Source: Wikimedia Commons
There are a small number of American habits that produce the same reaction in every visitor, and this is the purest of them. The price on the shelf…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
There is a quiet oddity in American civic life that almost nobody examines, which is that the country conducts its elections on a working day in November.
Most…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
It is one of the most universally shared complaints in the history of television, and for most of that history the people being complained to had a technically…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
There is a particular kind of American administrative object that works by accident, and this is the purest example of it.
The Social Security number was created in…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Long-haul trucking in 1975 was at a peculiar high point. The interstate system was essentially complete, freight was moving by road in volumes it never had before, and…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
There is a specific moment, four years after this one, when American wine stopped being a joke - a blind tasting in Paris in 1976 in which French…