Encore: ‘You’ve Got Mail’ Got It Wrong

Hi, so we've been making Decodering since April of 2018.

That feels like a while to me.

And during that time, we have made more than 60 episodes of the show.

So, today, what we're going to do is pull one of those old episodes out, brush it off, and re-air it for you.

It's an oldie but a goodie called The Shop Around the Corner, and it's about a beloved movie, a beloved neighborhood, and some bookstores, beloved and otherwise.

Please enjoy, and we'll see you next week.

There are some movies that I'll always watch, no matter how many times I've seen them before, no matter if I come across them when they're already halfway over.

To be honest, most of these movies are romantic comedies, and one of them is You've Got Mail.

Don't you love New York in the fall?

Makes me want to buy school supplies.

Go!

I'm almost ready!

I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.

On the other hand, this not knowing has its charms.

You've Got Mail was directed by Nora Efron and is lovingly set on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

It stars Tom Hanks, who you just heard, as Joe Fox, and Meg Ryan as Kathleen Kelly.

Professionally, Joe and Kathleen are enemies.

He's the brash owner of a powerful expanding chain store called Fox Books, who is putting Kathleen's small, beloved children's bookstore, the shop around the corner, out of business.

There's only one place to find a children's book in the neighborhood.

That will not always be the case.

And it was yours, and it is a charming little bookstore.

You probably sell, what, $350,000 worth of books in a year?

How did you know that?

I'm in the book business.

I am in the book business.

Personally, though, they're falling in love by anonymously exchanging heartfelt emails on AOL.

Do you think we should meet?

Meet?

Oh my god.

You've Got Mail is based on a movie, also called The Shop Around the Corner, that came out in 1940.

That movie is itself based on a Hungarian play written in 1937.

But You've Got Mail, which came out in 1998, is decidedly a creation of the late 1990s.

You've Got Mail.

The movie is set at a a very specific moment in time when the internet was just starting to be widely available, but it was not yet entirely clear the extent to which it would transform every aspect of modern life.

It's a moment when most people were still connecting to the internet via dial-up and America Online, when people checked their email if they had one, like maybe once a day on their desktop at home, when very few people had cell phones, when Starbucks was still new to New York City and ottering a tall, non-fat cap seemed cool.

But Brooklyn, the borough, did not.

And most of all, it's a moment when a vast, welcoming brick-and-mortar bookstore was widely seen as an enemy of booksellers, readers, and vibrant community life.

You know what?

We are going to seduce them.

We're going to seduce them with our square footage and our discounts and our deep armchairs and

capacito.

That's right.

They're going to hate us.

at the beginning, but we'll get them in the air.

You know why?

Why?

Because we're going to sell them cheap books and legal addictive stimulants.

In the meantime, we'll just put up a big sign

coming soon to Foxbook Superstore and the end of civilization as you know it.

To me, this is the most 1990s thing about You've Got Mail: that the force of evil in it, the big, bad, the villain, the cost-slashing, heartless commercial enterprise that's raising local businesses, destroying community relations, and dumbing down creative culture, is a thinly veiled Barnes and Noble?

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willip Haskin.

Every episode we take on a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

Barnes and Noble has been the preeminent bookstore chain in America for over three decades, a period full of ups and more recently, downs.

But in the 1990s, Barnes and Noble was flush.

Its super bookstores, where customers could get a coffee, a comfy chair, and a best-selling book at a discount took over the country, making business difficult, if not downright impossible, for independent booksellers everywhere.

In this episode, we're going to look at the specific bookstore-on-bookstore conflict that inspired You've Got Mail, a neighborhood drama immortalized in a Hollywood movie that encapsulates a time that is chronologically not that far away from us, but feels like it might as well be forever ago.

It's a story about how how we think we know what we ought to be scared of, how we think we know how change will play out, but actually, we have no idea.

So today, I'm decodering.

Remember when Martin de Noble was the bad guy?

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The Upper West Side is the famously lefty, intellectual Manhattan neighborhood that stretches the length of Central Park, from 59th Street to 110th Street, from the Hudson River to Central Park West.

I should say up front that I am very partial to it.

It's where I grew up.

And it's where Nora Efron, who died in 2012, and her sister, the writer Delia Efron, lived when they were writing the script for You've Got Mail.

Here's Delia Efron.

The Upper West Side, it was our place.

We wanted to write about our neighborhood because we

loved it.

We really loved it.

They reset the movie they were adapting, The Shop Around the Corner, there.

But that film, a lovely romantic comedy starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan as co-workers who are unknowingly exchanging anonymous letters, needed some other updates as well.

I mean, it's just the most marvelous movie.

But they work in the same store.

Something very strange happened to me.

I got psychologically mixed up.

You don't say?

Yes.

I found myself looking at you again and again.

I just couldn't take my eyes off you.

Oh?

And all the time I kept saying to myself, Clara Novach, what on earth is the matter with you?

This Kronic is not a particularly attractive type of man.

I hope you don't mind.

No, no.

And at the time that was made, the fact that people didn't express feelings to each other, even though right in front of each other, you know, that was plausible.

But it's not plausible when we wrote this film.

So we needed a bigger problem for them.

And how could he be basically destroying her life?

And that's how we came up with, I mean, it was because of all the changes in the bookstores.

In the early 1990s, the Upper West Side was home to a number of independent bookstores, places with names like Griffin, Bank Street Books, Endicott Booksellers, and Shakespeare and Company, which had already appeared in the Nora Efron scripted when Harry met Sally.

It's the bookstore where Harry and Sally meet, the time they finally become friends.

Anyway, at the time that the Efrons were writing You Got Mail, the bookstores were in turmoil thanks to a new addition to the neighborhood.

Why can't two people be together?

Is the central question of a romantic comedy?

And in this case, we needed a reason, and the reason seemed to us that he was going to be putting her out of business because Barnes ⁇ Noble, I guess, had opened.

And we knew...

that you know then we thought barnes and noble was destroying all the independence the barnes and and Noble Delia is referring to was a 32,000 square foot store that opened on Broadway and 82nd Street in 1993.

It carried 225,000 books, about 10 times more than a regular, well-stocked bookstore.

Its high-ceiling first floor, detailed in the company's forest green color scheme, was stuffed with discounted bestsellers, mahogany-colored shelves, and racks and racks of magazines.

Snuggled up in the corner on the mezzanine was a cafe that served Starbucks.

The second floor ran the entire length of the block and had a festive children's area and dozens of places to sit and read.

Do you remember when that Barnes and Noble opened?

No, I don't.

I feel like it's always been there.

Do you?

Yeah, I do.

I remember it opened in like 1993.

I was 12, but I spent a lot of time there.

I was very like a new shiny temple of books where they let you read as many magazines as you wanted on the stairs and then you could leave.

All these years later, I think this is still the bookstore I have spent the most time in.

I have killed so many hours there, reading books and magazines, waiting for movies to start, to meet friends, to get picked up by my parents.

I think I've even bought a few things.

What I'm trying to say is, I love that place.

That was just a crazy thing, wasn't it?

I mean, thinking that the whole world was coming to an end because of Barnes and Noble.

So, what explains this crazy thing?

To figure that out, we're going to look at what this particular Barnes and Noble did to the bookstores located right around it.

Starting with a soulful little children's bookstore named Eeyore's.

Eeyores, which was named after the Mopi Donkey in Winnie the Pooh, was the first ever independent children's bookstore in New York City.

It was founded in 1974 by a man named Joel Fram.

I had the idea that it would be almost a quasi-community center where anybody could come in and sit on a pillow and look at books.

I actually talked to a lot of people and asked them, do you think this is a good idea?

And just about invariably they said, no, don't do it.

I decided to do it anyway, really when I started in 1974.

You could just sort of plunge into something.

What Joel is saying is that the rent was cheap.

For a long time I lived in a

one-bedroom apartment on 82nd and Columbus and paid $78 a month rent.

Don't say it.

Don't say it.

One way things have changed.

You

couldn't look at a closet for that now.

Well, initially, once again, you're talking 1974.

It was $250 a month for the first tour.

By the 80s, Joel was paying more, and Eors had changed locations a couple of times, ending up on Broadway, between 78th Street and 79th Street, in an extremely compact little space.

It was right across the street from this elegant apartment building that takes up a whole city block called the Apthorpe.

The Apthorpe is where the Efron sisters lived.

Nora Efron, who of course wrote the script for it, lived across the street at the Apthorpe and was Anchi's regular customer.

Eeyoreth had a lot of regular customers and a lot of heart.

It was like a little wonderland.

Brian Selznick, the illustrator and author of children's books like The Invention of Hugo Cabray, started working at Eeyoreth in 1989, soon after graduating from RISD.

If I wanted to be a children's book

writer and illustrator, that working in a children's bookstore would be a great education.

And so there was a little sign in the window that said they were looking for help and you're given a little quiz when you go in.

And

I think everything I knew was basically

where the wild things are.

The manager sent him off to go study and Selznick dutifully went to the library where he tried to memorize as many children's book titles as possible.

I think when I came back, I didn't really know that much more, but I think I might have been one of the first people to actually come back after having been told to go study.

The manager hired him and would send him home every night with bags of books.

In short order, Brian became as knowledgeable as the rest of the staff.

I remember

the sense of sort of this welcoming embrace when you walk in.

There were posters and

mobiles, and there was a giant

stuffed Eeyore in the corner, which was

probably, in retrospect, one of the dirtiest, most disgusting things in New York City.

The people who would come into the store, it was so interesting.

You know, it was a mix of the families from the Upper West Side.

There were celebrities, there were people who wanted to become children's book writers or illustrators themselves.

There were the musicians.

There was like the guy who dressed like he was in a marching band and would always steal Dr.

Seuss books.

It felt like a real

community community within a community.

Another thing that Eeyores would do was hold writing contests for kids with prompts like, if I were mayor of New York, here's what I'd do to improve the city.

That particular contest from 1988 got over 400 responses and was written up in the New York Times.

I'm going to read you a little quote from that piece.

If I were mayor of New York, here's what I'd do, wrote Willa Paskin, a six-year-old Upper West Sider.

It wouldn't be so dirty on the ground.

I'd pass a law that people would throw their garbage in garbage cans and not in the street.

I didn't win.

Could have been a little more original, but that clipping stayed on our fridge for years.

This is all to say, Ears was a local institution, and it's not like it was the only game in town.

There was a Toys R Us up the block that carried kids' books, and Shakespeare and Company and two smaller Barnes Noble's nearby also had children's sections.

Even so, into the early 90s, Eers' business was doing well.

And then a number of things befell Eeyores all at once.

And one of them was Barnes Noble.

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a version of Barnes and Noble has been around primarily as a seller of textbooks since the late 1800s, but its modern history starts in 1971 when the last Barnes and Noble was bought by a young man named Len Riggio.

Len Riggio grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and early on in his career, Riggio and the media liked to paint a brash picture of him as a street-smart Italian-American entrepreneur, upending the Tweety book business.

He was presented as tempestuous and tough, and much was made of the fact that his father had been a prize fighter who twice defeated Rocky Graziano.

Years later, when Nora Efron was trying to get him to let her film You've Got Mail in a real Barnes and Noble, she joked to Riggio that if she'd based Joe Fox on him, she would have cast John Travolta, not Tom Hanks.

But this fixation on Riggio's ethnic identity obscured the extent to which he fit another type to a T.

He is the boomer archetype.

Boris Kotchka is the books editor of the LA Times.

I mean, you know, the student radical grows up, makes some money, then in the 80s, Go-Go 80s personified, and then by 1993, he has had an ITO.

So he has completely

flesh this arc out a bit.

In the 1960s, Len Reggio started working at the NYU bookstore.

He got turned on to politics, started reading a ton, and at 24 he opened his own shop, the college bookstore SDX, the student book exchange.

It was down in the village on Waverly Place, and he let student radicals use the copy machine.

It was so successful, he opened a number of other college bookstores across the city.

And then in 1971, he purchased Barnes ⁇ Noble, a one-storied chain that had shriveled to just one store, its flagship on 18th Street and 5th Avenue, a block from Union Square.

Ruggio turned the store around.

Independent bookstores at the time could often be cramped, musty, disorganized, snobbish.

He put in amenities like benches, bathrooms, signs, phones.

He opened on Sundays, but mostly he just stuffed the place with books.

Laura J.

Miller is a professor and chair of sociology at Brandeis and the author of Reluctant Capitalists, Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption.

What Barnes and Noble did

going way back to the 1970s was to be be able to say we're gonna take this very large piece of real estate in the heart of New York City and pack it full of books so that people could find

all kinds of variety of titles that they didn't even know they were looking for and in many cases they were discounted.

By the mid-1970s, it built itself as the largest bookstore in the United States and it even had a TV ad campaign.

Do you have any books on electrical wiring?

Sorry.

Have you tried Barnes and Noble?

Barnes Barnes Noble.

Of course.

Of course.

Barnes and Noble was primarily a northeastern chain, but in the 1980s, with the backing of a Dutch financier and eventually the junk bond king, Michael Milken, it expanded nationwide, taking over the second largest bookstore chain in the country, the shopping center-based B.

Daltons, a chain it would phase out in the 1990s when it started opening superstores.

Okay, so I want to just talk about superstores for a second and the specific kind of superstore that Barnes Noble is.

Unlike department stores or Walmart, Barnes Noble doesn't sell everything.

It sells everything in one category at a very competitive price, like Home Depot and Toys R Us, which pioneered this particular business model in the 1950s.

But think about a Barnes Noble compared to a Home Depot or a Toys R Us.

They're all huge stores offering a massive selection that puts a lot of pressure on smaller stores selling similar wares.

But they don't quite feel the same.

Barnes and Noble has something those other chains don't have.

It has an ambiance.

It's a place you might want to hang out.

But just as Barnes and Noble didn't invent the superstore concept, they didn't invent this vibe.

That honor belongs to a number of independent bookstores, places like Powell's in Portland, the Tattered Cover in Denver, even the Original Boarders in Ann Arbor, that in the 1980s tried to distinguish themselves from the omnipresent shopping center chains like B.

Dalton's and Walden Books.

And they did that by

increasing their inventory, having massive selections, and also really changing the atmosphere of bookstores from places that had seemed not very welcoming, places that were maybe kind of musty, where you had to know your way around and good luck to you, and that did not really provide necessarily a whole lot of space for just hanging out.

What Barnes and Noble had that these independent superstores didn't have though was capital.

Starting in earnest in the early 1990s, both Barnes and Noble and its chief rival, the Kmart Back Borders, began to mass produce this kind of rarefied super bookstore experience, marrying the trappings of an independent with the discounts of a chain.

Boris Kochka again.

One of the things that most defined Barnes and Noble once it went public was that it installed a Starbucks in the store and created a sort of library cafe experience.

And Starbucks was the other big company that had this insight that

they could import

a model that

felt distinctive and urban

to any mall in America.

It's the idea that

everyone can live an aspirational lifestyle by going to the Barnes ⁇ Noble and browsing books.

And before that,

there were these deserts where you couldn't find an independent bookstore and you couldn't have that experience.

But what Barnes and Noble did was it brought that.

And in return,

you know, it also killed off a lot of independent bookstores, especially in dense neighborhoods like the Upper West Side.

Because that's the thing.

The sort of mass prestige that Barnes Noble was offering up was compelling in suburbs, exurbs, and book deserts, but it proved to be just as compelling on Barnes Noble's home turf, New York City.

By April of 1993, Barnes Noble had opened about 135 super bookstores across the country.

Still, the 82nd Street Barnes Noble, the one that inspired You Got Mail, stood out.

I have never been more excited about a store opening, Barnes Noble CEO Len Riggio told the New York Times.

That quote came from a story titled Barnes and Noble's Superstore Prompts Volumes of Worry that also included the tidbit that Eeyore's was having a 25% off sale to face off with Barnes Noble's grand opening.

What was it like when the Barnes Noble opened?

It was so upsetting.

We were all so horrified and scared.

Brian Selznick, the author and illustrator who worked at Eeyore.

Really made you feel like

David being threatened by Goliath.

You could just sort of sense this giant corporate monster, you know, putting its laser eye out into the world, finding places that had already been proven successful, and then coming in and just, you know, claiming the earth.

Brian and the other staffers were reassured that Barnes Noble couldn't provide the type of knowledge and service that Eeyore's did, which is exactly what Meg Ryan's character says in You've Got Mail when she's trying to calm her own employees down about the forthcoming Fox books.

A Fox book superstore.

Kel Nightmare.

It has nothing to do with us.

It's big, impersonal, overstocked, and full of ignorant salespeople.

But they discount.

But they don't provide any service.

We do.

And this is true as far as it goes, which is only so far.

Because what Barnes and Noble began to reveal about people who buy books is that sometimes people want knowledgeable, informed, attentive customer service.

And sometimes we just want frictionless anonymity.

especially if that's cheaper.

Another way to say this is, part of what was appealing about Barnes ⁇ ⁇ Noble was its less intimate service, the way you could disappear there, the spot in the middle of the city or the shopping center where you could literally take a nap if that's what you wanted to do.

It was a place where no one knew your name and might not have the perfect recommendation, but you could leave crumbs in the magazines and you didn't have to ask anyone to use the bathroom, which definitely wasn't just for customers.

I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but this hands-off approach presaged not only the appeal of an even more frictionless, even more generic, even cheaper electronic bookseller.

It presaged customer service delivered by chatbot and ads on the subway for food delivery services that promise if you use them, you won't even have to talk to another human being on the phone.

In the 1990s, though, this was all far away, and Barnes and Noble was offering up a new, shiny, anonymized space, almost a public space, at a time when people, freed from their desks by laptop computers for the first time, could utilize a so-called third place, one that wasn't their home or their office, more than ever before.

This is all to say that despite the knowledge, the service, the community already on offer at half a dozen bookstores in the neighborhood, the Barnes ⁇ Noble on 82nd and Broadway was a hit.

And the other bookstores around it suffered as a result.

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Even before the Barnes ⁇ Noble opened, Eeyores was having problems, the biggest of which was that business was just down.

It was not really thriving at that point.

I can't really designate a time when business declined, but it was declining, and I sort of saw the handwriting on the wall from Barnes and Noble.

Talking to people about Barnes and Noble's rise, I heard this a lot.

That stores just eking it out found that they could no longer compete once the megastores arrived.

Laura J.

Miller again.

People went into bookselling in the past, rarely because they wanted to make a lot of money, because it was not a business where you could make money, or at least not much of it.

Now, it's it's a mistake to say Leonard Riggio didn't or doesn't care about books.

He went into the book business at a relatively young age and stayed with it for his working life.

But Barnes ⁇ Noble also, and Leonard Riggio at its helm, figured out a way to make a whole lot of money from this.

And in doing so, it became

it became, it helped to transform bookselling into an extremely competitive field.

In August of 1993, four months after the Barnes and Noble had opened, Ears closed.

I was sad about it.

At the same time,

it's a tremendous strain to try to keep your store alive.

In the years afterwards, a number of other neighborhood stores would follow suit.

Endicotts, a general interest bookstore on Columbus Avenue, closed too.

When it did, the owner told the New Yorker, there are three words for why we're going under, and the words are Barnes and Noble.

In 1996, Shakespeare and Company, the store most famous in Upper West Side lore for battling Barnes and Noble, closed after a long, public, and protracted battle involving protests and calls for boycotts.

No less a personage than Tony Morrison told the New York Times that Shakespeare and Co.'s disappearance is melancholy and outrageous.

These closings mirrored what was happening to independent bookstores across the city and the country.

Throughout the 1990s, membership in the ABA, the American Booksellers Association, fell from 5,500 to 3,100.

By 2005, it would be down to 1,702.

General interest bookstores were hit hard, but this is also when women's bookstores, gay and lesbian bookstores, and African-American bookstores began to permanently disappear.

In 1998, the ABA sued Barnes ⁇ Noble and Boarders for what it alleged were monopolistic practices, using their size to get discounts and preferential treatment from publishers and demanding additional fees from those publishers for in-store displays.

There was a real fear that independent bookstores wouldn't survive, and this was coupled with a real disdain for superstore chains among bookstore owners and certain kinds of writers and readers, who saw them as having a chilling effect-that's actually a phrase I saw used-on the culture, stocking only what was already popular and using unfair business practices to replace community bookstores with something phony and commodified.

But this sentiment would not have gotten such a memorable and mainstream airing had it not been for You've Got Mail.

Do you want the website to become one big, gigantic strip mall?

Do you want to get off the subway at 72nd and Broadway and not even know you're in New York City?

Can we save the shop around the corner?

By fictionalizing the story of a little bookstore shut down by a giant new bookstore that's offering customers something irresistible but hollow, the movie charmingly and persuasively made the argument that Barnes and Noble, I mean Fox Books, was no good.

In the film, Fox Books' triumph over the shop around the corner is presented as inevitable but awful, an example of false progress, where customers got something more affordable and convenient, but not better.

A bookseller with no higher calling than filthy Lucre.

When Joel Fram read about the movie in the newspaper, he sent Nora Efron a note.

And she wrote me back a very nice note saying we really miss thes.

And of course, she chose to

have it center around Meg Ryan instead of a vaulting middle-aged guy for purely commercial reasons, of course.

For all that You've Got Mail crystallized in argument against Barnes and Noble, it didn't include the thing that would eventually make the villainization of Barnes and Noble seem so quaint.

It didn't include Amazon.

Since being founded in Jeff Bezos' Seattle Garage in 1994, Amazon has upended everything.

Using supercharged versions of some of Barnes and Noble's own tactics, ease, vast selections, and steep discounts, Amazon has replaced Barnes and Noble as the Goliath of the book business, and not just the book business.

This didn't happen overnight, though.

In 1999, Barnes ⁇ Noble was still so powerful that Jeff Bezos could straightfacedly say of it, Goliath is always in range of a good slingshot.

Meaning Bezos and Amazon were the Davids of the situation.

Well into the 2000s, Barnes ⁇ Noble maintained its poll position, but it was more fixated on its competition with borders than on solving the internet.

Boris Kochka again.

I mean, the nail in the coffin really was the 2008 recession, which was a huge sorting mechanism for industries in the U.S.

But that was the year that the number of Barnes Noble bookstores closing started outpacing the number of stores opening.

The decade after the Great Recession was hard for the super bookstores.

At the end of 2010, Borders declared bankruptcy.

Though Barnes ⁇ Noble is still the largest physical seller of books in America, sales and revenue have consistently declined.

It went through six CEOs in a decade.

The former overdog is so widely understood to have become an underdog that in 2013, The Onion ran an article with the title, Fox Books Files for Bankruptcy.

E-commerce's effect on just about every kind of physical business has erased some of the distinctions between types of brick and mortar stores that once seemed so important.

If Barnes and Noble and independent bookstores were once apples and oranges, now they're both in danger of getting juiced.

Not that the independents are doing as badly as Barnes and Noble.

Delia Efron again.

Now the little stores, you know, they're doing well.

The 2010s are when independent bookstores began to stabilize, increasing their numbers for the first time in decades.

The stores that survived being undercut by the superstores and then Amazon and the ones that have opened since have figured out how to make themselves indispensable and financially sound.

They understand their markets and their customers and they're offering them something they can't get online.

Meanwhile, Barnes ⁇ Noble, no longer luxe and shiny, inhabits a betwixt and between space.

Not Amazon, but not quite shopping local.

It's trying to change that though.

In 2019, the company went private again, selling to a hedge fund that will give each shop more discretion around the titles they carry.

A strategy that worked when it helped turn around the UK's own big chain, Waterstones.

In other words, after everything, the plan is to make each Barnes and Noble superstore feel more like an independent bookstore.

There's a moment towards the end of You've Got Mail when Meg Ryan is talking about her store closing.

People are always telling you that change is a good thing.

But all they're really saying is that something you didn't want to happen at all has happened.

My store is closing this week.

I own a store.

Did I ever tell you that?

It's a lovely store.

And in a week it will be something really depressing.

Like a baby gap.

Soon will just be a memory.

In fact, someone, some foolish person, will probably think it's a tribute to this city.

The way it keeps changing on you or the way you can ever count on it or something.

I know because that's the sort of thing I'm always saying, but the truth is,

I'm heartbroken.

I think this is the toughest part of the whole movie.

I don't mean to sit through.

I mean the part of the movie that's the most challenging.

Because this is what we are inclined to do, lament change and then get used to it, even start to feel attached to it.

But what Meg Ryan is saying here is that even when this happens, even when we accept change, embrace it, even when we feel nostalgic about all the gaps that used to to litter this neighborhood, we shouldn't forget that it isn't necessarily productive.

It isn't necessarily progress.

Just because we don't mind it doesn't mean it got better.

It's just what we got used to.

It's a pretty serious idea to smuggle into a feel-good movie, and one that, in retrospect, seems maybe a little overheated in the context of Barnes and Noble itself.

I mean, Barnes and Noble is a physical place that pays local taxes, employs people who live nearby, and where you can still go hang out and buy an actual book.

Sort of seems like we were overreacting.

Change isn't always bad.

But that's actually what the story is about.

How we can't tell if we're overreacting in the moment because we have no idea what is going to happen.

All sorts of things we think about all the time weren't yet imaginable when You've Got Mail came out.

The movie can't imagine a world in which computers, instead of bringing us together, might actually just keep us apart.

It can't imagine a world in which Starbucks is the most pedestrian place to get a coffee.

It can't imagine a world in which romantic comedies are at the movies a dying format.

It can't imagine a world in which all brick and mortar stores are under threat from the internet, except maybe the ones that are as singular as the shop around the corner.

After everything, the Upper West Side got its bookstores back.

The Endicott space was until recently another bookstore.

Shakespeare and Company, under new management, returned to the neighborhood.

There's even a children's bookstore now, an outpost of Books of Wonder, which inspired the look of Meg Ryan's store in You've Got Mail, and that opened on 84th Street in 2018.

The 82nd Street Barnes and Noble is, thank goodness, still there, but another Barnes and Noble on 66th Street closed at the very beginning of 2011.

When it did, the New York Times ran a piece full of lamentations from people who basically never bought anything there, but did very much enjoy hanging out.

Barnes and Noble Noble may have arrived in the neighborhood as some air sat sollace big box store, rolling over the little guy.

But enough time passes, enough things change, and that airsat soulless big box store, it turns out it's a community center, too.

Now I'd be simply heartbroken if something happened to it.

There are always rumors going around, oh, Barnes and Noble was, you know, and it's just terrible, it's terrible.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

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This podcast was written by Willa Paskin and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode.

Decodering is produced by Willa Paskin and Benjamin Frisch.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

A special thanks to Steve Geck, Maris Kreisman, Emma Straub, Jacob Bernstein, Gary Hoover, Peter Glassman, and June Thomas.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you in a few weeks.