Did you know that first post office in New York City was established inside of a coffeehouse in 1642? The first post office in South Carolina was also established inside of a coffeehouse.

This is all just a way to restart the discussion of the role the coffeehouse plays in society (and, to be fair, the very first post office in America was actually in a bar, back in 1639, but that information does nothing to help me progress my point). Is it a place for debate and discourse or a place where I pick up a cappuccino for no other reason than that the overpriced, piece of garbage machine I have at home couldn’t brew raw sewage, much less a decent espresso? (Here’s a tip: that $75-$200 machine you have at home is actually physically incapable of brewing a real cup of espresso; all it can do is brew a crappy, bitter cup of coffee which, granted, is all many people think an espresso is, but the truth is, you need an industrial machine that costs a couple thousand dollars if you want to make an actual, real, no kidding cup of espresso).

Coffeehouses, even within my memory, didn’t used to be limited to the partially soul-less spaces of Starbucks and Caribou Coffee. They used to be places to read, to perform, to speak with strangers and play chess. Maybe they weren’t like Cafe Central in Vienna, where Freud and Trotsky took their brew or Deux Magots in Paris where Sartre held court, but I remember they used to be something!

I almost wonder if free wireless is part of the problem. We (and yes, I do this, too) bring our laptops with us and work and write and surf the web instead of interacting and performing and talking anarchism and socialism with strangers.