Over at the urban-policy magazine City Journal, writer Laura Vanderkam takes a fascinating look at the shifts in economics and immigration that led Koreans to dominate the greengrocer industry in New York City for a generation and then, almost as quickly, start to leave it behind. Read the full article here.

This brings to mind two related projects. First is Virginie-Alvine Perrette’s little-seen 2008 documentary “Twilight Becomes Night,” a look at the dwindling number of independent, neighborhood-oriented businesses in New York. Second is the more popular coffee table-sized book “Storefront: The Disappearing Face of New York,” which photographs the same phenomenon, beautifully capturing some of the mom and pop shops remaining throughout New York’s five boroughs. (It’s a huge book, but also recently made available in a smaller format.

Veteran comic book letterer and type designer Todd Klein assembled this list of the “greatest” comic book logos in history. The intention was to identify the marks that “have had the greatest impact, are instantly recognizable and have withstood the test of time.” There aren’t a lot of surprises here, but the list really does show how iconic many of these logos have become, how deeply ingrained into our collective pop cultural memory they are.

It’s not just a list, either. Klein, whose grasp of the typographic history of comics probably has very few peers, identifies the designer of each logo and each logo’s various iterations. Fascinating stuff — well, to me at least. See the whole list here

New York designer and writer Rebecca Silver recently started this site where she posts a Q & A with a creative professional every day, posing the same ten questions to each. She’s had some terrific gets already, including George Lois and Ellen Lupton, as well as some great up-and-comers like August Heffner. Visit the site here.

A clever project that “turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.” Built with HTML5 and JavaScript. See it in action here and read the project summary here.

This well-regarded vendor of Mac products is now selling this turnkey, Mac mini-based home theater solution. The preconfigured bundles include additional RAM, up to 12TB of storage, an optional HDTV tuner and an optional, third-party Blu-Ray drive. I would imagine most people who can manage as sprawling a solution as this have already started to build them for themselves, but maybe I’m wrong. In any case, there’s nothing listed among the bundles that mentions a universal remote control option which to my mind would be the single most important part of any turnkey home theater package. Pricing has yet to be released, but you can peruse the offerings here.

Netflix, who are now obviously streaming video content to a huge number of users, has published their unique insight into the performances of the major U.S. and Canadian broadband providers. Charter ranks best, Clearwire worst, and my own ISP, Time Warner, is among the top four or five (I guess?). Clearly, it’s a less-than-subtle attempt to goad the poorer-performing providers into improving their service, and to establish the question of “How well does Netflix work on your ISP?” as a metric for how consumers choose providers. See the data here.

Another film-related post today: Belgian designer Tom Muller created this visualization of the most prominent actors across all of the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, showing where they’ve recurred.

Slight, but nicely done. See the graphic in its enormous entirety here.

Yes, I’m on a real film noir kick. The classic crime films blog Where Danger Lives is in the midst of counting down the one hundred best noir posters — the first eighty have been listed already. The images of the posters are of pretty good quality, too, having been color corrected, cleaned up and presented at fairly large sizes (click through each image to see the enlargement).

See all of the posters here.

The brand of typography that I ‘grew up with’ is becoming a matter of the historical record. Curator Paola Antonelli writes:

“This first selection of twenty-three typefaces represent a new branch in our collection tree. They are all digital or designed with a foresight of the scope of the digital revolution, and they all significantly respond to the technological advancements occurring in the second half of the twentieth century. Each is a milestone in the history of typography. These newly acquired typefaces will all be on display in “Standard Deviations,” an installation of the contemporary design galleries opening March 2.”

There are some worthy additions, but there are some — like Verdana — that I’m less than fond of. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re not historically significant. Read the announcement here.

Last week’s issue of The New Yorker features another installment in staff writer (and surgeon) Atul Gawande’s ongoing reports on the cost of health care. It’s called “The Hot Spotters,” and it’s well worth a read. Gawande looks at individuals and organizations who have already taken the initiative in meaningfully reducing health care costs by focusing on the surprisingly slim fraction of health care consumers — as little as one percent — who can drive a shockingly huge portion of total costs — as much as thirty percent. Profiling Jeffrey Brenner, a doctor in Camden, New Jersey who and took a statistical look at how health care was distributed across that city, Gawande writes:

“He found that between January of 2002 and June of 2008 some nine hundred people in [just] two buildings accounted for more than four thousand hospital visits and about two hundred million dollars. One patient had three hundred and twenty-four admissions in five years. The most expensive patient cost insurers US$3.5 million.

“Brenner wasn’t all that interested in costs; he was more interested in helping people who received bad health care. But in his experience the people with the highest medical costs — the people cycling in and out of the hospital — were usually the people receiving the worst care.”

It’s an eye-opening report that shows how fundamentally broken the health care system is in the United States. New Yorker subscribers can read the article online for free here, but others are locked out, unfortunately. As a consolation, Gawande’s highly influential 2009 report, “The Cost Conundrum” is also available and also completely fascinating.