Some laundromat owners are teaming up with libraries to provide books, toys and even story time for kids forced to tag along on laundry day.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

We had planned to bring you a conversation with the editor of the conservative website that first published that controversial photo from the medical school yearbook of the Virginia governor, Ralph Northam, but we are having technical difficulties. We’ll try to bring you that conversation as soon as we can. But first let’s go to the laundromat, where the average visit takes 2 1/2 hours. That time is not easy on working families with kids. But Allyson McCabe takes us to Queens, N.Y., where there is a growing effort to help families use laundry time to get more than just clean clothes.

ALLYSON MCCABE, BYLINE: The laundry must be done. But if you don’t have access to a washer and dryer in your home, chances are that means spending a lot of time at a self-service laundromat.

(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINE WHIRLING)

MCCABE: Nadine Pineda (ph) says that’s tough, especially with an active 16-month-old toddler in tow.

NADINE PINEDA: It’s – my working schedule is, like, off the charts, so I try to do laundry when I can.

MCCABE: Pineda says most laundromats don’t have anywhere for her son to play while she does the laundry. But at Lavanderia XI, there’s a comfy couch, toys and lots of books in English and Spanish.

PINEDA: I saw this. I was like, what? I’m like – it’s really the first laundromat that I’ve seen that has a center like this for kids. I think that more laundromats should reinforce this sort of idea not only because it helps the children but because it also helps the parents in a way.

MCCABE: Brian Wallace is president and CEO of the Coin Laundry Association. He says there are about 30,000 laundromats nationwide, and families with limited time and money make up a large share of their customers.

BRIAN WALLACE: And they’re coming to us with, you know, anywhere from, you know, 50 pounds of laundry to maybe a hundred or even a couple hundred pounds of laundry, depending on the size of their family.

MCCABE: All that laundry can run hundreds of dollars a month. So Wallace’s trade group formed a foundation to sponsor events, like free laundry days and food giveaways. Eventually, it started giving away books, and that sparked an idea. Last fall, it partnered with Libraries Without Borders and a Clinton Foundation program to bring learning spaces into laundromats. Queens Library outreach assistant Hal Schrieve says the new space allows families to use laundry time to boost learning, literacy and more.

HAL SCHRIEVE: A lot of times, families are here and focused on chores, and maybe kids are, like, watching the TVs or just kind of, like, hanging out. And I think the goal of this space, too, is to make sure that kids’ time in laundromats is being used to do creative things or to learn and to give families time to interact with each other.

MCCABE: Families like the Ramoses (ph), who come here every week.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: We have a laundromat around the corner of our house, and we travel six blocks just to get to this particular one because of the space, so…

SCHRIEVE: (Singing) I and J and tag-along K all on their way up the coconut tree.

MCCABE: On a recent Sunday morning, a group of kids gathered to hear Schrieve lead a reading activity while others played with puppets, blocks and literacy-themed coloring pages.

SCHRIEVE: (Singing) Chicka-chicka, boom boom. Will there be enough room? Look, who’s coming. Can you read these letters?

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Yeah.

MCCABE: Laundromat owner Jose Almonte says the learning space has given him an edge over nearby competitors, a win-win for the community and his business.

JOSE ALMONTE: The kids run to that area to play, to color. I mean, it’s entertainment.

MCCABE: As the pilot expands this spring, similar programs are planned at laundromats across the country, all part of a growing effort aimed at meeting busy families where they are.

For NPR News, in Queens, N.Y., I’m Allyson McCabe.

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NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Fairly dividing goods is one of the hardest problems economists face. NPR’s Planet Money talks to economists about how best to solve it.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The recent government shutdown was in part a battle over how to fairly divide federal resources. This problem is one of fair division. Fair division is its own area of study, from how to fairly split rent between roommates to how to pick a movie and a group. Problems of fair division crop up all the time. Sally Herships from our Planet Money podcast walks us through some classic fair division problems and their solutions.

SALLY HERSHIPS, BYLINE: Recently, I ran an informal economic study. I presented a sealed cardboard box to two 10-year-old girls, then I backed way up.

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: Oh, my God. It’s got candy on it.

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #2: Marshmallows.

HERSHIPS: Inside the box with a cake with a lot of candy on it. I asked the girls to figure out how to fairly divide it.

How do you both feel about the marshmallows?

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: I love marshmallows. I don’t really like Skittles, though. But they do…

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #2: I love Skittles. But they do make different flavors if you combine them.

HERSHIPS: This problem is called fair division. Luckily, there is a solution – divide and choose.

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: If one person cuts it and the other person decide – what – gets what, then it could be equal.

HERSHIPS: We see fair division problems all the time. How do you split a property after a divorce, profits in a business, runway space at an airport? Constantinos Daskalakis, or Costis, is an expert in game theory at MIT. He says there are some basics like the rental harmony problem. He asks Planet Money reporter Kenny Malone and I to imagine we have an apartment with two bedrooms. One is big, but it has no closet; the other does, but it’s small.

CONSTANTINOS DASKALAKIS: Maybe, you know, I value a smaller room that has a closet, but you value more a big room that – because you like space.

HERSHIPS: I’m taking the closet.

KENNY MALONE, BYLINE: Yeah, I don’t need the closet. It’s fine. I wear the same jeans every day for two weeks in a row.

DASKALAKIS: OK. Thanks for sharing. So, like, yeah, so the question is, you know, who gets what? But also, how is rent split?

HERSHIPS: Say the rent is $2,000. The roommates need to figure out what percentage of that they think each room is worth.

DASKALAKIS: Maybe for you, two rooms are equal. But for Kenny, big space is so much more valuable that he says, look, you know, I don’t care about the closet at all. I don’t even have clothes, OK. So what I care about is the space. So the protocol that we use with my roommate was – and it’s a classical one – each of the two roommates in a sealed envelope writes what they consider to be the right split, what they consider to be the right values of the two rooms.

HERSHIPS: And what they found, Costis’ roommate was willing to pay more for the big room – $1,400. Costis was willing to pay 1,000 for either.

DASKALAKIS: So each of us get the room where they’re the highest bidder. However, how much do we pay? We pay the average of the two prices.

HERSHIPS: So Costis only has to pay $800 even though he was willing to pay a thousand.

Are you free tonight? Because I feel like next time my boyfriend and I decide who gets to pick what movie to watch, I would like you to be part of the decision.

There’s a solution for this, too – fair random assignment, or coin flipping – for when you’re dealing with something that can’t be divided like what movie to watch. If you have more than two people, you can use a similar protocol, but it has a way cooler name.

DASKALAKIS: This has the eerie name of random dictatorship. Say you want to – say you have a group of five friends and you want to decide what to do tonight. OK. One way to be fair about the decision is to say, I’m going to flip a five-faced dice. OK.

HERSHIPS: Yeah.

DASKALAKIS: And, you know, whoever is elected will decide the whole plan.

HERSHIPS: Costis says there are other solutions – auctions, lotteries, time sharing. But, of course, if you want something badly enough and you can afford it, you can always buy yourself a cake and eat it too. Sally Herships, NPR News.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

More Chinese and Taiwanese restaurants in the U.S. are embracing Mandarin to name their businesses.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Restaurants serving Chinese or Taiwanese food in the U.S. often use the same few words in their names. Think golden and dragon. But NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang has been noticing a different trend in New York City.

HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: Down underground in a Manhattan subway station, a wok full of napa cabbage and carrots are stir-frying in Edward Huang’s first restaurant. Slow-braised beef noodle soup and rice bowls topped with minced five-spice pork are all served from this galley kitchen crammed inside a bustling food court. Huang says the dishes were inspired by visits to his family in Taiwan, and so was the restaurant’s name – Zai Lai.

EDWARD HUANG: My family’s parting words are always zai lai – come back soon, literally. But it’s, like, a see you soon, come back soon sort of idea.

H. WANG: At first, though, spelling out that Mandarin phrase in English letters – Z-A-I L-A-I – was not what Huang had in mind for branding his Taiwanese restaurant.

HUANG: People come, and they say, oh, is it Zay Lay (ph)? We had – you know, some of our employees in the beginning had trouble pronouncing it. And I wanted to avoid that headache.

HONGYUAN DONG: Well, I guess the only difficult sound here is the Z.

H. WANG: Hongyuan Dong teaches Chinese at the George Washington University in D.C. Here’s how he coaches his students on pronouncing that Z sound in Mandarin.

DONG: So it’s similar to Ds in English. So it’s not zai (ph) – it’s dsai (ph).

H. WANG: Dong says he’s seen other new restaurants with Mandarin names written in pinyin. It’s a system of transliterating Chinese characters using the Roman alphabet. Pinyin was first adopted by the Chinese Communist Party, and now it’s an international standard that’s popping up even on restaurant signs in Washington, D.C.

DONG: Actually, I noticed a new restaurant called Lao Ban. There’s no English because lao ban (ph) means the boss in Chinese.

H. WANG: That’s another sign, Dong says, of how much more common Mandarin is in U.S. culture today.

HEATHER LEE: I think it means that we’re ready to engage mainland China. We’re speaking in the language of mainland China.

H. WANG: Heather Lee is a historian at New York University Shanghai. She’s researched the history of Chinese restaurants in the U.S., including when names in Cantonese rather than Mandarin were often spelled out using English letters. Over the years, many other restaurants have adopted some common keywords in their English names like panda and Great Wall. Lee says the transition towards Mandarin names marks a shift in who’s running the restaurants and the kinds of customers they’re trying to attract.

LEE: They’re linking up with a wealthier professional population from mainland China. A lot of them seem to have connections to Taiwan as well.

H. WANG: For Jason Wang, it was a connection to the city of Xi’an in northwest China that he wanted to preserve right in the name of his family’s restaurant chain in New York – Xi’an Famous Foods. The first part of the name is spelled with an X-I. It’s one of the hardest sounds to pronounce for many non-Mandarin speakers. And Wang says putting that X on his restaurant storefronts has helped the business grow.

JASON WANG: Let’s just keep things authentic. You know, let’s keep the X. Let’s keep the spice in the food. Let’s not make it too easy for people. People like discovering stuff, you know. They don’t really like everything handed to them on a platter.

H. WANG: Wang adds it’s also a matter of taking pride in his Chinese heritage.

J. WANG: Why are we ashamed of the stuff that we call our food or what we call our restaurants? I think that is also why we’ve become more confident in presenting the actual names versus trying to hide it behind some sort of euphemism of a name.

H. WANG: Back underground in the subway station at Zai Lai, Patrick Dixon (ph) is waiting for his order – a steamed pork bun.

PATRICK DIXON: You know, if I wanted, like, authentic Chinese cuisine, I’d consider the place that actually has, like, Chinese words in it before a place that has, like, just panda, you know?

H. WANG: Dixon’s a frequent customer at this restaurant. He says part of the draw is its name – Zai Lai.

You know what it means?

DIXON: No. I have no clue. What does it mean?

H. WANG: It means come again in Mandarin.

DIXON: Oh, that makes sense.

H. WANG: Especially since he’s planning to Zai Lai again and again.

Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News, New York.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.