If there were a hundred good small cities in America fifty years ago\u00e2\u20ac\u201dtowns built to suit the people who settled them, according to their tastes, aspirations, and the sovereign peculiarities of landscape and weather\u00e2\u20ac\u201dtoday there are no more than twenty-five. In ten years, as the inexorable lattice of sprawl replicates and proliferates, and the downtowns become malls, and the malls downtowns, and the rich syllabary of mercantile America is reduced to a simple alphabet composed of a Blockbuster, a Target, a Starbucks, a Barnes and Noble, a Gap, and a T.G.I.Fridays, and California herself is drowned in a sea of red-tile roofs from San Ysidro to Yreka, there may be fewer than ten. When the end finally comes, I believe that Berkeley will be the last town in America with the ingrained perversity to hold onto its idea of itself. This is a town\u00e2\u20ac\u201don the edge of the country, on the edge of the twenty-first century, on the edge of subducting plates and racial divides and an immense sea of corporate homogeneity\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhere you can still sign for your groceries at the store around the corner. A Berkeley grocer is a man who preserves such an archaic custom not in spite of the fact but exactly because it’s an outmoded and cumbersome way of running a business.<\/i><\/p>\n
— Michael Chabon<\/a>
\nOriginally published in the March 2002 issue of Gourmet<\/p>\n