While my fellow newsletter writers natter on about climate change, COVID, campus antisemitism, structural inequality, and Taylor Swift, I am going to use my cultural privilege and laser-sharp prose to draw your attention to a far more vexing problem. The highway exit–renumberers are at it again.1
You thought you’d seen me at my most curmudgeonly bemoaning the decline of cursive writing, phonics instruction, and candlepin bowling? Those are minor issues. They can be left to Dean Phillips on the campaign trail.
The real shande of the week—nay, the year—is that the weird highway exit–renumbering trolls, who have been slowly working their way up to New England, recently renumbering the Mass Pike, are now coming for Connecticut.
This trend has been sweeping the country for years, and every time I see a renumbering, I call out to the sweet heavens, “Why? Why, sweet Jehovah, El Shaddai, Yahweh—why? Who benefits when my cherished exit 4 becomes exit 45? Who needed that renumbering to know that they were 45 miles from the New York border? Who cares that much about the New York border? And if they were going to renumber the exits, why not honor Boston and make the exit numbers reflect how far you are from Boston—who the hell cares how far you are from the land of Schenectady and Niskayuna?”
Please, read this article and tell me why I-91 and the CT-15 in Connecticut need new exit numbers. I mean, the columnist, captive to trendy groupthink, tries to make a case for it:
The Connecticut Department of Transportation, pressured by the feds, is about to renumber all of the exits on the Merritt & Wilbur Cross Parkways and our interstate highways. No longer will the exits be numbered sequentially but, instead, will reflect their mileage from the New York state line.
This scheme has long been in place on the Garden State Parkway, giving motorists a better sense of their distance to a desired exit. Mileage-based exit numbers also help first responders find an incident’s location. And because this renumbering is being done nationwide, it will add uniformity to all signage.
The parkways’ sign conversions will take place next year followed by renumbering on I-91 (in 2027), I-84 (2028) and I-95 (2029). When the new exit number signs are in place there will be a smaller sign attached to each indicating the “old” exit number, at least for a couple of years to help drivers adjust.
Are you persuaded? I am not.
First of all, what evidence is there of “pressure from the feds”? Did they threaten to withhold highway dollars, which is how the feds forced every state to raise its drinking age to 21, thus forcing 18-year-olds to enlist in the Army (which they are eligible to do) and get deployed abroad so they can have a drink? Did they call state DOT bureaucrats and whine? Did they give them noogies and swirlies at the annual transit fun camp?
And as for “mileage-based exit numbers also help first responders find an incident’s location”— is there evidence for it? Can anyone point me to a case in which first responders were delayed by the old numbering system? Don’t first responders in, say, Holyoke, Mass., know where exit 4 is? How is it more helpful to tell them “I broke down 45 miles from where you enter upstate New York. You know, 73 miles from the Mohawk Mall, near Albany”?
And then we have: “And because this renumbering is being done nationwide, it will add uniformity to all signage.” How is that even a good thing? Why is it better to have uniform signage? What about those of us who prize eccentric local signage?
That’s it. I am moving to Maine, where exits on I-95 as you approach Canada are denominated in Roman numerals, written in German schrift.
Janet Halverson, jacket designer
I recently acquired a first edition of Judy Blume’s Forever, and I was struck by the subtle, suggestive beauty and artistry of its cover:
Always curious about jacket art, I looked up the designer of this one. Her name is Janet Halverson, and it turns out that a small gallery in Boston is putting on a show of her work to run through mid-February. According to the website of the Katherine Small Gallery,
Janet Halverson designed covers and jackets for books written by some of the most important authors of the twentieth century. That and the fact that those covers and jackets are highly regarded by contemporary designers of covers and jacket is, more or less, all that is known about her. There are no books about her. There are no articles. Most recent references to her on the internet are by people wanting to see and know more. When we tracked down people who might’ve known her we were most often told, “I knew Janet—but not well.”
Unfortunately this exhibition won’t provide much interesting information about Janet Halverson’s life. She was born in Orono, Maine, in 1926, grew up in New Haven, worked in New York, and presently lives in suburban New Jersey—aged 97. But at least there is her work. And from that work we can discern that she was a good and inventive and smart designer.
She was so utterly the real deal. I mean, look:
Jascha Heifetz money
Today is the birthday of Jascha Heifetz, perhaps the greatest violinist of all time. My grandfather Walter Kirschner, a lover of classical music, used to occasionally give me $10 in an envelope with a note that read, “In honor of Jascha Heifetz’s birthday.” He would do that even when it wasn’t Jascha Heifetz’s birthday. But today actually is Jascha Heifetz’s birthday, so I am going to give each of my children $10 of “Jascha Heifetz money,” as my siblings and I used to call it. I would be chuffed if you would do the same for a child in your life.
Write more letters
I am pleased to reprint in part the letter from the editor in the latest issue of one of my favorite magazines, The Idler, the finest journal of idleness and leisure:
Dear Idlers,
One of the many beautiful arts that Silicon Valley has killed off, in its infinite avarice, is letter-writing. Unlike emails, WhatsApp, texts and all the rest of it, letters are tactile, beautiful, individual. Every letter is different. A letter—particularly a hand-written one—oozes charm and personality. There are academics out there who are devoted to the study of Keats’s letters, for example. I went to a lecture about them a few years ago. Each letter consisted of one sheet folded up into an envelope, and to save money, the poet would write in the margins, using up every bit of available space.
Even in the eighties, we were still writing letters. I have a few; sweet correspondences between teenage friends, containing drawings and jokes and silly lettering.
The ancient philosophers wrote letters to each other, and in fact the progress of all human civilisation was conducted by letter until very recently. Letters had strict rules of courtesy. I remember being taught them at school. You must write “Dear X”, which I found strange as “dear” seemed to me to be a very affectionate way of greeting someone that you may never have met before. Then there were the sign-offs: “yours sincerely”, “yours truly”, “yours faithfully”. There was the fun or possibly terror of receiving a letter. In Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov, about a lazy Russian land-owner, the generally inert Oblomov family is thrown into a state of anxiety when a letter arrives at the house. For days, they dare not open it. They stare at it, shake it, and leave it lying around, wondering what on earth could be inside it.
I find it it so sad. What are future scholars going to do about the correspondence of famous writers? Will we buy books with titles like The Collected WhatsApps of Salman Rushdie? Selected Emails of Julian Barnes? …
I am making a new year’s resolution to write more letters and postcards….
In order to do this, the editor concedes, one must prepare. And so he advises:
What we need to do is to get everything prepared. We need notepaper and postcards, envelopes, ink pen and stamps. These should be kept together in a drawer in a desk.
Sound advice. I do write some letters, but I would write more if I were kitted out as advised above. Is it fate that a Paper Source has just opened in New Haven? I am now equidistant between a fine chain store downtown and a finer indy shop, The Write Approach, out in the ’burbs. I have no excuses.
Here’s an idea: First new paid subscriber to this newsletter, I will spend the money on stationery, postcards, and stamps.
Yes, that is an endash. You are welcome, punctuation geeks.