There is a specific and very common experience in American shopping: a person takes three garments of the same stated size into a fitting room and finds that they are…
This is one of those differences that nobody notices until they travel, and then cannot stop noticing.
In the United States, up is on. The toggle points to the ceiling…
There is a pattern in American buildings that is so consistent it looks designed, and in a sense it was.
Commercial, public and institutional buildings use lever handles. Houses use…
An American moving to Europe discovers a washing machine the size of a filing cabinet, built into a kitchen run, with a round glass door and a cycle that takes…
Almost nobody notices this until they try to work across the two systems, at which point it becomes a daily irritation: documents that print with the wrong margins, files that…
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,…