The American roadside mailbox is such a fixed feature of the landscape that it reads as a natural object. It is on a wooden post, it has a curved top…
Most Americans drive on these roads for a lifetime without discovering that the numbers mean something. They are treated as names - arbitrary labels that happen to be numerals.
They…
Americans visiting Europe discover that food scraps go in a bin, and Europeans visiting America discover a switch on the wall that makes a noise like a small industrial accident…
An American arriving in Italy or France in August and discovering that the windows have shutters, glass and nothing else is reliably astonished. An Italian arriving in Ohio and finding…
Stand on an American building site and what you see does not look like a house. It looks like a very large piece of furniture: a lattice of identical thin…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
It is one of the most standardized objects in American life and almost nobody knows it was standardized on purpose. Every school bus is the same color. Not…