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Critical Mass

It takes a certain, minimal amount of uranium or plutonium
for a sustained nuclear reaction. Short of that amount, the reaction
fizzles out. With a critical mass, it sustains itself.

We visited Daniel, in medical school in Portland, Oregon.
I kept thinking about the stands at the University of Chicago,
under which scientists first succeeded in creating
an artificial sustained reaction. The stands are gone, now.

Portland, Oregon, has achieved another kind of critical mass.
The city is, like some other great urban areas, a great restaurant town.
You need a lot of critical components to sustain such restaurants.

You need deteriorating houses on narrow streets capable
of being divided into seventeen rentals each.

You need timing. You have to get there and subdivide the houses
before they fall to the ground and rot, or before the gentrifiers--
young professionals with too much money and no kids--
discover how close they are to the city center, and rehab them.

You need a porous immigration policy, because two or three
meat-and-potatoes-and-gravy restaurants is one or two too many.
You need Mexicans and Thais and Vietnamese and Korean
and Chinese and Japanese menus, and still more.

You need a non-existent food inspection program.

You need thousands of bicycles, because the streets
are three lanes wide and two of them are for parking end-to-end.

You need to sacrifice a lot of young people to be waiters,
and you have to tattoo a lot of them, and pierce and skewer them
with studs and ear-rings and seafood forks.

You need to sacrifice a lot of people, and condemn them
to eat nothing but celery and lentils, because vegetables
are not living things, and can be killed with impunity.

It is not easy to make a great neighborhood for eating,
and getting together, and making conversation with bright,
interesting people, but it is worth the loss of a generation
to make it happen. The Aztecs knew what they were doing.

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