I’m All Lost In, #110: A new blue suit at Men’s Wearhouse; free transit in Iowa City; and Simit at Trader Joe’s.

I’m All Lost In…

the 3 things I’m obsessed with THIS week.

#110

Before I get to this week’s official entries...

a List of the week.

William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk classic.

I’ve only read two of the novels (Neuromancer and Snow Crash) on sci-fi writer Chloe Gong’s cyberpunk syllabus. But the eight books she selected for the NYT this Tuesday look like an action-packed list of invaluable hard-boiled sci-fi.

P.s. As for the two novels I have read: William Gibson’s Neuromancer is 1930s detective pulp refashioned as science fiction poetry. Moreover, in the past year, with the A.I. explosion, Neuromancer has become even more astoundingly prescient than it was back in 1984 when Gibson first published it and envisioned the “consensual hallucination” of the internet, coined the term cyberspace, and invented cyberpunk itself. As for Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), which Gong calls “visionary.” Well, yes. And.

While Stephenson’s 550-page Snow Crash and its hard-wired, acrobatic pizza delivery ninjas make for a smart and rollicking romp in the corporate metaverse, the last 100 pages—about Sumerian tablets as viral code?—are pure gobbledygook. I’d amend Gong’s enthusiastic recommendation by giving you permission to bail when Stephenson starts mansplaining about the Tower of Babel around page 454.

Quote of the Week. Speaking of the ancient world, I started reading a promising book this week. Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City (2001) by famed Assyriologist Gwendolyn Leick. Famed Assyriologist!

Leick’s book seems to be a more granular version of my favorite city studies book, Ben Wilson’s Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention (2020). You can scroll down for my review here. Wilson chose 14 city case studies, tying each city’s heyday to a discrete urbanist innovation in chronological order. Ch. 5, for example, “Baghdad, 537-1258 AD,” focuses on the idea of cities as magnets for international talent and scholars.

Leick also arranges her book chronologically. But she remains in antiquity. Her study spotlights 10 different Mesopotamian cities from Eridu in the 5th millennium BC through Babylon in the early ADs. It’s one big excavation into the foundational elements of big city culture.

This quote from her preface makes me happy to be a human being: “The most remarkable innovation in Mesopotamian civilization is urbanism.”

Recommended Listening: A sultry bit of chanteuse electronica by an artist I’d never heard before, British tune smith Tirzah, came on the coffeeshop sound system Thursday. I stopped what I was doing.

On to this week’s list.

1) Men’s Wearhouse

First of all. Men’s Wearhouse. Excellent pun.

I’m the officiant at my dear friends’ Sara & Dan’s upcoming wedding next Saturday. I needed a suit jacket and dress pants.

An easygoing young saleswoman in jeans greeted me at the doors as if I was coming over to watch a movie. After measuring my chest and effortlessly helping me try on a few fits, she and her superstar colleague, a playful expert tailor who called out hemming and tapering notes while wielding a busy white-chalk pencil, got me correctly cleaned up. It took all of a slow-to-no pressure half hour.

Yes, I’m well-aware of Men’s Wearhouse’s middling Reddit reputation. And I was a little disappointed by the limited selection after the first round of trying on a few jackets; they didn’t have the Robert-Redford-as-Jay-Gatsby daydream I’d been picturing. You sort of have to be Robert Redford for that anyway.

Nor am I confident that the “modern” Kenneth Cole Awearness© make I spotted and quickly settled on is sartorially choice material; though according to the text I got in response to a selfie I sent from the dressing room, it was an exclamation-mark-good-look.

The low cost is a good look too: $350 for the electric-blue jacket, $150 for the electric-blue slacks.

Mostly, thanks to the warm patience of a dad helping a son put on a tie, I got a fuzzy feeling from my striver-on-commission touts. They were as invested in next Saturday’s success as I was.

I still need a belt and the right shoes to complete the outfit. I’ll be buying those at Men’s Wearhouse early next week when I pick up my hemmed and tapered electric blue officiant suit.

2) Mass Transit Affordability

It’s encouraging that Democrats (Socialists, actually, like Seattle’s new mayor-elect) have finally come up with a winning response to the GOP’s grievance and scapegoat-based populism. It’s a solution-driven rejoinder. All in one powerful and hopeful word: Affordability.

Equally important, and detailed in a NYT dispatch from Iowa this week, there’s a winning example that Democrats can get behind: Iowa City Made Its Buses Free. Traffic Cleared, and So Did the Air. Ridership jumped, people cut back on driving and, over the summer, the city extended the program another year.

There's certainly a metaphor in the 118% ridership increase:

Ridership eventually grew to 118 percent of prepandemic levels, compared to the average nationally transit ridership-recovery levels of 85 percent … Bus drivers say they’re navigating less congested streets. People drove 1.8 million fewer miles on city streets, according to government calculations, and emissions dropped by 24,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. That’s the equivalent of taking 5,200 vehicles off the roads.

3) A Turkish Street Food Classic Now at Trader Joe’s

Accompanying a picture she took in the frozen-food aisle, XDX texted me this news from Trader Joe’s on Sunday: “Spotted in the cap hill Trader Joe’s! Totally up your alley….”

Texted from Trader Joe’s freezer aisle, 11/16/25

Certainly. And alleys off the alley when you’re talking about a savory Istanbul street-food classic like simit.

Hoping to send back the picture I was sure I had of a Beşiktaş neighborhood hawker carrying a stack of the bagel-like snack on his head, I scrolled through the one-off blog I wrote while I was in Istanbul back in November 2013. No luck. But I did find some blurry cell phone shots I’d evidently snapped back then at a historic Istanbul bakery. They were photos of a flaming oven and a tray of fresh simit

Re the bagel comparison: While simit is hot-oven baked, it is not boiled first like a New York bagel. Simit’s crispy brown shell comes from a water-flour-grape molasses glaze called pekmez that you spread on the dough before covering it in sesame seeds and baking for 20 minutes at 420 degrees. Simit is also skinny like a snack-food-bag pretzel instead of pudgy like a proper bagel. And because of the pekmez, it’s also subtly sweet.

A decade-plus since I’d had hot-off-the-presses simit in Istanbul, I rushed over to Trader Joe’s and bought a package; Trader Joe’s evidently added this traditional Turkish fare to its abundant repertoire in late October this year. $3.50 for a package of four. I dig Trader Joe’s.

I proudly put the simit front and center in my fridge.

Impatiently peckish on Tuesday night, I just as proudly, though foolishly, put a simit in the microwave. This was—after battling with the unnecessarily complex plastic packaging—a big fail. Floppy simit. It’s supposed to be firm and chewy.

It was still pretty damn good.

Microwaved simit, 11/18/25.

I dunked it in some Trader Joe’s vegan cashew pesto dip.