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
An American sits down in a restaurant abroad, orders a cola, drinks it, and asks for another one. The second one arrives and so does a second charge,…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
There is a particular kind of advertisement that an American sees so often it has become invisible, and that almost no visitor can watch without staring.
A person…
It is one of the most reliably discussed features of American public life among people who did not grow up with it. The partitions stop well short of the floor,…
Hold a block of supermarket cheddar next to a block of English or Irish cheddar and one of them is a colour that does not occur in dairy. It is…
It is one of the small things that produces real confusion rather than amusement. A date written as a string of numbers with a slash between them is ambiguous in…