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…
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…
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 the ceiling of a fire station in Livermore, California, there is a hand-blown light bulb that has been switched on, with brief interruptions, since 1901. It has…
Sewn into the seam of every mattress and every upholstered chair is a white tag covered in small print, and somewhere in that print is a sentence along the lines…