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Getting ready for the Lunar New Year once meant buying a new set of clothes for many families of Korean ancestry.

For centuries, the costume known as hanbok – a two-piece outfit traditionally made of embroidered cotton or silk worn by men and women – has played a central role in the new year's wardrobe.

"Family members would get together in a new set of hanbok and bow to each other in a traditional way, wishing good health and fortune," explains Minjee Kim, a costume historian who has studied hanbok, a style of dress modeled from 17th- and 18th-century daily attire worn during the Joseon Dynasty.

But this Lunar New Year tradition is waning.

While hanbok dresses are still in high demand during wedding season, these days a bride's hanbok dress might be the only one she ever buys. "Young couples today in Korea are not having as many children, so when they all get together for traditional holidays, those gatherings are very small," Kim says. "They don't try to keep their traditions strictly by wearing hanbok."

Kim adds that the cost of the custom-made outfits, which can run as high as several thousand dollars, has forced many families to scale back from making annual hanbok purchases.

Some families also turn to rental boutiques like Hanbok Story in Queens, N.Y.

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Youjung Jung takes a customer's order for a new outfit at her store Hanbok Story in Queens, N.Y. Hansi Lo Wang/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

Youjung Jung takes a customer's order for a new outfit at her store Hanbok Story in Queens, N.Y.

Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

Owner Youjung Jung, 57, opened the store six years ago after emigrating from South Korea. She says she's disappointed that fewer people are keeping the hanbok tradition in her home country and the U.S. Designing and making the outfits have been part of the family business for Jung as far back as her grandmother's generation. But her adult children, she says, have no plans to continue the business.

"It's a problem," she says with her eyes downcast.

For some Korean-Americans who live nearby, Jung's store has been invaluable.

Jinhee Kim, who lives in Queens, stopped by to buy a hanbok for the Lunar New Year after picking up her seven-year-old daughter from Korean-language school.

"I want my daughter to follow the Korean tradition. I'm just here for her," Kim says.

Lisa Anderson, who is Korean-American and also lives in Queens, says she is not getting a hanbok of her own for the new year, but she is getting her wardrobe ready for her son's doljanchi, or first birthday celebration.

"A lot of Korean women believe you should have a least one hanbok in your closet just in case," Anderson explains as Jung wraps a measuring tape around her husband Berris' waist. He's getting a hanbok, too.

Berris, who is Jamaican-American, says wearing the outfit is a way to keep the Korean culture alive in his family.

"I wish that my mother-in-law was still alive, and I wish that my wife had brothers and sisters. But she doesn't. She's an only child. So I think that if we don't maintain it, then it can very well be lost," he says.

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Youjung Jung measures Berris Anderson for a hanbok as his wife Lisa watches. Hansi Lo Wang/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

Youjung Jung measures Berris Anderson for a hanbok as his wife Lisa watches.

Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

On today's All Things Considered, NPR film critic Bob Mondello and I have a chat with Audie Cornish about the inevitable, inscrutable Oscars.

There are eight films up for Best Picture this year: American Sniper, Whiplash, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, The Theory Of Everything, Birdman, Boyhood, and Selma. Of these, exactly one is a giant popular hit. And it's not the one that oddsmakers will tell you is going to emerge with the victory. In fact, there's a distinct absence of races this year that are perceived to be especially close. So with mostly small-box-office films and mostly contests that seem to have clear winners, what's to watch on Sunday?

Well, host Neil Patrick Harris, our Official Host Of Lots Of Things, for one. He's done the Emmys and the Tonys and probably spends his Sunday nights hosting impromptu awards ceremonies for his family, but this year, he's getting the big stage for the first time.

Meanwhile, we'll be on Twitter, like much of the rest of the world, using the hashtag #NPROscars.

Late last year, a Spanish judge prohibited Uber from operating in Spain, after protests by taxi drivers. Days later, the company announced it was closing down operations here.

But less than two months later, it's reinvented itself as UberEATS, converting its network of drivers into food deliverymen.

Customers in Spain can log onto the same Uber smartphone app which they used to request rides (though they may need to update the app; Spanish telecom operators were ordered to block the original app after a judge's ruling in December). A new option labeled UberEATS allows users to order food from participating restaurants. The service is part of a partnership with the Spanish foodie website Plateselector.

Uber debuted this new service in Barcelona last night, promising food delivery in 10 minutes or less. The company already provides a similar service in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, called UberFRESH.

"The global fame of Spanish gastronomy, the cosmopolitan character of Barcelona and Spaniards' great acceptance of new opportunities in the 'on-demand' economy, are the main reasons the company chose Barcelona as the first city outside the U.S. to launch UberEATS," the company said in a statement emailed to journalists.

Most dishes cost around $11, with about a $3 delivery fee. Just like with the ride-share service, customers with GPS-enabled smartphones can watch a little taxi icon getting closer, delivering their meal.

In addition to Spain, Uber faces ride-share bans in South Korea, Thailand, India and France. It also faces stiff resistance from taxi drivers and unions in Germany, Belgium and elsewhere. In India, Uber was criticized as unsafe after allegations that a woman was raped by her Uber driver. And in Sydney, Australia, the company came under fire for jacking up prices during a hostage crisis.

Nevertheless, the five-year-old San Francisco-based company has expanded to more than 50 countries. Uber is privately-held, but has been valued by investors at more than $40 billion.

That's a lot of takeout food.

Harris Wittels died Thursday. He was a stand-up comic, a television writer/producer, a musician, a frequent and dependably hilarious guest on comedy podcasts, and an author who unleashed the concept of the #humblebrag upon the cultural landscape.

He was 30 years old.

When anyone dies, our sadness is tinged with something darker and more selfish; we resent the time we'll never get to spend with that person, the days and months and years that will pile up without their presence.

When a comedian dies, particularly one so young, we feel that resentment more keenly, because laughter is a limited resource - one of a very few things with the power to make those days and months and years pass more easily.

You'll see some writing today about Wittels' coinage of the term humblebrag – the tendency for people, celebrities especially, to express a distinctly performative brand of faux-humility on social media. It became a whole thing, the #humblebrag hashtag, one Wittels frequently expressed some misgivings about.

On Twitter, you can read some of his fellow comics weighing in on his stand-up and his music (with the band Don't Stop or We'll Die, formed with Paul Rust and Michael Cassady) while his fellow Parks and Recreation writers laud his singular contributions to that show. (By the way: You know Harris, Pawnee's Animal Control guy? That was him.)

But you and me, let's talk podcasts.

Wittels may not have been a household name – in your household, anyway. In my household, and in the households of the nation's comedy nerds, his name meant something. When you saw it listed as a guest on a given comedy podcast, as he was frequently on Scott Aukerman's Comedy Bang Bang (nee Comedy Death Ray), you dropped everything and started listening while the file was still downloading.

On Comedy Bang Bang, Wittels was quick, self-deprecating, and hugely funny: he'd try out jokes he'd earlier typed into his phone in an impromptu segment called "Harris' Phone Corner" (which almost immediately became "Harris' Foam Corner" – never mind, long story) and revel in the affectionate mockery they'd inevitably receive from Aukerman and guests.

With Aukerman, he co-hosted the podcast Analyze Phish, a show whose premise (Wittels a Phish super-fan, Aukerman a bemused Phish-skeptic; they talk) does little to hint at its dogged, exultant silliness, or the exasperated affection the two men share.

I've used the word "affection" twice in the last two paragraphs, because that's the word that came through most clearly in every Wittels appearance: the guy was loved. You can hear it.

Here's a thing about podcasts – their loose, rangy, long-form format breeds a distinctive strain of intimacy. You're listening to a conversation between two or more people, with all the digressions and hoary jokes their shared history engenders, and if feels familiar, comfortable, warm.

Last November, Wittels made a second appearance on You Made It Weird, a podcast whose host, Pete Holmes, greets guests with a weaponized form of gregariousness that, if unchecked, can dominate conversations.

Listen to Wittels' appearance. You get past the ghoulishness of it quickly: yes, Wittels talks at length about cycling through addiction and recovery, and tells some harrowingly funny and off-handedly profane stories about his first, fumbling encounters with heroin. But listen to how Wittels tells them – how clear-eyed, unsentimental, brutally honest, and hilarious he is.

He's all of those things at once, each one bound up inextricably with the other. Listen to how Holmes – even Holmes! – gets quieter and quieter as Wittels talks.

It's a conversation that clocks in at an hour and forty minutes. It would never fit into the programmatic confines of radio or television; it flows, it doubles back, it halts, it lurches forward. It's a weird gift, is what it is.

Wittels is gone, and that's sad. Infuriatingly so. There's that familiar resentment – he was only 30 years old, which means we won't get decades and decades of his comedy.

But he was improbably and gratifyingly prolific. His Twitter feed (@twittels) is still there, still hilarious, still so recognizably him.

There's the Comedy Bang Bang and Analyze Phish archives, filled with Wittels' voice and humor and jokes so determinedly bad they shade into performance art.

So while mourning his absence, maybe spend some time today, and in the days and months and years to come, enjoying his digital presence.

Do a search. Listen. Laugh.