It is the most reliably divisive question in domestic life, it has broken up less serious relationships than it should have, and it has an answer that is older than…
Maya Linton
The little plastic tab holding your bread bag shut is one of the most quietly engineered objects in a supermarket, and the colour of it is not decoration.
In a…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1950 there were still tens of thousands of one-room schools operating across rural America, each with one teacher, one stove, one bucket of water and every child…
The cereal aisle is the most carefully arranged few metres in a supermarket, and the arrangement is not about you.
Children's cereals sit low, roughly at the eye level of…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The paper drinking straw is not a modern environmental compromise. It is the original manufactured straw, patented in 1888, and the thing it replaced was an actual straw…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1965 a large shipyard employed thousands of people who mostly walked to work, assembled a hull outdoors plate by plate on an open berth, worked at eighty…