of transactions from a convenience-store chain to see whether cash-register totals would tend to be rounded up more often than down. “The last digit’s pretty random,” Whaples said. Averages worked out in customers’ favor about as often as they didn’t. 

But also, the gains and losses in question amounted, in the aggregate, to fractions of a penny either way, so why are we even talking about it? 

“I’ve yet to find somebody who’s off skiing in Gstaad because of the extra money that they made on the penny,” Karl Littler said. 

Although Canadians were not required to cash in their cents, based on statistics from New Zealand and Australia (divorced from pennies since 1989 and 1992), officials anticipated that Canadians would choose to return lots of them. Explaining the transportation of more than 44 million pounds of pennies across Canada, rumored to be a quite large country, visibly tickles Anthony Rotondo, the Mint’s senior manager of domestic circulation. 

(The Royal Canadian Mint has achieved such international renown in coin production that about 80 other countries have paid it to make their coins. No other countries hire the United States to make their coins.) 

Trucking obsolete cents from financial institutions to their final recycling site required 1,200 trips in tractor-trailers. The penny metal was sold to help cover such costs. At the recycling site, cents were deposited onto a conveyor belt. 

Plated steel pennies — minted in Canada for 12 years — flew up to a gigantic magnet, leaving only copper-alloy and copper-plated zinc coins behind. “Copper and zinc are very hard to separate,” Rotondo said; uncoupling them required “a special million-dollar machine” that creates a field of artificial gravity inside a tank, in which zinc floats and copper sinks. 

Canada’s pennies were mostly copper, “lucky for us,” Rotondo said. “Copper is typically worth three to four times what zinc is worth.” Were the United States to ever round up its pennies, our hoard would be predominantly zinc; since 1982, we’ve made about 2.1 billion pounds of them. Unlucky for us. The words Canadian officials used to describe their recycling of, to date, nearly eight billion pennies are not ones typically associated with undertakings on the national scale in the United States: “success”; “very smooth”; “not an issue”; “a nice story.” 

But in addition to working with a population about one-ninth that of the United States, the Canadians had a hidden advantage. Their mint shepherds its coins through every stage of their life cycle: forecasting the need for them, producing them, distributing them, recirculating them and retiring them. In the United States, these responsibilities are divided among a hodgepodge of public and private entities.

 The wisdom of Canada’s system — in which the coin people handle all the coin stuff — was spotlighted during Covid lockdowns. The natural flow of coins was similarly interrupted across both countries: public-transit usage receded; reliance on self-checkout machines, which require up to three times the amount of coins to operate as standard checkouts, surged. 

But in Canada, there were no signs of any coin shortage. Within the United States, it is accepted that the Treasury Department will relentlessly flood the penny-sogged nation with nuisance pennies until Congress passes a law to stop it from doing so. 

But how could such legislation ever, reasonably, be proposed? Pennies are not even important relative to other American minor coins, let alone in comparison to, for instance, the rights of man. Vaporizing every single penny would have virtually no effect on the amount of money we have in circulation. They are worth so little that almost no one I approached — including representatives for the entities that make and distribute them — was able, or willing, to discuss them. 

Compounding this lack of interest is the sobering fact that the government would not necessarily save a fortune by not making pennies. Because it costs the Mint less than 10 cents to produce dimes, less than 25 cents to produce quarters and less than 50 cents to produce half dollars, when the Mint “sells” these coins to the Federal Reserve at face value, the payment it receives constitutes a sizable “profit.” This revenue, called seigniorage, is used to finance the national deficit; it reduces the amount of money the government would otherwise borrow, and the interest that would have been charged on that borrowed money. 

Pennies have “negative seigniorage,” as do nickels, though we produce many fewer nickels. (The hierarchy between the two manifests inside coin-operated machines, many of which still accept nickels but nearly all of which, since the 1960s, have been engineered to automatically reject pennies.) In 2023, creating dimes, quarters and half dollars generated more than $433 million in revenue. Minting pennies and nickels ate away about $179 million of that profit. Even undiminished, however, $433 million would have represented less than a fraction of 1 percent of the government’s $6.13 trillion budget. 

At this scale, the question “Should we make pennies?” is, essentially, a personality quiz: Does the idea of losing money bother you enough that you feel compelled to stop it, even if the amount of money is trivial? Americans confront this question individually each time they receive pennies. Every penny deserted at checkout is a no. 

The government’s approach is the same as its citizens’. 

Sure, a person will eventually lose the price of a cup of coffee in left-behind pennies, and a nation will sacrifice enough money to install several hundred thousand reflective road signs that can be read at night. 

But if you can stomach the arrant waste, you are spared its contemplation. “My sense,” said Jeff Gore, a professor of biophysics at M.I.T., “is if something is easy to do and it makes the world better, then we should do it.” Gore is the creator of what is now called Citizens to Retire the U.S. Penny, the inverse of Mark Weller’s Americans for Common Cents. 

Gore jokingly refers to his undertaking as a “grass-roots organization”; “the reality is it’s a website,” he said. He came up with it one night while killing time in his lab two decades ago. It hasn’t needed much updating. “There are lots of problems in the world that are important and difficult,” Gore said, “but this is just not one of them.” To Gore, the dearest cost of penny production is not the money spent manufacturing and distributing the coins but that the cent “does the opposite of what currency is supposed to do” — facilitate transactions. “People think that because it exists and is used, it means that it’s useful,” Gore said. 

He compared the Treasury Department’s effect on the raw metals that compose a penny to a reverse Midas’ touch: “We’re taking something that is actually a valuable commodity,” he said, “something that has actual value, and then we’re converting it into something that people just throw away.” 

In the process of counting one hundred million pennies (or rather, one million dollars' worth of pennies) at the San Francisco Mint in 1950. One cent in 1950 was the monetary equivalent of 13 cents in 2024.

Contemplating minor coins may be an arcane, practically pointless duty of the secretary of the Treasury of the United States, who is, based on the latest information available, Janet Yellen; nonetheless, as treasure-adjacent business, it is soundly, and legally, her purview. For months, via her staff, I begged Yellen for an interview. The secretary of the Treasury, I was informed, is “one of the most accomplished economists of our time” — a condition that evidently renders her unable to talk to me about pennies, even by phone, even for five minutes. She was busy; she was overseas. What was she doing there, I asked. She was meeting with green-business leaders in Germany. I wanted to ask Janet Yellen if the United States needs pennies, because I believe that she may be the only human being whose answer matters: While consulting Title 31 of the U.S. Code (to see how much annual penny minting was required by law), I came upon a statute outlining general instructions for the apportionment of American coins. “The Secretary of the Treasury shall,” Section 5111 reads, “mint and issue” denominations of coins “in amounts the Secretary decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United States.” I reread the sentence several times. Groping for a light switch in a bolted room, had my fingers brushed over the knob of an unlocked door? 

Amounts the Secretary decides are necessary. What if the secretary decided the amount of pennies necessary was zero? I contacted Christine Desan, a Harvard law professor who specializes in the constitutional law of money. I asked what she made of Section 5111. “The way it reads to me as a lawyer,” Desan said, is that “there’s nothing in here that indicates the secretary has to issue them.” 

No one I interviewed had mentioned this statute. In fact, every news article, government report and congressional transcript I read — as well as every person I consulted, including former Mint directors — appeared to assume that penny production could not cease until Congress passed a law halting it. 

But if this interpretation was correct, no law was needed. Or rather, no new law: In passing the statute, a previous Congress — a very, very previous Congress, now confined to the realm of history — had already declared that pennies could stop any time a Treasury secretary wished them to. 

Does Yellen earnestly believe it necessary for the United States to issue billions more pennies every year? Her spokesman provided a general statement about coins, asserting that the Federal Reserve is in charge of determining the country’s coin needs. I asked if Yellen knew of any legal reasons Section 5111 could not be carried out as written; if she considers any factors other than the Federal Reserve’s coin orders when deciding what denominations are “necessary” in the United States; if she could comment on the Treasury Department’s own conclusion that hardly any of the billions of cents minted in the United States are spent by anyone — that they mostly just disappear, which is why the Federal Reserve needs constantly to order more, destined for the same fate. 

Days later, her spokesman replied: The Treasury relies on the Federal Reserve to determine the amount of coins needed; I should contact the Federal Reserve if I had any more questions. When I approached the Federal Reserve, a representative informed me that “any questions on coin” should, in fact, be directed to the Mint. 

The Mint, in turn, advised me to seek answers from the Federal Reserve.  

In May, I took a trip to Washington to visit Abraham Lincoln relics: the palm-size glass negative from Mathew Brady’s studio, on which his penny portrait is based; the Georgia marble colossus at whose feet — in memoriam, apparently — visitors deposit trash in the form of 1-cent coins. Our murdered president is a primary character in our nation’s story of endless penny production. 

If America’s deference to the penny can be imagined as a single vine, its curlicues knotted together in such density as to blot out all light of logic, the bullet that ripped through Lincoln’s skull is its seed. 

“You find out fast how much people care about coins the moment you start talking about removing” Lincoln, Philip Diehl told me. “All of a sudden, there are a lot of people who care about coins.” 

Lincoln never expected his legacy would include being pictured on pennies until the end of time. At no point in his life had any president appeared on coins. It was American law, and tradition, that coins should not portray them. Congress decided this in 1792, when it created the Mint; putting rulers on coins was un-American — behavior that would “gratify our enemies.” 

U.S. coins obeyed this edict for more than a century, depicting, instead, abstract symbols “emblematic of liberty,” helpfully labeled “LIBERTY” (this is why it says “LIBERTY” behind Lincoln’s neck; legally, he can only appear on the coins if he is emblematic of liberty) until Theodore Roosevelt took office. Roosevelt had a habit of unilaterally replacing American coins he considered ugly — “artistically of atrocious hideousness,” to use his words — with designs he liked more. 

He installed Lincoln on the cent because he felt like it. He doesn’t appear to have run the idea by anyone. Secreted behind a series of security doors inside the National Museum of American History is a vault of charcoal filing cabinets. The cabinets are nearly as tall as their custodian, Ellen Feingold, the curator of the Smithsonian National Numismatic Collection, under whose supervision the drawers can be unlocked to reveal hundreds of stacked shelves, each no wider than a penny’s height. The shelves pull out like oven trays, bearing honeycombs of miniature storage boxes. Inside this climate-controlled ventricle, the shelves and boxes preserve the money history of the human race over the last 3,000 years. 

Monetary design, in Feingold’s telling, reveals more about a nation’s values than its monuments. “You could put a statue up, but the statue is in one place,” she said. “Most people will never go there.” Currency is unique: an everyday object, saturated with symbolism, of tremendous practical importance, that can find its way to every American, regardless of demographic. 

Because American money is intended for use by Americans, it’s natural that the way money functions in their real lives — the ways in which they actually do use it, not merely the ways in which it can, theoretically, be used — should dictate its configuration. 

It is, in fact, tradition to modify our currency based on majority preference. Recall how the persistent popularity of Spanish pieces of eight destroyed Thomas Jefferson’s decimalized dreams — dreams that, if strictly realized, would have denied today’s Americans their most-used coin, the (indivisible-by-10) quarter. 

A permanent deference in our national currency design to the tastes and practicalities of a particular year — to that year’s president; to Teddy Roosevelt’s preferred pennies — “to me is ahistorical,” said Feingold, fresh off examining a pinky-nail-size ancient coin with gloved fingers. (Recall that when Roosevelt installed Lincoln on the cent, the coin was worth more than a quarter in today’s money.) 

This fact is inescapable in the coin vault, with its racks of wartime stamp currency and flimsy Depression-era tokens and centuries-old chits of paper insistently labeled “12 shillings.” 

American money — like, it is easy to forget, all facets of public life — can be anything Americans need or want it to be. It must not be a certain way simply because it has long been so. 

It does not have to be pennies.

The End [at last].